“No, it’s not.” She picked up the stub of the joint with her fingernails and lit it again. She held it to my lips.
“Your turn.”
I pul ed hard on the joint, trying to take enough in for the both of us. When she put her mouth to mine for the shotgun, I was going to push the words
“Don’t cough,” she said. “Coughing wil get you too high.”
“I can’t help it,” I said, hacking until my throat burned and tears wet my face.
BY HALLOWEEN, MARCUS had started hanging out again but only late at night and without anyone else around. A temporary arrangement, he promised. Since he was working, he had more money in his pocket. Sometimes we went to the Varsity or J.R. Crickets and he paid for everything, leaving the waitress a big tip so we wouldn’t get carded. Ronalda and I spent time together in the afternoons, doing homework, smoking dope, and watching Cinemax. It wasn’t a bad way to live. At six o’clock, I would climb aboard the 66 Lynhurst, a little bit hungry and stil a little bit high. This was why I preferred smoking to drinking. Liquor made me emotional while weed put a little daylight between me and my problems. It wasn’t that I forgot my troubles, it’s just that they didn’t trouble me quite so much.
One afternoon, Ronalda had sent me on my way with a smal paper bag fil ed with peanuts and jel y beans. I looked forward to shutting myself in my room and eating them by the handful. When I arrived at our building, the Lincoln was out front. Not the new one with the electric windows, but the
’82 that Raleigh usual y drove. I wasn’t expecting my uncle on a Monday. He tended to drop by on Thursday afternoons, when James worked the line at the airport. On Thursdays, my mother fixed Raleigh a cold lunch before she pul ed out the double deck of cards with which they played Tonk. I don’t know if James was aware of these afternoon games, but they were never mentioned when I was around.
I used my key, trying to make myself seem sober, but I know I must have looked real y confused to find James and my mother seated on the couch. Above them grinned a montage of photos, al of me. I had never real y paid attention until Ronalda pointed them out, but now they seemed stupid, these pictures of me smiling the same way, every year of my life. I was older in each but nothing more. It was just my camera face, perfected by the time I started first grade.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Dana,” my mother said, “I need to talk to you.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let me go upstairs and wash up.”
James said, “You look clean enough to me.”
I licked my lips. I knew the fragrance of the marijuana had snaked itself into my clothes and hair. Even my upper lip seemed to radiate the odor.
“Okay,” I said, remaining by the door, trying not to get any closer. I wondered what I looked like. I knew from television that parents can diagnose their kids with drug use by looking at their pupils, so I kept my eyes to the carpet. The paper bag of jel y beans and peanuts rattled in my hand.
“What’s up?”
“Where have you been, Dana?” my mother asked.
James’s arms were crossed across the front of his uniform. When half a year had gone by after I’d dared my father to save me from Marcus, I’d been foolish enough to think that I had won something. Of course, six months is a long time on the calendar of a sixteen-year-old girl. For James, it was just enough time to col ect his thoughts and get his game together. His round face, squished under his hat and hidden behind his glasses, shone with satisfaction.
“I was out,” I said.
“You see, Gwen. This is what I was talking about.”
When I was a girl, I would have been thril ed to know they had been discussing me, but now, I was just annoyed. Who was he to act like he knew me? From his righteous posture, I knew he hadn’t told my mother about the time he’d let me leave the house half-naked at midnight, al because he’d been afraid to show his face. I would bet anything that he claimed to have found out through his connections, al the people he knows in such high places al over the city.
I moved toward the couch, wanting them now to smel me. I wedged myself into the thick of them. The couch was plenty big enough for three people, but neither of my parents moved as I forced myself in the space between them.
My mother sniffed my hair. “Have you been smoking grass?”
I laughed at her term,
“So now Marcus McCready has you using drugs?” my father said.
I giggled again, as Marcus stayed away from weed. It would violate his probation. The whole thing was funny, my parents sitting here waiting for me at six in the evening as though it were three o’clock in the morning, as if they were regular parents, as if I were an ordinary girl.
“Gwen,” James said, “if you can’t control her —”
“If she can’t control me, what?”
“She doesn’t need control ing,” my mother said. “She needs something else.”
“Legitimacy,” I said.
“You are legitimate,” my mother said.
“What’s in the paper sack?” James asked, reaching for it.
I clamped the bag down between my knees. “It’s not your business. It’s a present.”
