Alicia, a 17-year-old high school senior with a chip on her shoulder, didn't have time for silly questions, especially from a stranger asking about kids jumping turnstiles.
It was last Thursday afternoon, and the first day of school was over. She was heading home from the heart of Park Slope, Brooklyn, an oasis of boutiques, cutesy ice cream parlors and meticulously restored brownstones.
Her home is in a less glossy neighborhood of corner bodegas, storefront livery car bases and litter-strewn empty lots.
Alicia is among some 500,000 students who get a free student MetroCard from school, but she still hops the turnstile when she can get away with it, she admitted, as she stepped onto an F train at Seventh Ave. and Ninth St.
"To save the fare," she said with disdain for having to explain the obvious. Student MetroCards are programmed with three fares - or three trips - each weekday.
Theoretically, that allows one trip to school, one to an after-school activity and one final trip back home. Still, the amount of fare-beating jumps between 3p.m. and 4 p.m., when dismissal bells ring across the city - and students are to blame, MTA analysts have found.
Alicia gave the delinquents' rationale. There's more to life than school and three trips a day often are not enough. You might want to go downtown - as in downtown Brooklyn. Or go see a friend. Maybe a movie.
Each time you enter the subway without using your student MetroCard, you save one extra ride to take legally, and safely, later that day - especially if a cop happens to be near the entrance.
Not that Alicia worries about getting caught.
"Why would I? I know when to hop and where to hop. I know where the police are going to be and when they're going to be there."
And if she is caught, she's not concerned her parents would give her hell.
"Why would they? It's on me. What happens to me, happens to me. If I get a fine, it's coming out of my pocket."
She dismissed a suggestion she pay for her non-school travel.
"The cops, the MTA, they're all going to get paid whether I pay or not, whether I hop or don't hop. I could put the money I save aside into a college fund or something."
Sure, she'd like to go to college, she said, not sounding terribly optimistic or eager at the prospect: "I don't have a job. I need one."
She'll graduate on time, even though her grades have been erratic.
"Flip-floppy," she said. "Like a roller-coaster, up and down."
Farebeating, of course, does have consequences and victims. It takes away dollars that otherwise could be used to prevent worker layoffs, set more affordable fares or provide cleaner stations.
To think otherwise is just flip-floppy.
Alicia and her friends got off at a station with brick parapets covered in gang graffiti.
A young man with glassy eyes and a red baseball cap sat on the stairwell leading to the sidewalk. He looked like he, too, was once on a roller-coaster ride, a flip-floppy roller-coaster ride, and got stuck at the bottom.
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