Adam Selzer by How to Get Suspended, Influence People Page B

it; I guess it was simply because she didn’t feel like reciting a loyalty oath to start her day. After a while, I stopped saying it myself. Not that I had anything against America; the country had my allegiance, but the more I thought about it, the more I didn’t want to pledge to be loyal forever. What if the government just decided that the whole Bill of Rights business was passé and Mrs. Smollet became the president? I don’t think they’d have my allegiance anymore.
    Pretty soon, everyone I knew in the gifted pool was standing there and just giving a little salute during the Pledge, though none of us meant anything malicious by it—except for Edie, of course. Whenever someone tried to drill us on why we weren’t saying the Pledge, she’d tell them how it was written by some socialist guy back in the eighteen hundreds. Why this didn’t make her
want
to say it remained unexplained.
    After the gifted-pool meeting, Anna just walked out of the room with me, and we started heading for her house, which was maybe a mile away. We got a bit stalled at the edge of the parking lot when Anna looked over at the school cop, whose job was to hang out at the edge of the parking lot, watching for any drug dealers who might be hanging around, and said, “Ooh! It’s a new cop!” She ran right over to the car and peered in at the guy. I followed, wondering what she was up to.
    “Hi!” said Anna. “Are you a good cop or a bad cop?”
    The guy neither smiled nor frowned; he was like one of those guards in England who aren’t allowed to react. “We’re all good cops,” he said, as if we would believe him.
    “Have you caught any troublemakers yet?” Anna asked.
    “Are you one?” He eyed her suspiciously.
    She nodded. “Most definitely.”
    The cop stared at her for a second from behind his sunglasses—and so did I. I had always been told in no uncertain terms to respect police officers. But then again, she wasn’t being disrespectful, she was just making conversation. Even when she said she was “most definitely” a troublemaker, he didn’t pull out the handcuffs or anything.
    “So,” she said. “If you could slap any celebrity, who would it be?”
    “We don’t slap people,” he said.
    “She means hypothetically,” I said. I wasn’t about to stand around idly while she bravely interviewed the cop. She’d think I was a wimp.
    “Well,” he said, “that’s a good question. Do I only get one slap?”
    “Yes,” I said, hoping that was right.
    “Hmmm…,” he said. “Do those lawyers who advertise on TV count as celebrities?”
    “Sure,” said Anna. “They’re on TV.”
    “Okay, then,” said the cop. “I’d slap Gordon Griffin.”
    “The personal injury lawyer?” asked Anna. Joe Griffin’s father. I smiled.
    “Yeah. He’s a jerk.”
    “Excellent choice,” said Anna. “Have you ever met him?”
    “Every cop in town has had to deal with him in court,” he said. “He’s an even bigger slimeball in person.”
    I couldn’t believe that the cop had just called another adult a slimeball in front of us. I mean, was he allowed to do that?
    “My dad says that he wouldn’t hire that guy to stick his head down our toilet, because he doesn’t want anything that gross going down there,” Anna said, and I had to cover my hand with my mouth—which did not look cool—to keep from laughing so hard as to attract attention.
    The cop chuckled a bit, too. “Your dad’s a smart man,” he said.
    “His son is a jerk, too,” I said. “He’s always saying that God disagrees with everyone he disagrees with.” I hoped Joe wasn’t close enough to be within earshot.
    “I know the type,” said the cop, who was starting to go back to looking around the campus to see if anyone was causing trouble, which, after all, was his job. “Do you guys have someplace you need to be?”
    “Yes,” Anna said. “We need to go buy some lighters.” This was just rubbing his nose in it; he couldn’t arrest us for