Dead Woods by Maria C Poets

that.”
    She shrugged. “I didn’t feel like it.”
    “Oh,” Max said.
    Lina took a long sip of beer. She sometimes found Max almost eerie, the way he somehow seemed to know what she thought. He didn’t have to say much. It was the way he pronounced oh and looked at Lina that made it seem like more than just one little word. She was quiet for a long time. Max finally broke the silence when he asked, “What made you join the police?”
    She had to laugh. When she lifted the beer bottle, she saw that it was empty and ordered another one. After the young woman with the dazzling smile placed a bottle in front of her, Lina grinned and said, “I lost a bet.”
    Max thought he must not have heard her right, which didn’t happen often. “Excuse me?”
    “Yep. I became a cop on a bet.”
    “You’re kidding me.”
    Lina shook her head and took another sip of beer. “I know, no one ever freaking buys it, but it’s true.” And she told Max about that evening eight, almost nine, years ago. It was after her kickboxing class. She’d gone to a bar with some others from her group. “We were all in our twenties,” Lina explained. “A few of us were unemployed, a few studied at the university without much enthusiasm, some had jobs, and one was doing an apprenticeship as a printer. I’d been enrolled at the university the past two years—ethnology—but I had expected more and was bored. The lectures only cursorily covered questions about how people in different cultures deal with life, how they shape it, even though it should have been the very core of the field. Or maybe I always chose the wrong seminars.”
    That evening at the bar, the discussion had turned to occupations and career prospects. Someone mentioned that the job security offered to civil servants was totally cool, eliciting a “yuck” from someone else, and others chimed in with descriptions of civil servants, leaving out not a single stereotype: lazy, slow, stuffy, reactionary, without imagination, and dead set against any change. And cops—they were the worst. “Actually, I’d really like to find out whether that’s true,” Lina had thought out loud. “I mean, I only know cops from demonstrations and traffic stops. Hard to believe they’re all idiots.”
    “Why don’t you try it out?” one of the gang, Lutz, had said. “Then you’ll know.”
    “Hm, not a bad idea.”
    All the others had laughed their heads off. Lina, a cop? Lina who had been at demonstrations with her mother ever since she was a toddler and who got sick at the mere sight of someone in uniform? “You wouldn’t dare,” Lutz had said.
    “Just watch me,” she replied.
    “Never.”
    “I’ll do it.”
    That was that. She couldn’t back down. They decided that she would apply for police training and, if accepted, stay with it for four weeks. She had to swear she wouldn’t intentionally flunk the entrance exam. If she lasted the four weeks, her friends around the table would throw a super party for her. If she gave up before the four weeks were over, she’d have to clean the toilet at the dojo for a month.
    “In the beginning, I didn’t take the whole thing seriously,” Lina explained to Max. “I mean, I never thought they’d take me. My mother used to occupy empty houses—she was a squatter. She’s still active. You know, St. Pauli, the coalition against gentrification, and so on. But despite all that, I passed the test for the criminal division.” With a wry smile, she added, “I’m a little too small for the uniformed police, but in Major Crimes even a little person has a chance. So I started the training.”
    “And when your four weeks were over?” Max asked and ordered another orange juice and another beer.
    “We had a huge party. My buddies rented an entire bar. Everyone knew about me, my new name was Miss Piggy, and they laughed their heads off that we, of all people, had managed to place a mole with the cops.”
    Max tilted his head, as he always did