The Cake is a Lie (8 page)

One P.E. class, Jae and I had been
awkwardly standing next to each other, waiting to run wind sprints
across the gym, when for the lack of something better to say, I’d
said, “Yo Jae, how’s Kelly?”

“
She’s selling weed now,”
He’d replied off handedly.

“
Ohh yaa, I heard about
that.” I’d lied, super believably.

I was in. I’d began hatching a master
plan to use Jae’s belief that I was cool to my advantage. Phase one
was getting his Instant Messenger username. After a few educated
inquires I’d got it through a mutual girlfriend, I wrote it down
hastily on one of my binder covers: DeezBfosho4u.

Staring at the message for the
hundredth time, I finally went for it and pressed send before
nervously closing my eyes to wait for the Xylophone returned
message sound effect. A few minutes passed.

“
DOdo
do.”
I waited thirty seconds more,
afraid to open my eyes.

“
Noooo screw that,” Jae had
responded. Jae had a way of scoffing as if something was unbearably
retarded, I imagined it through the screen as I read all the
“ooo’s.” Uh oh.

My prior attempt to buy weed had gone
terribly. I’d just walked up to DMF when he was standing alone in
the hall and said, “Hey we should get high sometime.” It was one of
my worst ideas ever. He’d just said, “Uhhhh,” And then started
laughing, as if he was so caught off guard he really didn’t know
what to say. The worst part was the way he looked at me, he
honestly didn’t even know I existed. He’d probably written the
whole incident out of his mind in a second, dismissing it as some
weird, unexplainable occurrence.

I wallowed in despair in front of my
computer.

“
DOdo
do.”

“
I got a way better
connection bro,” Jae wrote. “Go through me bro, my sisters way
skimpy, trust me, my guy’s got the fattest sacks.”

“
Oh ok,” I typed excitedly,
not knowing what “skimpy” or “fattest sacks” meant.

“
So how much do you want?”
He wrote back instantaneously. I’d clearly stumbled onto Jae’s
favorite topic of conversation.

“
How much do you sell?” I
tried. I hadn’t thought this far ahead. I was shooting blind at
this point. On the other side of the screen, Jae grinned
smugly.

He made a big profit, but on
a smoggy Friday morning, Jae sold weed to a naive, innocent
7
^th
grader who had no business buying weed. We met like two secret
agents on the outskirts of Einstein, he reached out his fist and
dropped the baggy into my waiting hand. Then we went our separate
ways. I immediately shoved the baggy into my underwear. My pulse
beat harder with every step I took deeper into campus. All I wanted
to do was go to the bathroom and look at the weed, but I was too
scared. I went through class looking at the door every two seconds,
certain the vice principle was going show up and call my name. I
didn’t get to savor the satisfaction of having weed in my underwear
while reading out loud in honors English, and solving equations on
the big board in math class. It was even worse during the car ride
with my mom and step dad over to Duncan’s house that night,
constantly aware that life would not go on if they smelled the
odor.

It was all worth it. I walked into
Duncan’s basement, threw the baggy on his coffee table and sat down
next to him like nothing happened. Duncan was speechless, trying to
piece together what was happening.

“
Is that weed, Marco?” He
calmly inquired after a moment.

“
Maybe,” I replied
mysteriously. The baggy sat alone for five minutes while we tried
to out chill each other. When he finally picked it up to
investigate, my own urges became too much and I began trying to
grab it from him. I had to feel it again. We fought over holding
it, touching the sticky texture, smelling the bizarre aroma. The
weed was just one solid, really hard green thing. Not fluffy and
spread out in small bits like I’d always imagined. Jae had called
what he sold me a “nug.” He’d kept going on and on about how big of
a nug it was, how he was the best hook up ever. My favorite part
had been how tightly and crisply rolled up the bag had been before
I opened it.

I kept unsuccessfully rolling the baggy
as tightly as I could to try and duplicate the way Jae had
originally wrapped it.

Duncan told me his big weed story again
even though I’d heard it a dozen times.

In 4
^th
grade his mom and her friends
let him puff on a pipe they were passing around. It was a stupid
story because it had a terrible ending–Duncan couldn’t even say for
sure if he’d gotten high or not. I’d demand he think harder and
remember, but he just couldn’t say.

Soon I’d have my own weed story to brag
about. We had to roll it up though, I knew that was what you had to
do. Like cigarettes. Plus, one of our friends from the neighborhood
went through a phase where he’d meticulously pick out a variety of
colorful plants from his garden to roll up in newspaper and smoke.
We’d laugh and make fun of him, then we’d puff on one with him. It
was always quite a debate whether anyone was actually getting high
or not.

I instructed Duncan to get me some
newspaper and some tape. I pulled apart the nug into smaller chunks
and lined them up on the paper. I roll it all up the best I could
and used a small piece of scotch tape to keep it together. Then I
put the concoction in my mouth and pretended to smoke it over and
over while we waited for his Dad to go to bed.

I could hear his dad’s dateline murder
mystery through the living room floor boards above. “The sleepy
little town had no idea there was a monster on the prowl.” With
every creak and cough from above I looked up alertly in the hopes
of picking up some signal that he was finally going to
bed.

I ran through my head whether this was
the right thing to do. As much nervous and scared as excited. I
reweighed the risks over and over. Everyone knew pot was the
training wheels of all drugs, if you were going to do one, might as
well be the absolute safest. I mean, I’d never do cocaine. I
wouldn’t bike down dead-man’s hill, but pot had never killed anyone
in the history of the world.

I thought about all my idols that
smoked pot: Jonsen, Janae, Mia, Pacey, Loren. If they all ended up
drug addicts or dead what would be the point of living anyways? I
thought about Bob Marley, my dad’s favorite musician. Bob Marley
smoked weed his entire life. In fact, Rastafarians believed smoking
pot was the key to happiness. I’d read that the Rastafarians lost
all sense of time after a while. How liberating. My dad had never
touched a drug in his life. My nervous, anxious dad who ruined our
family. My dad who sets all his clocks ten minutes ahead so he was
never late. I thought deeply about it, but I’d made my decision
long ago.

When Duncan’s dad finally went to sleep
we walked up to his kitchen then into his backyard. Arrogantly, we
didn’t open the creaky back door that quietly, or walk that softly
when went outside. It was understood that once Duncan’s dad went to
sleep, he slept like a rock, because of the drinking.

The winter air was freezing, we
shivered as we walk to the back of the yard, by the big back fence.
I lit a match and put it to one end. Once the newspaper caught on
fire the whole thing kind of burst into a big flame. In a frenzy, I
put my lips to the one end and sucked as quickly as
possible.

Freeze.

I felt a feeling in my throat I’d never
felt before. I felt a suffocating pressure, like a quarter was
being jammed down my esophagus. Then it itched, it itched so bad I
wanted to claw my tongue out. I threw the joint to the ground and
managed to stomp on it three or four times before beginning to
cough uncontrollably. Duncan started cracking up laughing. Then he
got scared my coughing and his laughing was going to wake up his
dad so he prodded me back inside. The whole way I was still
coughing and he was still laughing. This is the worst feeling ever,
I thought, this is the worst idea ever. It was one of those awful
experiences that makes you not want to ever do something
again.

Duncan wanted to know if I was high, I
told him I didn’t know, I didn’t think so. While I was downing
glasses of water on the couch the discomfort and fear started to
lift.

He didn’t think so either.

Duncan imitated the face I made when I
inhaled, eyes closed as tight as possible with a big frown like a
dying person. I laughed really hard.

Duncan continued to imitate me, “Hey
Duncan, wanna try some of this joint? ‘Sure Marco I’d like to
try,’” he reached the invisible joint out tauntingly before
throwing it to the ground and stomping it out. I was laughing
ferociously. Duncan thought it was odd I was so giggly. He
pretended to be really upset that I was laughing so much, he
theatrically kept demanding that I stop this instant, which made me
laugh more.

“
Stop laughing Marco, just
stop it right now.” He finally concluded I was either high or just
really goofy. I agreed. High or not, I laughed as hard as I’ve ever
laughed that night.

Brandon’s crew’s favorite spot to hang
out was at Brian’s house. His family owned a three story mansion
right by Einstein. They had the most comfy sofa sectional I’d ever
sprawled out on. We’d all just dive onto it and collapse after
school. He had a freezer full of all the otterpops and Costco
microwave snacks you could eat. He even had a
trampoline.

After school our clique arrived at
Brian’s to find three girls sitting on his trampoline. We pretended
not to notice them and headed inside but one yelled to us, “Your
mom said we could use your trampoline, Brian.”

Brandon told me that was Abbie Till,
Brian’s next door neighbor. He told me Abbie was our age and went
to a private school. I was intrigued. Private school girls had a
way of just looking straight through you, it was
irresistible.

“
Hey boys.” A flirtatious
raspy voice called out to us as we were halfway through the screen
door. This caused all three girls to break out in laughter and
forced me to do an immediate double take. Very few girls had the
confidence to say something so forward, this was rare. Not to be
out flirted by a girl, slowly our group migrated over to the edge
of the trampoline.

Abbie was tall and blond, borderline
cute. Her mouth was a metal concoction of braces and rubber bands.
Her friend Nora was beautiful, the perfect amount of beautiful,
meaning I actually believed I could possibly woo her. Her face was
like a cherubic angel, rounded cutely in all the right
places.

Who gives a crap about faces, I
thought, her boobies are as swollen as a grown women. I puffed up
and beamed with pride every time I thought about my brand new
appreciation of boobs, I’d dreaded for so long it would never
happen to me.

Abbie’s other friend was Oakley, she
was the skando who’d enticingly called to us. She was skinny with
bobbed black hair, flat chested.

I felt so bad for flat
chested girls. I’d always think about overhearing a super popular
8
^th
grader, Hilary Thompson, nastily say about another girl,
“She’s on the itty, bitty titty committee.” Oakley’s face was
pretty though, her tiny mouth, thin nose and small sharp dimples
all bunched together cutely underneath her big, sharp dark eyes and
broad forehead. She had olive skin just like me. But the deal
breaker was the dark werewolf hairs twirling around her arms and
upper lip. A black forest connected her eyebrows. She was the
hairiest girl I’d ever seen. It was all yuck with a side of
gross.

We all talked by the trampoline. We
asked them where they lived, who they knew. (This was back before
plain getting to know you questions didn’t bore girls to death like
the plague).

Oakley excitedly answered for all three
of them. She’s such a chatty Cathy, I observed, it’s borderline
obnoxious.

I wasn’t even paying attention to what
she was babbling on about, I was focused on Nora, Nora who didn’t
utter a sound. It made me want her even more, she was so
mysterious. She must be thinking about how boring we are, I
wondered. I’d instantly fallen in love with her, I wanted to marry
her.

Us guys decided to play a two hand
touch football game in the field coincidently right next to the
trampoline. All of us played our hardest, like knights jousting for
Nora’s colors. We all loved Nora.

Nora never came back to Abbie’s house
after that. No matter how many times I prayed and prayed for months
afterwards. Every time we went to Brian’s house my hopes would
skyrocket, just to inevitably crash.

Oakley was at Abbie’s a lot though.
When we spent the night at Brian’s we’d talk to Abbie and Oakley on
the phone for hours. Sweet nothings. Someone would pass the phone
to me while I was playing video games and I’d half attentively say
“Hey, so what are you doing?”

“
Nothing, sitting on the
couch watching T.V., what are you doing?” Oakley’s voice would come
through the other line.

Oakley talked as if her voice was girly
and high pitched, and half of it was, but the other half had
something scratchy to it, like a kinky princess.