The second cop came over and cuffed my wrists behind me. He led me by the arm. His grip crushed me.

“Ow,” I said.

“All right, honey. Settle down.”

He pushed me into the backseat, encased in hard plastic like a prefab shower stall. Easy to clean, I guess, but no one had lately. The car smelled sour from leftover sweat and vomit. I had to sit sideways to accommodate my cuffed hands. My officer muttered into his radio and joined the other two men by Peter’s car. After a while he got in and nosed the cruiser into traffic. We headed west, towards the edges of the city. It became clear that someone, at some point during the night, had made a bad decision. I felt glad to be so wasted. If I’d been sober, I was sure I would be panicking.

After a few miles and many bursts of staticky speech on the radio, the cop stopped the car in a bright lot, got out, and opened my door. With the same grip on my arm he hauled me through the entrance to a squat building.

“Please,” I said. “I’m innocent.”

My head was killing me now. He pushed me down a hall of painted cinder block, the ceiling lined with fluorescent lights. Their buzzing got inside me and pried at the front of my skull, splintering it apart. We went into a room that contained two cells filled with women. Sweat and perfume replaced the air. The noise fluctuated enough so you couldn’t get used to it, couldn’t tune it out. He uncuffed me.

“I’m putting her in Two,” my officer yelled behind him.

I needed to lie down. Bad. I had to get away from those lights. He unlocked a door to the cell and pushed me in. The room was cold, too air-conditioned. I felt not the least bit drunk anymore.

I glanced at the other women inside—there were seven or eight of them—and cast my eyes down immediately. One woman’s teeth chattered. I could hear it from where I stood. She rubbed her arms and stamped her feet, crazed and exhausted, probably coming down off crack. I marveled at the force of her suffering. She had one whole corner of the cell to herself. A couple of others, young girls, kept their eyes on the floor. Two Latinas stood together whispering. They glared at me.

I stayed at the front of the cell, staring into the hall. The steel wall smelled like the metal risers we sat on in grade-school music class, hitting our triangles. A different cop came and retrieved one of the quiet girls. The crackhead began a high undulating keen, like rabbits dying, which I’d heard once, on a science class field trip in ninth grade. We were supposed to be cataloging the plants in a square meter of this meadow, and some stray dog discovered a nest nearby and killed the baby bunnies. Jail kept reminding me of school. The crackhead’s dark skin looked gray. She smelled like she’d shit herself. Each of us shrank farther into our respective corners.