Prince of Pot

by Tanya Lloyd Kyi

  Then there’s me. I’m the one with the choice. When I leave school and dedicate my life to the tender propagation of high-yield marijuana, my parents will not only understand, but applaud. They’ll praise my dedication and loyalty. I’ll be following in the family footsteps.

  I could ditch class forever, if I wanted to.

  But on Tuesday morning I get up while it’s still dark outside, I wash in freezing water, I push past the bears crowded around my front door, and I hike through the morning’s spiderwebs (webs that always seem to be built exactly at the level of my face). Then I drive to this pasty place, where everything’s painted beige and no one knows me.

  I do this…why? To flirt with an untrustworthy girl? To pretend I’m a friend of the guy whose locker is beside mine, when I know barely anything about him? There is no possible reason, except that I have art today and I feel as if nothing will be right again until I’m holding a paintbrush. So I walk through the hallway as if it’s my own personal endurance test. When someone’s shoulder bumps mine, I take a deep breath and keep moving. When a ham sandwich arcs overhead and splats onto the floor to cheers from a group of ninth-grade boys, I sidestep the mustard. I keep my head down until I reach my locker.

  My pink and purple locker.

  The word SORRY is scrawled across the metal in some sort of waxy substance. It’s written in big pink letters in the middle, then repeated in miniature purple versions all around the edges.

  I touch a glob with one finger.

  Lipstick.

  As my face flushes its own cosmetic shades, I stomp to the bathroom and grab a handful of paper towel. When I get back, a few people are giggling.

  Lucas arrives. “Whoa,” he says. “It’s like Valentine’s Day puked on you.”

  I ignore him, swabbing at the first letters. The lipstick smears into an oily mess, and soon there’s a softball-sized lump of paper in my hand and still a pink-and-purple film on the metal.

  Lucas finishes organizing his stuff and shuts his locker so he can lean against it.

  “Shouldn’t this be a good thing?” he asks.

  I pause to stare at him. “How can it be a good thing?”

  I walked away from Sam in the courtyard because she was too loud and just plain too much. She thought vandalizing my locker would help?

  Lucas doesn’t answer, so I wave my purple paper wad at him.

  “Why would she do this?”

  “A girl who writes apologies in lipstick…I think someone looooves you.”

  “This is supposed to be a mating ritual?”

  I scrub away the final smear, chuck the paper at the garbage can near the classroom door, then open my locker to dig out my books for first period.

  A construction-paper heart has been stuffed through my locker vent. It flutters toward me.

  The bell rings. I slam my locker door and follow Lucas into homeroom, my binder in one hand and the heart in the other. I’m convinced that every single person in here is smirking at me. Even the teacher.

  As I slide into the desk beside Lucas, I can feel him silently laughing. I know that he’s laughing at my reaction more than he’s laughing at the lipstick. To him, a smeared message on a locker is probably no big deal. But Lucas doesn’t understand how ingrained my invisibility is.

  Sam definitely doesn’t understand. I’m in school on the condition that I don’t attract attention. That no one stops to wonder who I really am, or why my parents never turn up for parent-teacher night, or why I wear the same three shirts in rotation, probably with a whiff of pot attached.

  What if everyone starts asking questions, beginning with my purple locker and ending with my pot sales and pet bear?

  The PA speaker crackles to life as I finally manage to get my heart rate back to normal.

  “Wait!” Lucas’s whisper stops me as I’m crumpling the heart. “There’s a note.”

  I smooth the paper and look down at the round curvy letters.

  It’s the worst poem ever.

  Oh, the girl from the town was so sad

  When the boy from the forest was mad

  That she promised she would

  From then on be good…

  Lucas reaches over to snatch it from my hand.

  “Hey!”

  I grab for it, but he extends his arm to the other side, holding it out of my reach. It doesn’t matter, though. I can read the last line.

  Except if he wanted her bad.

  “Something to share, Lucas?” Ms. Aloni’s voice is too sharp and crackly to be real. It’s like an actor’s impersonation of a teacher’s voice.

  Lucas, thank God, crumples the heart in his hand.

  “Nothing.”

  She hovers over him, lips pinched even more tightly than usual. I can see she’s deciding whether to force him to hand over the paper.

  “Ms. Aloni, I’m going to throw up.” Convenient, but true.

  As she turns toward me, Lucus stuffs the heart in his pocket.

  “I suggest you excuse yourself,” she says.

  I practically sprint from the room.

  By the time I reach the darkened art room on the other side of the school, I’m breathing hard. I barge inside and sink down against the wall, sucking in the dusty sweetness of varnish and tempera paints.

  I struggle to “get a grip,” as Judith would say.

  Lucas is right. It’s stupid to be upset about lipstick and a poem.

  But I didn’t sleep last night. Instead, I thought about Sam’s lips. Her voice. The way opinions seem to spill from her. The way she doesn’t seem to care who’s watching or listening. The way she looked at the huckleberry blossom.

  Sam, Sam and Sam.

  I live in a forest. You’d think there would have been things before now that I wanted but couldn’t have. Lego, or video games, or store-bought cookies. But I don’t remember wanting anything, ever, like I want Sam.

  Except if he wanted her bad.

  What the hell?

  This was her attempt at apology, lipsticking my locker and writing that poem. Which proves that she doesn’t know anything about me. We’re two different kinds of people, and our lives are completely incompatible.

  That smile, as if everything goes her way, always…

  She’s taken over my brain.

  The door beside me swings open, and the lights flick on. I pull in my legs so Mr. Pires doesn’t trip over me, but he stumbles anyway.

  “You scared the hell out of me, Isaac,” he says, shaking his head. “What are you doing in here?”

  What am I doing in here?

  “Hiding.”

  He grunts. Then he moves around me, setting up his classroom. Once the bell rings, noise swells in the hallway. Lockers open and slam.

  As Mr. Pires spreads papers and black pastels on the tables, I remember the project from my own eighth-grade class. You draw a scene in pastels, then dip the paper in a color wash. It’s the advanced equivalent of crayons and watercolors from kindergarten.

  “What class do you have first?” he asks me.

  “Lit.”

  He grabs one of his arriving students and sends him running upstairs with a note for the lit teacher. Then he drags an easel into one corner and chucks a paintbrush at me.

  I fumble it, surprised.

  “The art room’s not for hiding,” he says. “Start painting.”

  So that’s what I do. To the eighth graders, I must be an extra piece of art-room furniture. They ignore me, and I ignore them. I’m in my own world, painting a post-forest-fire scene of black on black. Black clouds. Black ground. Blackened stumps and twisted wood. Then one half-hidden bloom of fireweed. Color to relieve the eye.

  When I finally stand back to look at the canvas, I realize the flower’s the same shade as Sam’s lipstick.

  Around me, kids are
cleaning up their stations and getting ready for the next bell.

  Mr. Pires stops beside me and tilts his head.

  “Interesting,” he says finally. “The magenta’s a little much.”

  It is a little much. But without it, there’s only the black and the gray.

  “You planning to join your regular classes?” he asks.

  I nod. “I’ll fix this later,” I say.

  As soon as I figure out the answer.

  •

  I make it through the whole day with no further incidents. Maybe it’s because I eat alone in my truck, or maybe Lucas has warned her. Sam doesn’t turn up for our lunch date. I barely talk to anyone until the final bell rings. Then I push open the doors to the parking lot and find Judith leaning against my passenger side, a backpack at her feet.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Got the evening off,” she says. “Thought I’d hitch a ride home with you. Stay the night.”

  She says this casually, as if it happens often. Really, Judith’s only been home twice since she left last year. This is a gift. Not so much for me, because I get to see her during the week. But for Mom and Dad, her visits are like appearances of the prodigal.

  “You’re going to brave the bears?”

  Judith always says it’s the bears that keep her away. And it’s true, she’s never loved them. Not even Hazel.

  “The bears can mind their own business,” she says, swinging herself into the truck. She’s wearing tight black jeans and a top that’s cut short to show her flat belly. Long silver earrings glint against her dark hair. She’s about as prepared for a hike as Sam was, and my sister should know better. She should know what Dad’s going to say about that shirt, too.

  “You bring a sweater?”

  She rolls her eyes. She’s already rolled down the window and draped an arm over the edge. As we pull from the parking lot, a low wolf whistle follows us. I’m pretty sure it’s not for my wheels.

  “What about that guy I met at your place? Garrett. Won’t he be missing you tonight?”

  “He’ll survive,” Judith says. She reaches to flick the radio on and cranks the volume.

  To be honest, I’m happy to drive her away from that guy. My sister’s a smart girl. She got straight As in twelfth-grade calculus and chemistry. She can do numbers in her head that I can’t do on paper. But she’s not quite so smart in the life department.

  Not that I have any right to judge, these days.

  We pass the old grain elevators along the railway tracks at the west edge of town. The road loops past an industrial area and a few trailer parks before it reaches a patchwork of small farms. Horses stand grazing in one. Sheep in another. Then the farmland turns to marsh, and finally the south shore of the lake appears. My sister has fallen asleep beside me, her head lolling against her shoulder, mouth slightly open, one hand curled against her cheek like a little kid’s.

  I turn off the music and let the sound of the wind push against my ears. Let it clear out my brain.

  Slowly, the highway begins to twist, blasted cliffs rising on our right and dropping sheer to the water on our left. The narrow road is like a gateway between town life and mountain. Here and there, bridges span creeks. White water foams below. Eventually, the cliff edges begin to smooth and a few scattered driveways appear. Lakeside bays or cliffside retreats. Salmo. Balfour. Kuskanook. At each driveway, a different sign. The Appleton Place, with cheery red and green apples along the edges of the board. The Rolley Retreat, on a sign made entirely of driftwood. Eagle’s Aerie, words in a painted nest.

  We swing past the campground and reach the overgrown entrance to the old logging road. There’s no welcoming signpost here, only a yellow forestry gate to keep out visitors. Through some magic (if pot sales can be considered magical), my dad has keys to this.

  I hop out of my truck, free the padlock and swing open the metal arm. When I climb back in, Judith’s awake and pulling a sweatshirt from her pack.

  It takes me only a moment to relock the gate once we’re through. Then it’s a short drive to where we stash the truck in the brush at the side of the road. Here we switch to the ATV.

  “You want to drive?”

  “Absolutely not,” Judith says.

  So I gun it a little up the trail to make her squeal and beat her fist against my shoulder. Which makes me laugh and repeat.

  “Why does this trip get longer every time I come?” Judith grumbles when we ditch the four-wheeler and start hiking.

  “Maybe because you’re getting old?”

  She swats at me.

  Once we’re in the trees, my lungs expand. I suppose most people relax when they open their front door and smell dinner cooking. For me, it’s as I step into these hemlocks.

  “Smells like home,” I say. The air is thicker here, and richer, and every problem of the outside world seems a little farther away.

  “Smells like trouble,” Judith says.

  I stop. She’s below me on the trail, panting.

  “You don’t have to come,” I say. It’s true that Mom and Dad treat her like the prodigal daughter but it’s also true that we all walk a tightrope when she’s around.

  “Don’t get your panties in a knot,” she says. “It’ll be fine.”

  I take a deep breath, running a hand through my hair.

  “What’s with you, anyway?” she says.

  When I don’t answer, she takes a few giant steps to catch up to me and reaches to knead my shoulders a few times.

  “You know what it means when you dream of a tepee and a wigwam?” This is classic Judith.

  “What?”

  “You’re two tents.”

  When I smile instead of laugh, she says, “Two tents! Get it?”

  “I get it.” And now I’m laughing.

  “Tell your big sis,” she says once we’re hiking again. “Spill it.”

  She’s going to make a great psychiatrist one day.

  I tell her. Since she already knows about Sam, it doesn’t take long to explain. The locker. The poem. The smile and opinions and earlobes.

  “You think you’re the first person this has happened to? You can’t hide in the woods forever, bro. And you’ve hit the transition — one foot here, one foot in the real world. It’s only going to get harder until you leave.”

  Except that I’m not leaving.

  Everyone assumes I’ll do what they’ve done. Dad assumes I’ll work on the grow. Judith assumes I’ll leave. Mr. Pires assumes I’ll go to art school. Sam assumes…well, who knows what that girl thinks?

  But there’s no way I would leave these woods for a bartending job, or psychology classes, or hot dates. Not even if those dates were with Sam.

  I’m repeating this to myself so firmly and so many times that I don’t immediately notice the noise. Not until Judith’s feet stop moving.

  At her low hiss, I lift my head, and that’s when I hear it.

  The faraway purr of rotors.

  Though I keep my feet moving, my mind shifts entirely to sound-tracking. The noise grows slowly louder, until I can distinguish the individual thump-thump of helicopter blades.

  They’ll have heard it at home by now. If Dad’s working outside, he’ll make sure he’s sheltered by the trees. He’ll stay still. Mom will adjust the camouflage netting over the vegetable garden. Inside the house, Walt will simply stop and listen, the same way I’m doing.

  There’s nothing else to be done. Our clearing looks the same as a dozen others on this mountain, surrounded by trees and carpeted in ferns. We leave nothing brightly colored outside. The cabin is shadowed by evergreens and half-covered by moss. It should be invisible from the air.

  Thump-thump-thump.

  Part of me sees the mountainside the way the helicopter pilot must see it, like a green fleece blanket flicked over granite. De
ep cuts in the trees here and there, carved by creeks. Maybe a bear in the clearing, slowly picking his way between meals.

  Thump-thump-thump.

  As it passes overhead, Judith and I tuck ourselves against tree trunks. I crane my neck to see the colors on the side of the chopper. It’s yellow and green with a bubbled front and a flat finned body, like a bottom-feeding fish that’s taken to the sky.

  An air crane.

  They don’t use them much up here, but the logging companies bring one in every once in a while. Nothing to worry about, usually, though any pilot who sees something unusual is capable of calling in a tip to the local police detachment.

  Once the chopper passes, I blow out a long breath.

  “I told you. This trip gets longer every time,” Judith says.

  I don’t bother answering, and we’re silent the rest of the way. Silent as we approach the clearing.

  Maybe that’s why it happens.

  5

  I hear the metallic click-click as he cocks his rifle. Diving sideways, I take Judith down with me. We land on the ground with a wallop. I feel the breath whoosh from her lungs as she flattens beneath me. My shoulder hits a root and scrapes along it.

  A round cracks past.

  “Walt, it’s me! It’s Isaac.”

  Another shot, echoing off the trees.

  Crazy-ass delusional granddad shoots the pants off his grandkids. That’ll make good headlines.

  One more shot. This time bark splinters above me.

  “Walt! Dad!” I holler.

  Judith is half-buried in the leaves, arms wrapped around her skull.

  “Pop! Put it down!”

  It’s my dad’s voice, finally, and the tension flows from me as I hear him crashing toward the cabin. “It’s just Isaac.”

  It’s not just Isaac, though. It’s Judith, too, slowly unwrapping her arms and turning over, her body dotted with moss and bits of rotten wood.

  “What the hell?” she breathes. At least she’s breathing.

  “Welcome home, sis.”

  That’s all I can think to say. I flex my shoulder back and forth, making sure it’s not permanently damaged. Judith sits up and does her own inventory.