Tom Perrotta: Nine Inches

THE FIRST TIME LT. FINNEGAN PULLED ME OVER, I actually thought he was a pretty decent guy. I mean, there’s no question I was going over the limit, maybe thirty-five in a residential zone, so I can’t say I was surprised to see the lights flashing in my rearview mirror. I was mostly just frustrated — disappointed in myself and worried about what Eddie would say when he found out I’d gotten a speeding ticket in the company Prius after just a few weeks on the job.

The cop who tapped on my window was older than I expected, a big, white-haired guy with a white mustache, probably not too far from retirement. He looked a little bored, like he’d asked a few too many people for their license and registration over the years.

“What’s the hurry, son?”

“Just running a little late.” I glanced at the insulated pouches stacked on the passenger seat, in case he’d missed the magnetic decal on my door: SUSTAINABLE PIZZA… FOR THE PLANET WE LOVE. “I got stuck at the railroad crossing. I was trying to make up for lost time.”

That was the wrong answer.

“You need to be more careful, son. There’s a lotta kids in this neighborhood.”

“I know.” I could feel my face getting warm. “It’s just… I’m supposed to make the deliveries in thirty minutes or less.”

“Try telling that to a dead kid’s parents,” he suggested. “Let me know how it goes over.”

He was just messing with me, but for some reason I found it all too easy to picture the scene in my head — the child’s fresh grave, the weeping mother and the broken father, the pathetic delivery driver explaining that the tips are better when the pizza’s still hot. It seemed like a plausible version of my future.

“I’m really sorry, Officer. It won’t happen again.”

“Not officer, ” he corrected me. “Lieutenant.”

“Sorry, Lieutenant.”

He squinted at me for a few seconds, as if coming to a decision, then brought his hand down hard on the roof of the Prius. The thump made me flinch.

“All right,” he said. “Get the hell outta here.”

“Really?” I was embarrassed by the relief and gratitude in my voice, as if I’d just dodged a murder charge rather than a speeding ticket. “I can go?”

“It’s your lucky day,” he told me.

I WAS eighteen that fall and all my friends were in college — Evan at Harvard, Lauren at Stanford (we were still scratching our heads about that one), Josh at Bowdoin, Lily at Northwestern, Carlos at Cornell. My best friend, Jake, was having the time of his life at Wesleyan — he kept inviting me down to hang with his new roommates, but my heart wasn’t in it — and my ex-girlfriend, Heather, was chilling at Pomona, raving about sunny California in her status updates. That was my high school posse in a nutshell. We were the AP kids, the National Merit Scholars, the summer interns, the future leaders, the good examples. We enrolled in SAT prep classes even when we didn’t need to, shared study tips and mnemonic devices, taunted one another with Shakespearean epithets, and made witty comments about the periodic table. We stayed up late going over our notes one last time, threw parties where we studied together for history finals. On Saturday nights, instead of getting drunk and hooking up, we popped popcorn and watched Pixar movies. It wasn’t that we were anti-fun; we’d just made a group decision to save ourselves for college.

The only problem was, I didn’t get into college.

I’d applied to twelve institutions of higher learning and got rejected outright by ten of them, including my safeties. I got wait-listed by two of my likelies, but neither one came through in the end. I got shut out, just like the kid in Accepted, except it was nothing like that because he was a slacker and didn’t deserve to get in.

I totally deserved it. I mean, I got a combined 2230 on the SATs (superscored, but still), and had a GPA of 3.8, all Honors and APs, top ten percent of my graduating class in one of the premier public high schools in the state. Student Council rep, stagehand for the musicals, helped start a recycling program in the cafeteria. I ran cross-country all four years, even though I hated every tedious mile. But I did it, just so I could list a varsity sport on my transcript. Every goddam miserable thing I ever did, every shortcut I avoided, every scrap of fun I missed out on, I did it just so I could get into a decent college.

And none of it mattered.

My guidance counselor insisted that it was just a freak occurrence, a perfect storm of bad luck and rotten demographics. A record year for applications, too many international students, preferences for minorities and athletes, a need for geographic diversity, blah blah blah. But come on, not to get in anywhere ? Even when kids from my own high school with lower grades and test scores got into colleges where I was rejected? Where’s the fairness in that?

There was no logical way to explain it, but that didn’t stop people from trying. Maybe I was too well-rounded for my own good, or my recs were underwhelming; maybe my essay was pompous, or maybe it was pedestrian. Maybe I hadn’t done enough to set myself apart from the crowd, should have written about my lifelong passion for shoemaking, or my desire to someday design prosthetic limbs for transsexuals who’d stepped on landmines. Or maybe I’d just aimed a little too high, which was possibly true for Dartmouth and Brown, but those were my reaches, so that’s the whole point. But what about Connecticut College or George Washington? Was that really too much to ask?

April of senior year was such a nightmare. Everybody else was all excited, hugging one another and squealing with delight, the future unfolding before their eyes — Colgate! Hampshire! UVM! And then they’d notice me, and everything would get all awkward and quiet, almost like somebody in my family had died. People just kept moaning and shaking their heads, telling me how sorry they were, how unfair it was, a complete injustice that shook their faith in the entire system, and I kept telling them not to worry.

I’m on the wait list at Duke and Grinnell, I’d say. I’m sure something will pan out .

THE SECOND time Lt. Finnegan pulled me over — just a week after the first incident — he was all business. He took my license and registration, went back to his car, and wrote me a ticket for failure to obey a traffic sign, a moving violation punishable by a hundred-dollar fine.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “A hundred bucks? That’s crazy.”

“You have the right to contest this citation in the district court,” he informed me in a robotic voice. The lights on the police cruiser were flashing lazily, the whole neighborhood pulsing with red. “Should you choose to do so, you must notify the court of your intention within twenty days.”

I didn’t reply, because there was no point in going to court. I’d definitely rolled through the stop sign — I wasn’t about to deny it — but I thought he could cut me a little slack. It was ten-thirty at night, and I was driving on a quiet side street out by the conservation land. I’d just made my final delivery — a lousy one-dollar tip, thank you very much — and there was no one else around, no one except for Lt. Finnegan, hiding on the dark street with his lights turned off.

“Shit,” I muttered. “I can’t believe this.”