The old Ford raced down the highway, its speed seventy-five miles per hours. Hmph, there goes another one, thought Officer John Davy, as he lowered his radar gun and waved out his cigarette, throwing it to the pavement. He shifted the police car into drive and rolled off the shoulder of the interstate and onto the highway, his blue lights flashing and siren blaring. It was early in the morning; the sun had barely risen over the mist and trees, and the long interstate was almost empty of cars.

                The officer rounded the curve, thinking of how long it would take to chase down the Ford. But when he came around the bend he saw something surprising: the old Ford had already pulled into the grass on the side of the road.

              “What the hell?”

             The officer reached the old Ford, parked, and exited his car, bringing his ticket pad and pen with him. He adjusted his badge as he walked to the window of the old Ford. The window was still up. The officer ratted it a few times, but there was no response.

                “Open up the damn window, you scuffling vermin, open up the—“

                The officer paused, as the window rolled down to reveal a teenage boy.

                “Oh,” said the officer. He had been expecting a young adult, possibly in his late twenties or early thirties. He didn’t expect a young sixteen year old.

“Young man, do you have any idea how fast you were—”

The officer paused, starring at the boy’s face. He took in the dark hair, the crooked nose, but the feature that stood out most were they eyes. The irises were a sunken blue, and reminded the officer of the ocean after a storm; yet the eyes were welcoming, comforting. Something about them—their melancholy look, their deepness—made the officer lost in them.

                “Are you…are you alright?” asked the officer, forgetting his question and noticing the boy had been weeping.

“Oh, yes, officer, everything’s alright,” said the boy. “Yes, everything’s fine. I’m just sitting here, being sore as hell, that’s all. I was feeling sore as hell, so I pulled off the side of the road for a break.”

The cop grunted, thinking this strange, and took out his ticket pad and pen and asked for the boy’s license and registration.

                The boy quickly ducked down and removed the registration certificate from the glove box, and his wallet from his pocket, and handed them both to the officer.

                “Mark Pencilwood?” said the officer, looking down at the driver’s license. “Pencilwood?”

                “Is there a problem?” asked the boy.

                “Nothing, nothing. Just a strange name, that’s all. Ever thought of changing it?”

                “Never,” said the boy.

                The officer paused, looking into the boy’s eyes once more.

                 “I had an unfortunate name too,” said the officer. “Was born ‘Jones Davy,’ but changed it to John Davy after I turned eighteen. How old are you?”

                “Sixteen.”

                The officer turned away, looking down the stretch of road.

                “Whew. Sixteen and already breaking the law. Do you know how fast you were going?”

                The boy didn’t respond.

                “You were going seventy-five miles per—“

                “Do you like stories?”

                The officer paused, looking back into the boy’s eyes.

                “Stories?”

                “Yeah, stories. Do you like them?”

                The officer looked down into the boy, into those blue eyes. He lowered his hand, which held the ticket pad, pen, and driver’s license.

                “I guess. You gotta good story?” he asked.

                “One of a kind.”

                The boy closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair, placing his hands behind his head. “I just ran away from school.”

                The officer backed away from the window, pinching his eyes with his thumb and forefinger and taking a deep sigh. “Now you know I’m gonna have to take you in?” he said, reopening his eyes, looking straight into the deep blue of the boy’s irises. “Now you know I’m gonna…have to…”

                “It wasn’t that I was dumb. I just didn’t want to do it anymore.”

                The officer continued looking down into the boy’s eyes.

                “Why didn’t you want to do it anymore?”

                “The places it would take me, of course. It would take my straight behind a desk,” said the boy, and suddenly he twisted around, and looked out the rear view window, as if he were expecting someone to be chasing him, a parent perhaps, or possibly a teacher…

                “Whadaya mean behind a desk?” asked the cop.

                The boy turned his attention back to the officer.

                “I’d be working behind a desk, in a suit and tie and all. I’d walk into work every day and would be wearing slacks and a suit. Every day. Five days a week. Then I’d come home and have to work from my laptop until I fell asleep, and I’d never spend time with my family, and that would be my life. Work and suits, five days a week, fifty weeks a year, forty years out of a lifetime. Work and suits.”

                The officer’s hand involuntarily skimmed his badge. The boy continued talking.

                “I had good grades and everything. I studied my ass off to do it. Missed the times of my life, I swear to god. Just last week my little sister had her piano recital, and I couldn’t go and hear her play because I had to stay home and study my damn chemistry book. But I guess I have to keep getting A’s, so I can go to a decent college, right? So I can look good?”

The officer looked down at his feet, thinking of the time when he applied for the police academy and he almost wasn’t accepted because his grades were right on the border. It didn’t matter if he could shoot straight or chase down criminals—if he had earned a C in one more class, the force wouldn’t have taken him.

The cop looked back to the boy. “So you can look good. I know what you mean.”

“It’s a fashion show, isn’t it?” said the boy, smiling. “Now do you know why I had to leave?”

The officer’s radio suddenly beeped, and he reached for his belt, taking the radio and holding it to his ear. He walked away from the old Ford and back to his car, so he could take the call in private.

“Officer Gerald,” he said, “this is Officer Davy. What do you need?”

“We have a four-twenty on the other side of interstate fifty. Drug-bust. We need you to come check it out.”

“I’m in the middle of writing a ticket,” said the officer, looking down into his hand. The ticket pad was blank. “Gimme ten minutes.”

He put down his radio and went back to the boy’s car, beginning to write the ticket as he went. The boy was sitting in the seat, twirling his hair in his fingers and staring down the stretch of interstate, as though he could see the future.

“Sorry kid, but I’ve got to write this ticket, so—”

“I’m gonna be a novelist.”

“What?” said the officer.

“A novelist. You know, a story writer.”

“I know what a novelist is.”

“Good, because that’s what I want to be. That’s where I’m going right now. To get away from the city and live on a farm up north somewhere, where I can write stories all day long. Not behind a desk, but maybe swinging in a hammock or something.”

The officer remained silent, watching the boy, the blue eyes attracting his own like black holes.

“I’m sorry, Officer Davy, if I was speeding,” said the boy. “It’s just that I wanted to get the hell out of here the fastest way I could. I wanted to get away from the city, with all of the people, god dammit, all of the people who don’t act like people, but like little ants, scurrying from one part of the town to the other, not knowing what the hell they’re doing with their lives. I had to get away. I had to leave that school.”

The officer looked down from the boy’s eyes and at the half ticket he had written. The word SPEEDING was written across the top, and the officer lifted his pen, about to write in the boy’s name, and fill in all the identification, but he hesitated, and looked into the blue eyes again.

 “I can’t be behind a desk,” said the boy, looking straight into the officer’s face. “My father died from cyanide poisoning. He was swimming in a lake one day with some buddies, and a factory up the river had dumped toxic waste into it. My dad and his friends didn’t know the lake was dangerous until all of them were diagnosed with lymphoma. Died two years after that. All of them. And now I’m expected to go to college and get a job working for some company that’s going to lie through its teeth and say it’s making safe little plastic toys for children when really it’s dumping cyanide into streams and killing the children’s fathers. So I had to get the hell out of the city. Away from people who wear ties and dress up in suits.”

The officer stared down at the ticket in his hand. His pen bobbed up and down, his thumb split between pressing ink into the paper and throwing the pen down to the pavement.

“That’s why I asked you if you like stories,” said the boy. “When I get my novel published, you’ll read it, right?”

The officer looked at the boy, straight into the sunken blue eyes. He looked down at the ticket written in his hand, and back at the boy, and back at the ticket, and then he ripped the ticket in half.

“Of course,” said the officer, in a voice barely above a whisper. “Of course I’ll read it. Here—”

He handed the boy his driver’s license back, along with the car registration. “Here, take this. Get to wherever the hell you want to get to. Go as fast as you want. If you get pulled over, tell the cop to contact me."

The boy looked up into the officer’s face.

“Thank you,” he said.

The office nodded, and walked back to his car, pausing to look over his shoulder and watch the old Ford roar to life and start off down the interstate. The officer watched until the boy and his car disappeared in the distance, and then the officer began to cry. Tears streamed down his face, and he wiped his eyes, and every time he touched them, the image of the boy’s sunken blue eyes floated into his head, and he cried even harder. He wept and wept until his radio buzzed again, and it took the officer half a minute to gain his composure and answer.

“Hello?”

“Officer Davy? Where are you? We have a four-twenty off exit seventy-four and we need back up. Are you almost there?”

“I’m—I’m pretty far away,” admitted the officer, still whipping his eyes. “Gimme five minutes.”

He put down his radio and placed the car into drive and rolled back onto the interstate, pressing the accelerator until his car was going eighty miles per hour. The speed limit was sixty, but he was a cop, so he could go as fast as he wanted. The officer continued driving, billboards passing by him, and he thought about what the boy had said. About the lake. About the cyanide. All of a sudden, a large whoosh came from behind, as a pickup truck full of college students blasted by. The officer saw them, and began to merge into their lane to pull them over, but felt a knot in his stomach. The kids were going as fast as he was. And he was about to pull them over. For doing the same thing he was.

The officer turned off his lights and moved into a different lane, trying to put the kids out of his mind, trying to put the boy with the sunken blue eyes out of his mind. He drove on for another three minutes, until he saw a billboard with the picture of a child playing in a sand box. The child had a plastic truck in his hand, and the officer noticed there was no father in the picture. His stomach tightened.

 A few minutes later, he arrived at the scene of the four-twenty. Six cop cars surrounded a large white van; a few police men were reading Miranda rights to the drivers of the van, who were handcuffed and sitting on the pavement.

When the officer arrived, he pulled his cop car—he couldn’t help noticing it looked exactly the same as the other six—into the circle of cars, but didn’t exit his vehicle. The boy with the sunken blue eyes was still on his mind.

The boy with the sunken blue eyes. The officer still could have been talking with the boy, if his radio had never buzzed. Why did the other cops call him, anyway? They were handling the situation. Why did they call him over?

Because it’s standard protocol, thought the officer. Standard protocol.

And then he knew what the boy was talking about. It was standard protocol to get good grades; it was standard protocol to go to college; it was standard protocol to want to be a lawyer or accountant or a business man, to wake up in the morning dreading you job, but putting on the tie and suit—or badge—just to put the food on the table, just to pay the bills, just to buy your kid that cheap plastic truck. It was all standard protocol.

The officer ripped off his badge, throwing it to the floor of his car. He never wanted to be a police man. He wanted to be an artist, but his father, the chief of police, refused to hear such a matter. “You’re going to be a cop, just like I was, and you’re going to be head of the force, just like me.” And that was the end of the matter. That was the plan, that was the life, that was all the officer was destined for. To wake up in the morning, dreading putting on that badge.

He sat in silence, watching the other police men arrest the drivers of the white van. It was a drug bust. And with a pang, the officer noticed all the other police men smoking their cigarettes, and remembered all the times back at the station they had shared Cubans together. The officer sat in silence and watched.

And then he heard a rapping at his window. The officer turned, and saw a fellow police man staring at him from the outside. The officer rolled down the window until the fellow police man’s face was half way through the frame.

“Everything alright?” asked the police man. He took a puff of his cigarette before waving it out and throwing it to the ground.

The officer followed the cigarette to the pavement, the soreness in his stomach increasing. He stared up at the police man, looking into the brown eyes. They were shallow. The officer turned and faced the stretch of road, closed his eyes, and said,

“Do you like paintings?”