Grace Hopper once stated, “It is easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission” (Hopper). In translation, if you want to do something that you know you wouldn’t be allowed to, do it anyway. I found that it is much easier to grovel at somebody’s feet for a couple days, begging them to forgive you rather than miss out on the experience altogether.
I mastered the art of “kissing butt” at a young age. After realizing that I could get away with virtually anything, all because I was the youngest of my family, I learned how to use it to my advantage. Any time I got in trouble, I’d be able to sense which course of action would be deemed more appropriate: to scream and cry, or to beg and cry. But no amount of tears or apologies could’ve helped me in the summer of 2012. Up until then, I had kept my parents in the dark of my true colors. I never gave them a reason to think that I was doing anything that they’d disapprove of. I was their innocent little angel – incapable of doing any harm.
The woop-woop of the siren splintered the still night. None of us needed to turn around to know that we were being pulled over. The red and blue lights that flashed across the car’s leather interior were a dead giveaway.
Our driver, some girl from another school who I barely knew, burst into tears.
“This is my parents’ car, you guys!” she wailed. “I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead.”
The man in uniform took his good old time getting out of his car, no doubt enjoying the thought of us squirming in our seats. All I kept thinking was how unlucky I was. I didn’t even like anyone I was with in the car – it hadn’t even been an enjoyable night where I could’ve at least said, “It was so totally worth it” to my friends. In fact, cliché as it sounds, I knew something was going to go wrong that night. I had been texting and calling my sister nonstop, trying to get her to pick me up. But each time I’d get her voicemail.
“I’m just not feeling tonight,” I sighed.
Earlier that night, I had even considered walking the long journey from the end of Hoover’s Lane all the way to my house on 16th Street. But of course the foolish part of me overruled the sensible one and swatted away the tiny voice telling me to listen to my instincts.
The sharp wrap on the window interrupted my thought, and I was momentarily blinded as a beam of light poured through the smudged glass. As both windows on the left were rolled down, he took his chance at a further examination–as did I. I recognized him as Hot Cop, the one over whom both my mother and sister regularly salivated. Carefully aiming his flashlight at each of our faces, specifically our eyes, he was surprised to see that they weren’t glassed over and red. Just in case, I made sure to make mine as wide as they could go.
“Miss, are you aware that you’re tags have expired?” He spoke to the sniffling girl, though his eyes continued to roam over the rest of us.
The girl in the passenger’s seat went straight to work at trying to charm Hot Cop.
“Aw, c’mon, officer,” her voice was all high-pitched and whiney. “We were on our way home.”
As if lying were going to help us. What if he decided to interrogate us separately? Then she had just screwed us all over. The look on his face made it evident that her attempts were pointless, and he spoke with a harshness that made us all shudder.
“You can stop jutting out your bottom lip, little girl. That’s not going to help you any.” The girl slumped in her seat, as if his words had physically slapped her across the face.
A part of me wanted nothing more than to hit him, while the other was itching to sneak him a high-five. His words brought me to the realization that this wasn’t your friendly leaning-toward-retirement cop that abides by the expression “kids will be kids.”
He collected her license and registration and then retreated to his car. What’s-Her-Face now had her face buried in the steering wheel and was muttering quietly to herself. Every once in a while you’d catch words like “parents”, “cheerleading”, and “grounded”. We rolled down more windows–the amount of despair in the car was suffocating.
Hot Cop sauntered up to our box of gloom with an elegance and ease that would make an Armani model weep with envy.
“I’m gonna have to ask you all to exit the vehicle,” he said, obviously not caring how embarrassing the situation was. The empty Sheetz parking lot would’ve been a relief, had it not given the idle employees a chance to come out and serve as spectators to our shortcomings.
He took the distraught girl aside, and after what seemed like hours returned with her. For whatever reason, he chose not to ask any of us individual questions. Maybe she said something right, but from the apprehensive look he wore I think he was just weary of tearful little girls.
He took each of our names, for reasons unbeknownst to me. Some craftily gave him fake names, but I chose not to. He then insisted we called our parents to pick each of us up. Again, many easily got out of this situation by lying. Not me.
My fingers had trouble punching in my sister’s cellphone number–I had to restart several times. I had the inkling that Jill wouldn’t be pleased about being wakened at two in the morning. When I heard the first ring, a symbol of oncoming doom, I hastily turned it over to the cop.
“Maybe you should just talk to her,” I told him. For the first time that night, his face was a mask of something that could definitely be mistaken as sympathy.
They talked for a long time. I think Jill realized that it was her beloved Hot Cop on the line, and from what I could tell, they seemed to be hitting it off–both were busy deploring my irresponsible actions.
When I saw my sister’s tiny, brown Saturn whiz around the turn, I almost breathed a sigh of relief. At last, this night was coming to a close. At that point, I didn’t care that I was going to get bitched at the entire way home and probably well into the next few months. I was going home, where I’d be able to curl up in a warm bed and momentarily find some peace in slumber.
With bleeding ears, I crawled out of her car and through the back door. With no plan, I just laid in bed, trying to go to bed with an uneasy stomach.
Mom didn’t even question why I was home the next morning, just bid me a good morning and made her way off to work. For a fleeting moment, I considered the prospect of getting out of this situation scot-free.
A comforting thought lasted me until around three o’clock. When I saw my mom’s face flashing on my phone, I knew this wasn’t going to be a typical “how’s your day?” call.
She didn’t know everything but knew enough. Jill had ratted me out. I couldn’t really bring myself to be angry with her, for what I had done put her in a sticky situation. She made a decision as a concerned sibling rather than as a cool sister.
I was on house arrest to say the least. And when I failed to comply with the strict “no doing anything remotely fun” rule, I was shipped off to spend a few weeks with my father in Ohio. I missed out on the Fourth of July, all of my friends’ summer parties, and even my own seventeenth birthday. I was grounded from July 3rd till the beginning of the school year.
Since then, I’ve been hard at work trying to reconstruct my family’s trust; I’ve been scrubbing the dirt off of my slate, and it’s almost back to clean. My parents were kind enough to acknowledge my efforts, and I’m back to doing what I want for the most part. The one rule is that I’m never allowed to hang out with anyone who was in the car that night, but that’s obviously no skin off my nose.
Indeed, I believe that you’ll miss out on life if you’re constantly asking for permission. You need to make your own choices to truly gain the wisdom that comes along with making mistakes. And sometimes the situations that require you to ask for forgiveness bring you closer to the people that you’ve done wrong.
The summer of 2012 was full of many changes for me. But it’s in the past, and now that I’ve been forgiven, I can laugh about it.
God knows I’ll never forget how, after shrieking at me for a good ten minutes, Jill asked whether I had noticed how Hot Cop had checked her out.
Work Cited
Hopper, Grace. Wikiquote, “Grace Hopper.” 13 Sep 2009. Web. 15 Oct 2012.
