It gives Kirby chills thinking of it even now.

She quieted down once she was cuffed; her situation had become very real very quickly and all she could think was how angry her parents would be, and Exalta would be worse than angry. Kirby was being arrested. The officer remained silent as he did his best to skirt the mob and lead Kirby back to his squad car. He pulled her along by the upper arm, though his grip loosened, and indeed, he was nearly gentle with her, protective. Kirby was relieved for a moment. This man was going to deliver her from the mayhem. What was she doing here, anyway? She did want an end to the war and she wanted her voice to be heard by the people in charge—Nixon, John Mitchell, Spiro Agnew, Henry Kissinger. But now there would be very real consequences for her idealism—expense and public shame.

“I’m sorry I called you a pig,” Kirby said. “I don’t think the police are pigs. I’m not sure why I said that.”

The officer shrugged. “Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.”

Kirby suppressed a smile. He was quoting Buffalo Springfield! Had she managed to get arrested by the one member of the Boston Police Department who had a rebellious streak?

When they got to the squad car, the officer read Kirby her Miranda rights, but his heart didn’t seem to be in it. Kirby focused on his name tag, TURBO, and thought that it was a name better suited to a fighter pilot. Then she noticed that his eyes were green, her favorite color, and there was a sly cast to his expression that had long been her downfall with men.

“How old are you, dollface?” he asked.

“Twenty,” she said. “I’m a junior at Simmons.”

“Oh yeah?” he said. “I thought maybe you were one of those uppity Wellesley girls.”

“They rejected me,” Kirby said. Blair had gone to Wellesley, but Kirby’s grades hadn’t been as good and she didn’t make the cut, much to Exalta’s dismay.

“Rejected you, dollface?” he said. “You’re kidding me.”

“Stop calling me that,” she said. Dollface. It was such a demeaning term. She wasn’t a doll. She was a woman, a person.

Before she knew what was happening, Officer Turbo lifted her chin and kissed her. She thought of resisting, pushing him away, even kicking him in the nuts. He was abusing his authority! But she instantly felt attracted to him. She was helpless anyway, with her hands shackled behind her back, but the thing was, this turned her on. It was so wrong, so counter to the principles of being a strong female, that she felt betrayed by her body.

He was the one who pulled away. He looked as startled as she felt. “I’m against the war too,” he said. Before she could respond, he said, “I’m not going to haul you in. But I am writing you a ticket for disturbing the peace.”

She had thought, Ha! That’s ironic. It was Richard Nixon who was disturbing the peace—and Johnson before him, and McNamara. Kirby stood quietly while Officer Turbo wrote out a ticket then uncuffed her and handed her the citation as though nothing had happened, as though he hadn’t just given her the best kiss of her young life.

“My name’s Scottie,” he said. “Stay out of trouble.”

Kirby had turned her misadventure into an empowering anecdote. Yes, she had been arrested, put in handcuffs and everything, but in her greatly modified rendition of the story, she talked sense into the arresting officer and he let her go with just a fine. Seventy-five dollars. It was too much money for Kirby to come up with on her student budget and so she had to tell her parents. They should be grateful, she’d told them. He’d let her off easy.

Kate and David were not grateful; they were appalled. But Kirby pointed out that all she had done was protest the government’s foreign policy, a right guaranteed her by the U.S. Constitution. It was the policeman who should be judged, not Kirby.

“What was the officer’s name?” David asked.

“I forget,” Kirby lied. David was an influential lawyer and could probably find a way to have Officer Scottie Turbo disciplined or even suspended, which wasn’t what Kirby wanted. What Kirby wanted was to see Scottie Turbo again—but how? All she knew about him was that he was an officer with the BPD who had been assigned to the protests in Cambridge that day. She had no way to determine what his regular beat was. Did he write parking tickets around Fenway or investigate break-ins in Back Bay or set speed traps on Route 93? Kirby realized her best hope of seeing Scottie Turbo again was to do what she had been doing the first time, and so a few weeks later, when another protest was scheduled at Harvard, Kirby attended.

She tried to remember where she had been when he grabbed her; she thought it was on Russell Street, across from the Coop. And sure enough, there he was, standing in exactly the same spot.

“Pig!” she shouted. She considered pretending to spit but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Instead, she winked at him, and he immediately grabbed her by the arm—harder this time—pinned her wrists behind her, and threw on the cuffs.

“Hey, dollface,” he said in her ear.

He led Kirby to his squad car, read her her Miranda rights, then opened the back door.

“Get in,” he said.

Fear rumbled through Kirby’s gut. Was he taking her in for real this time? She ducked her head and folded into the back seat of the car, which was separated from the front by a metal grate. She felt like an animal. He drove south through Boston, past UMass, past Quincy, and into Braintree, where he pulled behind an abandoned warehouse. It started to rain, which only made the circumstances bleaker. What were they doing here? Officer Turbo parked and got out to survey the area. Kirby couldn’t help craning her neck too. There was no one else around. He could shoot her and dump her and he would never be caught.

He opened the back door. “Move over,” he said. He slid in beside her and unlocked her cuffs.

They started seeing each other every few days. They went to first base, second base, third base—and then Scottie would stop. It was excruciating. Kirby wanted to sneak him into her dorm, but she had a roommate who was always around.

“What about your place? Can’t we go there?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “I live with my mother. She’s older but still sharp. And she has a German shepherd who is very territorial.”

“Motel?” she said. It seemed sleazy and low class, but what choice did they have?