He was addictive in other ways too. He brought me some of the best weed I’d ever tried, better than the shit Toby’s family sold. We toked up that beautiful Thursday right after school let out. He brought a glass pipe decorated with peace signs and the most amazing stuff I’d ever inhaled.
Things were going beautifully when Jess’s voice broke through my stoned half-consciousness.
“Jack? What the fuck are you doing?”
She stood there, arms folded, scowling at us like she was part of the security team. Bad students, no smoking on school grounds.
Connor leaned back in the grass and started laughing hysterically. We both had the hoods of our sweatshirts pulled so tightly over our heads you could barely see our faces. I walked over cautiously, looking around for security. Half of me didn’t give a shit. It was such a great afternoon, the blue sky, the THC swimming through my blood, Connor’s elbow so close to mine it gave me goosebumps.
“You guys want to get kicked out of school?” she hissed.
“That’s why we’re in disguise,” Connor whispered, pulling the drawstrings tighter until I could barely see him.
“Hey, Jess!” I said, waving the pipe around. I wanted her to let loose and relax, crawl inside the moment with me. “You gotta try this shit. I swear, you will not—hey!”
She snatched it out of my hand before I could finish another sentence. “Are you serious? Go home and smoke this, dummy. Why are you sitting out here in the middle of the courtyard smoking up in broad daylight?”
I was too stoned to form a coherent response, so I grabbed it out of her hands and sat back down on the soft grass. I took a long hit. “It’s cool, Jess. Everything’s cool. The grass is green and the sky is blue.”
“Jack, please, I’m serious. Can you just walk me home?” She rubbed her bare arms like she was cold and it wasn’t so hot I was baking to a crisp inside my sweatshirt.
“Seriously, dude,” Connor said, nudging him in the shoulder. “She’s serious, man. Like, seriously.” Then we were both cracking up all over again, two ridiculous cartoon character boys.
“It’s not funny, Jack!” I heard the desperation in her voice, but somehow felt so far from it. “Can you just come over here for a second?”
“Yeah, yeah, give me a minute,” I said. The pipe was full of sweet stuff. Just one more hit…
“Jesus, forget it! You’re high as a blimp.” She turned and started to walk away. “I’ll leave you to your new best friend.”
“Jess, wait! I didn’t mean it!”
“You are such an asshole, man,” I heard Connor say, and again, in spite of the fact that I had just been a massive jerk to my best friend in the whole world, we broke into laughter. I watched her leave, arms folded tight across her body, head down, and felt a pang of sudden guilt, like the feeling I got as a kid when I’d snatched these balloons from a little girl on the playground and let them float away into the air, higher and higher, both of us faced with the sudden realization that they were gone forever and all we could do was watch them leave.
19.
“Did you know that a whale ejaculates like 100,000 gallons of sperm a day?” Max asked us.
Toby laughed so hard you could see the yellowed molars in the back of his mouth. I stubbed my cigarette out in the grass.
“Gross,” I said. It was lunch period and we were sitting in the green, far enough away from the courtyard they wouldn’t see us covertly smoking some nice hash Toby had scored for us that morning.
“And get this,” Max continued, flipping through his phone. “Ducks have like, the largest penis in the world. They’re like fucking explosive springs. Look at this, man.”
Toby grabbed his phone from him. “Jack, look at this, look! It’s like a fucking rape pole!”
I moved my head away. “I don’t want to see that.”
“Speaking of which,” Toby said. “We should go fishing tonight.”
Max’s eyes lit up. “Yes! At Skye’s thing!”
Toby groaned in appreciation at the mention of Skye. Gross. “Forget the fishing. We’ll go just to see what slutty ensemble Skye picks out tonight.”
“I don’t know if I feel like it,” I said.
He gave me a look. “You never fucking feel like it.”
“Jack, are you kidding? It’ll be dope,” Max said. “We haven’t gone to a legit house party in forever.”
I scoffed. “Forever” was barely more than a month to these losers. I looked longingly across the green out to the courtyard, wondering where Connor was. Lately I’d been feeling less and less connected to my boys, like they had shrunk into tiny gnats that wouldn’t stop biting at my skin.
And as for “fishing,” well, that was Toby’s favorite evening activity, a game that involved picking up girls. It had its own set of rules, and like the sport, they weren’t always so nice. The idea was to nab the ugliest girl there, the so-called “fish,” and then compare them all at the end of the night after they were all too high or drunk—or both—to notice.
It was Friday and expected that it’d be really warm tonight, so plenty of girls would be wearing tight, tiny outfits to Skye’s party. Toby and Max were still talking about the beached whales they’d find there when I stood up.
“Where you going?” Max asked.
“I’ll be back.”
I knew Toby was watching me as I walked over to the courtyard, closer to the shade.
I checked for security and lit a cigarette. From my spot beneath a beech tree, I could see all of the kids sitting and eating on the grass, laughing, talking, probably joking about the latest thing they saw or did online, some shit like that. I saw the nerdy kids huddled around in a circle playing that Magic card game—playing with intensity, the kinds of kids that Toby would
