Janey had woken up with a problem. A HUGE problem! On Halloween Night she'd performed a magic spell that she hoped would turn her into a beautiful girl that the boy she was hopelessly infatuated with would want to date, and it had. But her transformation had come with a tragic deformity that dashed all her hopes of ever becoming Bobby's Girl! To make matters worse her parents didn't recognize her now + had refused to believe she was their daughter, and called the cops on her, and now Janey was in jail for tresspassing + possibly some far more serious charges. This was a disaster---a complete and utter cock-up!---and she just knew her life was over...

Or was it?

IT'S MY PARTY AND I'LL CRY IF I WANT TO
The Sequel to BOBBY'S GIRL,
Part Two: Jailtime For Janey
Laika Pupkino ~ 2019

NOTE: IT'S MY PARTY + I'LL CRY IF I WANT TO is a direct sequel to my short 2009 Halloween story BOBBY'S GIRL, which you really need to read first, in order to avoid massive + possibly life threatening spoilers. Here is a link to BOBBY'S GIRL:
https://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/fiction/15425/bobbys-girl

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“It's my party and I'll cry if I want to;
Cry if I want to,
cry if I want to;
You would cry too if this happened to you!”
~Sylvia Plath

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All the way to the police station the two officers up in the front seat made fun of Janey, cracking stupid jokes about witches, like: “Careful there, Bob! She might turn you into a frog. Ha ha!”

But they weren't particularly cruel or off-color jokes, and anyway Janey hardly heard them, lost as she was in gloomy thoughts about the grotesque jumble of male and female parts she had somehow turned herself into, and what sort of future she---if she could even still call herself 'she'---might be facing.

The “real” Janey was never going to turn up, and even if she didn't go to prison for kidnapping or murdering herself, the life she'd had with her parents was over. As far as they or anyone else in the world knew she was not Jane Frances Smith of Princeton New Jersey, and had only popped into existence a few hours ago. What did the authorities do with someone like that?

She supposed that kids who got caught wandering around without parents or identities were assigned some name and then were either adopted or got put into a foster home. But once they found out what she was what foster parents would ever want to take her in? There was probably an orphanage in some remote location where they stuck all the weird genetic mutant children who had two heads or tails or lizard scales or penises. She didn't imagine it was a very nice place. And she knew she could kiss off any dreams she'd ever had about someday finding romance or getting married. But the thing that broke her heart the worst was that BOBBY would never in a million years want anything to do with her now!

Or no; He would be nice to her out of pity---like he had been those few times they talked---because that's the kind of boy he was. He was always standing up for the kids who got picked on and showing kindness to the friendless ones. But he never dated any of the misfit girls, and why should he?! Bobby could have his pick of any female on campus, and the girls he went out with were always the beautiful and popular ones, nearly indistinguishable from each other in how they dressed, talked and acted.

So he would never want to date a freak like Janey even if she was superficially his 'type' now, because he was just a normal down-to-Earth American boy who liked nice normal American things. And those rumors that one cheerleader he'd broken up with had tried to start about him---that Bobby was “some kind of weird fag” who had wanted her to put a Big Stick Popsicle up his bottom---were so obviously ridiculous that these stories not only failed to gain traction in their high school's rumor mill but totally backfired on the embittered ex-girlfriend, and she was soon off the cheer squad and eating lunch by herself. Because EVERYBODY loved Bobby Dukakis!

And while Janey knew in her heart that no one could love him as much as she did, she should have realized that not even magic would be enough to make BOBBY + JANEY a reality. She saw now that it had never been meant to be; and that she was suffering a punishment straight out of Greek mythology (which she'd read up on because it was Bobby's heritage...) for her overreaching dreams. From all the stories she'd read about people being turned into animals or statues or suffering other weird metamorphosises she knew that nothing ticked off the gods up on Olympus as much as some foolish mortal who didn't know her place.

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<=====8 |*| |*| 8=====>

When they got to the station the two cops talked briefly with an officer at a desk and filled out some forms, then they made her sit on a bench between them with her hands still cuffed behind her. “Could you please take these off of me? My hand is going to sleep.”

“Our Youth Liaison Officer Gina Martinelli will do that,” said the chubby cop, “She'll be handling your booking, and they said she's on her way here, so it shouldn't be- Ah, here she is!”

“What do we have here?” asked the slender dark-haired policewoman striding up the hall toward them.

“Residential trespassing. Took the window screen off and climbed into someone's house, started running amok,” said the tall cop. He and his partner stood up so Janey did too.

“Cooperative?”

“Meek as a lamb. But there were signs that she was tearing up the daughter's bedroom before we arrived. And from the stuff she's been saying it's pretty clear she's 5150.”

“We don't use that code anymore,” Martinelli reminded him sternly.

“Well whatever they're calling it, she's not playing with a full deck. Mr. and Mrs. Smith's daughter wasn't there---they seem to think she was kidnapped---but our girl here kept insisting she was their daughter Jane. We get the weirdest damned calls on Halloween night, and even though it was morning I'd count this as one of those...”

The pretty policewoman frowned. “Are you sure the Smiths were telling the truth and didn't just have you haul in their daughter? There's some pretty screwed-up parents in this state.”

“They are not!” cried Janey, “They're good parents! They just don't recognize me because of the magic spell!”

“See what I mean?”

“What I see is a scared kid who isn't gonna give me any trouble,” Martinelli replied, “Are you, Hon?”

“No Ma'am!”

“So polite! And please, call me Gina...”

“I'm Janey,” said Janey, “Really I am!”

“All right Janey. Let's get you booked and into the system.”

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<=====8 |*| |*| 8=====>

As the policewoman deftly unsnapped the metal cuffs from one of Janey's wrist and then the other she asked, “How did you get blood on your shirt?”

Janey showed Gina her injured left hand.

“Oh Jeez! You really gouged it. Well we'll get that cleaned up when we get you cleaned up. Now I'm going to have to frisk you. I want you to lean against that wall with your arms like this,” she said, spreading her own arms out.

Barefoot in just a t-shirt and shorts, the kid was underdressed for this time of year and Gina just gave her a token pat down, concentrating mostly on her pants pockets. Empty. She asked Janey if she had any ID on her, and when she said no Gina tsk-tsk!'ed at her and said, “You should always have your ID with you when you go out.”

“But I didn't go out, they took me out!” said Janey, pointing at the two departing policemen.

“Okay. If you don't have it, you don't have it,” shrugged Martinelli, then asked her all the standard questions about name, Social Security number, date and place of birth, et cetera and typed it all up on a computer she had switched on, not balking when the address where Janey claimed to live was the same one she'd been arrested at.

At a different table she grabbed hold of Janey's hand and one at a time pressed her fingers and thumbs down on an inky pad and then against the array of ten squares on a heavy manila paper form. She noticed she didn't have to tell Jane to just relax her hand. “You seem like you've done this before...”

“When I was ten my parents took me here and signed me up with the state's SAFEKIDS program. They printed my fingers just like this and had us write down stuff like how I get to school and what friend's house I might be over at if I was missing---we had to leave that one blank---then got some DNA out of my mouth with like a long Q-tip.”

“We won't need any DNA from you today-” the woman started to say when her phone started playing the theme from the old TV show Dragnet. She pulled it out, looked at it, and chuckled. “Way to make a liar out of me, Dondo! Okay it looks like we will be taking a DNA sample. The CSI just requested it...”

She found a DNA-kit envelope and opened it, took a sample from inside Janey's cheek, placed the swab inside the disposable plastic test-tube and stoppered it, put that in the smaller envelope that was inside the big one, wrote something on it and attached a little press-on sticker that had numbers on it, then dropped it in a wire basket-thing that said LAB. Then Officer Martinelli had her stand in front of a screen-thing that pulled down like a window shade and took a front view and then a side view photo of her, just like Janey had seen done on countless TV cop shows.

More than anything else, having her mug shots taken really made Janey feel like she really was a convict now. As the policewoman started walking her down an ugly beige hallway she gulped, “Are you gonna stick me in with all the criminals?”

“No, we're going to find you a nice private cell. Although if we get busy later you might have to share it with another girl your age. But not some guy named 'Bubba' if that's what you're worried about. We keep the men and women separate and never put juveniles in with adults. Now let's get you out of those clothes and into your county issues.”

She led Janey down a hall to a big square opening in the wall with a counter along its bottom like at a dry cleaner's shop, behind which sat a bored looking woman. As she took her feet off her desk and stood up Gina said, “Hi, Dawn. We need a female inmate's, small. And a- What's your bra size, Hon?”

“I don't know,” said Jane, because it was obvious that none of the bras in her dresser would fit her now.

Gina said, “Tell you what. Just give us your best guess and a few sizes larger and smaller and I'll bring the rest back.”

The woman dropped a selection of plain white bras onto the counter, then a set of inmate's clothing. Jane had thought her 'county issues' would be an orange jumpsuit (like they wore on that show about a bunch of thespians in a women's prison called Orange is Black Now that her parents wouldn't let her watch); but instead it was a gray sweatshirt and sweatpants, panties, white socks and a pair of white tennis shoes, all prominently stenciled MERCER COUNTY JAIL in bold yellow letters. She supposed this was to keep anyone from stealing them, but Janey didn't think it was too likely anyone would want to steal clothes as ugly as these. Lastly Dawn produced a cheap scratchy bath towel that smelled like bleach and dropped it onto the pile, which Officer Gina indicated Jane was supposed to gather up and follow her down the hall with it.

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<=====8 |*| |*| 8=====>

Janey thought there would be a dressing room like they had at JC Penny's or Target that she could go into and change. But they entered a room with some benches to sit on and and a tiled area on one of the walls that had three shower heads sticking from it, with a drain in the cement floor and a raised rim like a semicircular speed bump running around it to keep the water inside that one area.

But no shower curtains or or any sort of partitions around it. No privacy, which was a big problem!

The officer pointed, “Take a shower, dry yourself off and we'll see if any of these bras fit you.”

“You mean like take a shower naked?”

It was such a silly question that Gina couldn't help laughing. “Well how else do you take a shower?”

“I don't really need one though. I took a shower this morning and I'm really clean,” Janey lied.

“Everybody we house here has to take a shower. It's the rules.”

“But I can't!” cried Janey.

“But don't you want to get all that blood off you? It always feels good to get cleaned up and into a clean set of clothes; doesn't it?”

“NO!!” screamed Janey. “I mean yeah I like being clean, but I CAN'T!!

“You mean you're shy? But they must have showers like this when you go to gym class,” Gina said, then had a thought that might explain both the girl's state of near panic and her personality in general. “Or are you home schooled?”

“No, I take PE at school, and we have showers, but that was before! Before I drank that stuff and was normal like a girl; but now, I mean last night it all just- I mean I CAN'T!”

Officer Martinelli had a good instinct for when a suspect she was talking to was about to freak out and take off running. And even though it usually didn't happen this far into the arrest process, she was reading all the same signs of panic and flight in this kid, who had been nothing but compliant and sweetly ingratiating until now. Gina asked gently, “But why can't you? It's just us girls here. You don't have anything I haven't seen before.”

Janey started sobbing so hard her whole body was quaking! She spat bitterly, “You wanna bet?!”

And suddenly Gina knew why the kid was so terrified of undressing in front of her. 'Wow!' she thought, 'I never would've guessed in a million years!' It was incredible how well girls like Janey could pass when they started transitioning early enough. She couldn't see a single thing about the young woman that said 'male'. She told her, “It's okay Sweetie! I said it was just us girls here and as far as I'm concerned it still is! And I know your body isn't like you wish it was---not all of it, not yet---but when you're a little older you'll be able to fix that too. So don't worry about me being here; I know lots of transgender people. Or a few, anyway. My friend Darla is a policewoman up in New York.”

Janey looked up, astonishment on her tear-streaked face. “Really?!”

“Yes, really! She's one of the best cops I know and just a beautiful woman, inside and out. And she was born a boy just like you...”

“But I wasn't born a boy!” sobbed Janey, “I was a girl. And I'm not transgender; or I don't think I am anyway, because being a girl never felt wrong to me. But now I am wrong! I mean I woke up and I'm pretty now and my eyes are good and I got a bust like Holly Hooters, but I also got this thing now; So it's like I'm not a boy or a girl, just a THING!! A thing with a thing and I belong in the Freak Zoo and I wish I never found that stupid book!”

Officer Martinelli wasn't sure what Janey was saying but took a guess. “You mean you're intersex?”

“I don't know, I've never even had sex!”

“No, this doesn't have anything to do with whether you've had sex or not. Intersex people have a body that isn't all male or all female, but might have one thing a guy has and something else a girl has. Sometimes it's obvious the minute they're born, and other times it stays hidden for years."

“Really?” asked Janey. They hadn't even mentioned this in that sex education class she'd had in junior high.

“It's not that common, but it's a lot more common than some folks would like to believe. So if that's what you are it's not the end of the world, and you're not alone. There are others like you, who live their lives just like anyone else, and none of them have to live in the Freak Zoo. They closed that place down years ago...”

“But if I look like a girl and I have a- You know, a boy thing... then what am I?”

“What do you feel like you are?” asked the officer.

“I don't know anymore!” she cried.

“Then what do you want to be? Deep down inside you know that. Your heart's desire.”

“I want to be Bob-” Janey started to say, but stopped herself. Though Bobby had been the “heart's desire” from her magic spell maybe being Bobby's girl wasn't really the most important thing in the world after all. Or at least not right now. Janey's wish to be the mousey boring 'Plain Jane' she'd been yesterday was just for her, so she could feel like herself again. She said, “I want to be a girl.”

“Then you're a girl. If that's who you really feel like you should be.”

“I can just do that?” asked Janey skeptically.

“Why not? Who else is better to decide something that's that important to how you live your life and how you feel about yourself---and it really is nobody else's business---than you?”

“I dunno,” she sniffled, “Maybe scientists and doctors who study all this stuff?”

“Doctors have a terrible record of deciding for others who they should be. Especially with intersex people. They take a baby with ambiguous genitals and decide whether the child should be a boy or a girl, then use a scalpel to try and turn them into that. And years later it turns out they were totally wrong and that person doesn't feel at all like the sex that the doctor just arbitrarily decided they were, but feels like they were violated by some doctor playing God with their body, and by the parents who forced them into that gender; all because they couldn't handle the idea of someone being sexually ambiguous, which is rare but it's totally normal.”

“How come you know so much about all this? Are you intersex too?”

“No, I'm pretty much female through and through. But I had a friend in college who was; And when I was your age I had a lot of people telling me who I was supposed to be and that who I was in my heart was wrong; so I can at least somewhat imagine what it's like,” Gina told her, not being more specific because she didn't want to spook the timid kid, who gave the impression of having led such a sheltered life that she might not have ever met an out-of-the-closet gay person.

“You mean because you like girls?”

Gina was a bit surprised that Janey had figured this out, but then realized her euphemisms wouldn't have been hard for a 17-year-old with half a brain to read between; and the kid wasn't dumb. Gina said, “Yes, that's part of who I am. But I like adult girls, and I'm married to one; so don't worry about me. And if you want I'll turn around and look over there while you take your shower. I think I can bend the rules that much.”

“I'm not worried about you bein' a thespian. You're a nice person, and I got real worries to worry about! My own parents don't know me, I'm in jail for being in my own house and my whole life got wrecked by one thing I decided to try and didn't even really think would do anything! I'm so stupid!” said Janey and started crying again. But she managed to say, “But I'll take a shower 'cuz I just wanna get this over so I can go to my cage or whatever and sleep. And I don't want you to watch me do this but it ain't because of you, it's 'cuz of me. What I am now, I don't even want me looking at me!”

The policewoman's heart just about broke when she heard this. Whatever this girl's actual story was, it was obvious she needed a whole lot of therapy and support and love. As she turned her back to give Janey some privacy she said, “None of us knows what our future holds, and just because it looks hopeless it doesn't mean it is. There was a time when I was sure my life was hopeless, but after I made it through the rough part and got out on my own it turned out to be pretty great, and I wouldn't trade the life I have now for anything! So please don't give up hope!”

“That would be nice,” said Janey flatly, then Gina heard the faucet handle squeak and the sounds of water raining down on the teenager and the shower's concrete floor, which almost drowned the sound of the girl's quiet sobbing.

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<=====8 |*| |*| 8=====>

Clean and dressed in her jail clothes, with a beige butterfly bandage covering the betadine-orange wound in her palm, Janey checked out her living quarters. There wasn't much to see. Two steel bunk beds with thin plastic-foam mattresses. A steel sink and a steel toilet with no cover, three cinderblock walls and one made of bars, and a television bolted to a spot high on one wall.

Officer Martinelli had given her a short list of basic cable channels she could watch, and Janey chose THE ANIMAL CHANNEL with the sound down kind of low, all of which Gina had to do from outside the cell. Janey picked a bottom bunk to spread the two blankets and the crummy little pillow they had given her on, and lie down to watch some TV.

She tried to watch AMAZING SHELTER DOGS, but even the heartwarming stories of dogs snatched from the jaws of death and given loving homes and then saving their adopted families by barking when the house catches on fire couldn't hold her interest. And the dog pound scenes were just too depressing. Because she knew that for every Amazing Shelter Dog there were fifty who never found their loving human family but got murdered and tossed in the trash. Life was not a funshiney rainbow after all...

'All those dogs in the background are probably dead now,' she thought, and rolled over and put her crummy pillow over her head so she couldn't see or hear the TV.

She tried to go to sleep so she could escape from her grim reality for an hour or two; but her head was full of doggie gas chambers and penises, the hostility and lack of recognition on her parents' faces when they discovered her this morning, and a future she couldn't believe might be as okay as Officer Gina was trying to tell her it could; and she was crying again.

Janey was getting really sick of all this crying!

“I'm just a crybaby freak,” she cried, and the thought of being such a stupid crybaby freak made her cry...

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<=====8 |*| |*| 8=====>

For the most part, Gina had kept her promise to not watch Janey while she disrobed and showered, except for the quick look she had sneaked just to confirm that the troubled teen wasn't merely imagining she had sprouted a dick and balls. Gina had delivered people with stranger and more irrational delusions about their bodies to the Princeton University Medical Center for psych evaluation (Like the exhausted and terrified man who was convinced he had an extra set of arms that no one else could see; Demonic arms that were planning to strangle him the instant he fell asleep!). But Janey was not imagining that she had a boy's sex organ on her very female body. It was there.

Although Janey's story about how it hadn't been there yesterday didn't really seem credible. Partly because this could never happen, but also because she'd gotten a good enough look at it during her furtive peek to notice that it was circumcised. Gina was no expert on mysteriously-appearing penises, but she was pretty sure that if a human female ever did wake up with one on her body it would come complete with a foreskin...

Then again, if it was possible for drinking a magic potion and reciting a silly rhyme to make a penis grow on a girl then all sorts of equally fantastic things might also be possible, and maybe some leprechaun had climbed in through her open window and circumcised Janey while she slept. But Gina was more inclined to believe in Occam and his razor than any leprechaun mohel...

She logged on to a computer and amended the girl's file, checking the TRANSGENDER box; but because she wasn't sure what Janey's real story was she skipped over the subcategory box labeled INTERSEX and marked the one that said OTHER, UNSPECIFIED. And in the space provided for NOTES she typed in 'Recommend protective custody' and initialed it, because putting Janey in with either the male or the female juveniles could only cause trouble. Gina just hoped that whoever dealt with Janey next would actually bother to read it.

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<=====8 |*| |*| 8=====>

Janey had almost finally cried herself to sleep when she was startled awake by a loud Bang! Bang! Bang! sound. She rolled over and saw a cop pounding on the bars of her cell with one of those big plastic sticks with a handle some of them carried on their belts.

“Get up!” he ordered rudely as he unlocked and opened the barred door, “Bradshaw wants to see you.”

“Who?!” asked Janey.

“Detective Bradshaw,” he replied irritably, like she was supposed to know this but was too stupid to.

She wanted to ask him who Detective Bradshaw was but decided it would probably be better to talk to this policeman only when she absolutely had to. He sure didn't smile like Officer Gina had. As she followed him down the maze of corridors she caught a look at a clock on a wall, and was surprised to see it was barely past eleven.

He led her to a room with a dining room sized table in the middle and big mirror set in one wall that she assumed was one of those one-way window things. There were two chairs on opposite sides of the table. In one of them sat a man in his sixties wearing a grey suit and a tie, and when he nodded Janey took the other chair. The table's top had a heavy bracket bolted to it near her side that a suspect's handcuffs could be attached to so he couldn't leap across the table and bite his interrogator's nose off, but Janey wasn't handcuffed and the man clearly had no fear of her. He said his name was Detective John Bradshaw and he was investigating the State's case against her-

“-for the tresspassing and vandalism at 1483 Maple Tree Lane. Do you deny you were there at approximately 6:45 this morning?”

“Well no, because I live there.”

“Okay. I see you're still going with that,” he said neutrally, “Do you want to tell me in your own words what you were doing there?”

If Janey thought there was some lie she could tell him that would make her be in less trouble she might have told it. But the only story she could think of was what really happened, so she told it the same as she had to the tall cop and the fat cop only with a little less stuff about how perfect Bobby was, and again hedging about the reason she was screaming and smashing her stuff. Detective Bradshaw only asked a half dozen questions before deciding to just listen and take down notes about her on a notepad.

When she was done he thanked her, and she realized the questioning was over. She asked, “Am I supposed to ask for a lawyer or something?”

“We're still not sure if there will be a formal proceeding. If there is, you will see a juvenile court judge within 72 hours of your arrest and be able to enter a plea of either guilty or not. If you plead not guilty you can either call your lawyer or hire one. Or you're welcome to contact them now.”

“I don't have a lawyer. Or any money to get one.”

“I didn't think so. Then the court will appoint you a public defender. One can come talk to you some time today if you want, so you and he can review your options and start planning your defense.”

“No, that's okay. I don't really know what I'd tell him,” admitted Janey. She only knew what went on in courtrooms from TV dramas and a couple of very old movies she'd watched in her 9th grade social studies class that she only vaguely remembered (Twelve Angry Mockingbirds?); but she was pretty sure no attorney would be willing to defend her on the grounds that she was Janey Smith who had drank a magic potion and got turned into this unrecognizable blonde weenie-girl.

“And you're sure you don't want to call your real parents and maybe they could help you with all this?” asked the detective.

“Brad and Linda Smith ARE my real parents!”

“Oh of course. I was just asking...”

The not-very-nice deputy was waiting outside and led Janey back to her cell without a word.

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<=====8 |*| |*| 8=====>

Detective Bradshaw sighed. The girl had clearly believed her own story, and there wasn't much point in questioning someone as crazy as her. It was pretty clear that 'Janey' wasn't competent to stand trial for trespassing and he was going to suggest to whatever prosecutor got stuck with this turkey of a case that they ask she be given a psychiatric evaluation. She was going to wind up in the hands of the head shrinkers eventually, whether or not this thing actually went to trial.

The Smiths weren't looking to have Fake Janey's head stuck on a pike for daring to enter their house uninvited, as creepy as this can feel to a homeowner. They just wanted their daughter back. By the time he showed up there at nine they had calmed down enough that they were willing to listen when he told them there wasn't a lot of evidence connecting Fake Janey to Real Janey's disappearance, and no sign that there had been a struggle other than with whatever demons were inside the crazy girl's head.

It was almost as if Real Janey had gone out for a night of fun (teenage girls are seldom as innocent as their parents imagine) and Fake Janey had seen the screen off the window while walking past their house and decided to go exploring, and then for whatever reason had gone berzerk. Maybe her psychosis was triggered by that 'Hugglebug' lamp his CSI Dondo Reyes had retrieved from the bushes outside the window. It was nasty looking little brute.

And even though the tests he'd ordered probably hadn't even arrived at the lab that did all the DNA analysis for the Sheriff's Department yet, both he and Dondo had been pretty sure that the small amount of blood found at the crime scene would turn out to all be from the injury to Fake Janey's hand.

This might prove to be the strangest case Bradshaw would get today but it was hardly the most important. There had been several other break-ins and burglaries during the night---mostly commercial---that he still needed to investigate, and before he got even in to the station this morning there'd been a call about a dead body found in a park, which even though he wasn't a homicide detective he'd been close enough that he was the first one on the scene. Luckily what someone thought was a dead person floating in the park's little pond had turned out to be a mannequin. Halloween was always a weird time of year in New Jersey, but luckily they hadn't had any Martian invasions in a while...

.

<=====8 |*| |*| 8=====>

Back in her bunk, Janey watched a show that was on the Animal Channel about those pretty little fishes called clownfish, and how they could actually completely change their sex.

'Maybe I'm a clownfish,' she thought sleepily, 'And just haven't finished turning into a boy yet...'

And then she was a clownfish, and for some reason was having a really angry argument with a pretty teenage mermaid, when a deputy came and woke her up; but a lot less rudely than that last cop had.

He had a metal tray with a plastic spoon and her lunch on it, some white gravy and meat goop heaped onto some white bread toast that wasn't as bad as the name he called it---Shit on a shingle---but it wasn't very good either.

She ate it as she watched some more TV and then she was dreaming again, that she was on trial in a courtroom somewhere in the deep South that was packed with spectators---her trial was some super big deal for some reason---and it was so hot everybody had little fans they were fanning themselves with; and her penis was up on the witness stand, being cross-examined by that actor from the old movie she suddenly realized she was in (Gregory Pecker?).

But even with the freaky dreams sleep was good. It made the time go by quicker. Because the next thing Janey knew another cop was waking her up to eat her dinner. A tray piled with some tasteless glop he called chicken tetrazzini. She thought it might be the same stuff she'd eaten earlier only dumped over noodles this time instead of toast...

.
<=====8 |*| |*| 8=====>

Gina Martinelli couldn't stop thinking about the girl in Holding Cell 3-C and her crazy story. She had to figure it was some kind of psychological defense, a way to avoid the shame someone had taught her to feel for being trans, or intersex, or whatever the troubled young woman was physically.

But after she clocked out Gina found a computer terminal and brought up Janey's case. The girl's fingerprints had been taken the old-fashioned way but then the ink-on-paper prints (which served as a back up copy in case anything happened to the computers) had been put on a high-resolution scanner and entered into the Department's criminal data base. These were what she brought up on her computer screen, and just on a hunch ran them for matches with the records of every police department in the US, the FBI and even Interpol. Seven minutes later the closest thing to a match (30%) on any of her fingers was the left thumb of a seventy year old embezzler currently doing time in Florida.

But the prints that Janey claimed had been taken when she was ten wouldn't be in the criminal justice system. Despite what the tinfoil-hat crowd claimed, the SAFEKIDS program had not been put into effect so that the government could keep cradle-to-grave files on ordinary citizens, but actually to try and keep kids safe. And the data submitted by parents had helped solve six missing children and abduction cases that Gina been personally involved in. While not every police officer could just poke through the files they had on kids without the approval of a judge and the regional director of SAFEKIDS, as Youth Liaison Officer Gina was affiliated with the program and could get into its catalog, as long as she logged on using the special password they had given her and left a record of and an explanation for everything she had done in there.

There was no telling how many Jane Smiths there were in New Jersey that had been signed up with SAFEKIDS, but when she entered the address Janey claimed was hers she found her Jane Smith. The ten year old Janey's photo looked absolutely nothing like the teenager they had in custody, and Gina could tell that digitally advancing the picture's age to 17 wouldn't bring it any closer to resembling the blonde girl who was claiming she had been this bespectacled child with the mousy brown hair.

But it didn't take seven minutes or even seven tenths of a second for the images of all ten fingerprints to come back reading a 100% match to their counterparts in the other file. Officer Martinelli gazed at the ten sets of side-by-side images on her screen that were perfect duplicates of each other, her eyes moving back and forth between them a few times looking for any variation before concluding aloud: “You have GOT to be shittin' me!”

.
<=====8 |*| |*| 8=====>

When you discover something that you know is going to sound unbelievable to people it doesn't hurt to have not just one but two sources of undeniable proof of your claims. So Gina went downstairs to the forensics lab and asked the tech who's name she always forgot how long it would be before they had the the results of the gene test for Case #331-87032; then asked if there was any way they could get it done faster than that.

He found and handed her the sample's envelope, and then the envelope of samples from the crime scene, and said, “Well we might get them by noon tomorrow if you took this over to Genco right now and had them put a rush on it.”

“All right I'll do that,” she smiled and glanced at his name tag, “Thanks, Mike!”

On her way home she found Genco Laboratories among the clinics and medical supply places surrounding Princeton University Medical Center, and had them bill the sheriff's department the extra $70 for their one day service on both. She was pretty sure accounting wouldn't squawk about this when they found out why.

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<=====8 |*| |*| 8=====>

Janey slept and watched television and slept some more and slept again. It was like when you had the flu and felt achy and weak and miserable and you just wanted to sleep all day, only in this case her symptoms were all psychological and sleep seemed like the perfect remedy against her sense of despair and just the awareness of what she had turned herself into that came with being counscious.

But by around three a.m. there was just no way she could sleep another wink, and it was a long, long night full of increasingly horrible visions of her future until a cop came by and broke her cycle of gloomy fearful thoughts by singing out musically, “Room service!”

He was young, blonde, good looking; and his silly “room service” routine almost made up for him delivering a tray full of the worst half-frozen scrambled eggs and soggy toast Janey had ever had.

He stood there with his hand stuck through the bars and Janey couldn't figure out what this meant. Was she supposed to slap his palm like a high five or something? She asked, “What is it?”

He said in a ridiculous snooty voice, “Excuse me Mod-omm, but a tip is customary...”

“I'm sorry. But the only tip I have is to not do any magic on yourself because it can really go bad!!”

“Very well, Mod-ommmmm. I shall bear that in mind,” he said, and was gone.

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<=====8 |*| |*| 8=====>

When he came back a few animal shows later Janey couldn't figure out how it could possibly be lunch time already.

But he didn't have a tray, and was talking in a normal voice. He unlocked her cell and told her to bring anything that wasn't county property and wasn't contraband and that she wanted to keep because she wouldn't be coming back here.

She didn't have anything like that so she got up and started following him down the corridor, asking him,
“What's going on? Are you moving me to another cell? Or am I going to the real jail or something?”

“No, you have to go see Detective Bradshaw first, but then you're going home. All the charges against you have been dropped.”

“Dropped? But how?! I mean why?!? I mean WOW!!!”

“Yeah, I thought you'd like that,” he grinned, “The detective will explain it all. He has some people with him you might know...”
.

.

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END OF PART TWO
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