by Amy Sparling
He leans back, taking himself out of my personal space and drinks the last of his soda in one gulp. “When he asked me to look after you, I thought it’d be hard to find you in this crowd.” He rears back and tosses the empty can toward a trash can about thirty feet away. To my surprise, it ricochets off the rim and lands inside.
“Wait.” I hold up my hand as I think about what he just said. “Ben told you to look after me?” It shouldn’t be a surprise—I mean, I know there’s no possibility that a hot guy chose to talk to me because of how interesting I look—but still. That hurts.
He nods. “Yes ma’am.” I glare at Ben through the fire. Hot guy nudges my shoulder. “You don’t need looking after. He just wanted me to hang out with you so you wouldn’t be alone. You know how he gets around Marla.”
Now I know how he gets around Marla. Yesterday I didn’t know she existed. And although I want to like her—okay I do like her—it really bugs me how Ben’s blatant ignoring of me all night was premeditated. He was even so kind as to arrange a babysitter for me.
At least this babysitter is hot. It’s a step up from my mean childhood babysitter, Great Aunt Martha.
“So I guess I should know your name, since you’re babysitting me and all,” I say with a sigh.
“You can call me Bluntz.” I brush the sand off my hands thinking he might shake my hand. He doesn’t.
Bluntz is a stupid name. It’s the only non-sexy thing about this guy. I shrug it off, briefly wondering why that word sounds familiar, like I’ve heard it in a song or something. Doesn’t it have something to do with drugs?
I don’t know how much time goes by with Bluntz and I making small talk; one hour, maybe two. The full moon and fire illuminates the beach as far as I can see. The fire is still going strong thanks to people randomly adding wood when it starts to dwindle. What started out as about fifty people hanging out on the beach had turned into a hundred and then dwindled into about ten. Although a few guys keep asking Bluntz to play football with them, he doesn’t leave my side. I’m grateful for someone to talk to, but it’s hard to have a good time talking pointless chitchat with someone who’s obligated to talk back.
Ben and his girlfriend stand up and dust the sand off their butts. Wow, it turns out that they aren’t attached to the hip after all. Ben surveys the campfire and his eyes light up when they see me as if he just noticed that I was there. They come over and sit a few feet behind us. Bluntz and I turn around, forming a circle out of the four of us. I don’t particularly like anyone in the group right now.
My brother, the betrayer. Marla, the brother stealer. And Bluntz, the hot guy with a weird name who is guilted into hanging out with me.
“So you’ve met Bluntz,” Ben says, that big ass love-struck smile still on his face.
“Of course I have,” I mutter. He doesn’t catch my sarcasm. Bluntz doesn’t seem offended either, but that’s probably because he’s busy with a metal box he had retrieved from his pocket.
“This is a beautiful night,” Marla says. She sits with her knees folded and her legs bent off to the side. Her back is straight but her perfect posture doesn’t look forced. Marla makes sitting on a dirty beach look beautiful. I shift from sitting Indian style back to having my knees pulled to my chest, bringing all of my self-consciousness into myself.
A small voice in the back of my mind nags at me to stop feeling sorry for myself and have fun tonight. Ben and his cool friends beat my normal nights of watching romantic comedies and eating junk food alone or with Jill. But I feel so out of place here. These aren’t normal college kids. Marla is stunning and everything she says is witty, smart or both. Bluntz is so smooth and relaxed; it’s as if he can’t feel out of place anywhere. And Ben, the all-American guy who is friends with everybody. He totally fits in. I don’t.
I put a smile on my face and attempt to join the conversation. They’re talking about which college professors to avoid and which ones are cool—a topic of which I have nothing to contribute. My mind drifts into a daydream about an alternate universe. One where I’m pretty and charismatic, someone like Marla who catches every eye in the room. And Bluntz is in it too. In my alternate universe, he doesn’t sit next to me and confess to being here only to babysit me. Dream-Bluntz introduces himself, takes my hand and kisses the top of it in a very gentleman-like way. Dream-me blushes and giggles. Somewhere far away, Daniel sits glaring at me and my new boyfriend who is way better than he ever was. Daniel may have been smart and cute, but Bluntz is smarter and cuter. After dating someone as perfect as I thought Daniel was, Bluntz actually is all of that.
I’m so enthralled in my fantasy of Dream-Bluntz that I don’t notice when the real Bluntz stops messing with the metal box in his hand. I don’t notice what everyone’s doing until he flicks a lighter and the spark of flame catches my eye. I glance over at Bluntz and see him light a cigarette. Only it doesn’t look like a regular one, more like something homemade. He had to be old enough to buy his own cigarettes so why did he make them himself?
His eyes meet mine as he inhales and I glance away, embarrassed to see him when I had just been imagining those same eyes looking into mine in a longing, romantic way. He exhaled slowly, turning his face away from me. A gust of wind from the beach blows the smoke in my face anyway.
It’s unlike any cigarette smoke I’ve ever smelled.
He takes another drag, holds the smoke in his lungs and passes it to Marla. She does the same thing. Again the smoke hits me, filling my lungs with a strong skunk-like stench that smells disturbingly like the inside of Dad’s house.
In fifth grade, my school had a program where a police officer visited our classroom every month to talk about safety. Officer Jared was a portly, balding man and most kids just made fun of him behind his back. No one ever listened or cared about what he said. I mean, it was common sense that you should leave the house if you wake up and it's on fire. But one day his talk was about drugs. He kept emphasizing the stupid catch phrase taught to kids our age: Just say no! I had zoned out through most of the talk, but there was one thing I remembered. He was talking about how the smell of marijuana was something he couldn’t describe. “You'll just know it when you smell it,” he had said. “It's impossible not to know what it is.”
Cold terror rises in my chest. That’s why his name is Bluntz. Marla passes the cigarette—no, the joint—to Ben. No, no, no. He can’t possibly know what he is about to do, can he? Ben wouldn’t do drugs. Drugs are bad. Just say no.
Everything happens in slow motion. Just say no! I want to scream but I don’t. If I say anything, I’ll be cast out as a loser.
My fingers dig into the sand as Ben puts the joint to his lips and takes a hit. He holds the smoke in his lungs and looks up at the stars. Disappointment soars though every inch of my body. He knows exactly what he’s doing. Ben is a straight A student. An athlete. How can he do this? And in front of me?
Nothing can possibly make this night worse.
Until he holds the joint out to me and says, “Here Lex. You can be one of us now.”
Chapter 5
“Good morning sunshine.”
I had heard Ben come down stairs and leave the house fifteen minutes ago. And I heard him come back inside and shuffle around the kitchen. It was easy to pretend to be asleep on the couch, but now he’s hovering over me, and knowing that he’s probably staring right at me makes my eyelids twitch. A smile tugs at my lips even though nothing is funny. He sets what sounds like a paper bag on the coffee table. “I got your favorite breakfast, so wake up.”
With my eyes still closed, I yawn and stretch, my arms balled into fists as I slowly sit up on the couch. I open my eyes and blink a few times, trying to make it look like I hadn’t been fake sleeping the whole time.
Ben’s giving me a bright smile with half a hashbrown in his hand. The other half is shoved in his mouth as he bends over and moves my pillow and blanket out of the way. He plops down next to me and turns on the TV. “The game is about to start, hope you d
on’t mind.”
All of last night comes back to me in a flash. The beach. Marla and Ben. The hot guy named Bluntz.
The joint.
The awkward way I said no thanks and left to go sit in Ben’s car.
Waking up on Dad’s couch the next morning with Ben here should be the most awkward thing ever. But here he is, sitting next to me scarfing down an egg McMuffin and acting like nothing is wrong. I can play along too.
“Thanks for breakfast.” I had seen the cereal in Dad’s pantry and it’s probably all expired and there’s no milk in the fridge. Ben’s breakfast is more than just a delicious food treat. It’s a lifesaver.
“No prob.” He shoves the other half of hashbrown into his mouth. “I get McDonald’s almost every morning.”
“So where’s Dad? Still in the country this time?” I ask, between dipping pieces of pancake into syrup and devouring them.
“Moscow for three months.” He crumples up his fast food wrapper and tosses it behind his head. It soars through the living room and lands somewhere on the kitchen floor. I’ll nag him about that later.
“Moscow?” Dad’s work definitely went global. “How long has he been gone?”
“Umm, a couple weeks? A month maybe.” Ben turns up the volume on the TV and the sportscaster’s excited yells are enough for me to catch the hint. If Dad’s gone all summer then I can stay here for the next two months.
But now that I know about Ben’s drug usage, maybe I don’t want to spend the summer here. This huge elephant in the room makes the lump in my chest heavier. “Ben?” I say as in icebreaker.
“Hmm?” He raises an eyebrow but doesn’t look away from the game.
I used to tell Ben just about everything without even thinking twice about it. He was the first person to know when I got my first period, and despite how much he hated that, he even went with me to buy tampons because Mom was out of town and I was too terrified to tell Dad. If I could tell Ben something that personal, then I can tell him my feelings about this. “Last night was weird.”
He watches an instant replay on the screen then turns to me. “What part?”
What the hell part did he think I meant? I throw my arms in the air. “The part where you smoked pot.” It rolls off my tongue so quickly, it sounds like a question.
“Hey, it’s cool. If you don’t want to smoke you don’t have to.” He says it as plainly as if this is the subject every little sister talks about. “No one will judge you for it.”
“That’s not my point. I’m not worrying about people judging me. That’s not what I meant.” I trip over my words when I’m upset. He doesn’t even understand. He looks back at the screen and I take a loud breath to get his attention back. “I never thought you’d be someone who did drugs. I mean, you’re the guy every mom wants their daughter to date.”
He flinches. Since I struck a nerve, I continue, “Drugs are bad and illegal in this state. I just never thought you’d do that.” I look at my hands in my lap. “And in front of me.”
“Lex, I know this sounds weird, but you have to hear me out.” He leans back on the couch and puts his arm around me, big brother style. “I always thought pot was bad too, but then the guys and I tried it one night. I don’t even remember who had the joint, but it wasn’t anything like what I had imagined.”
“It’s still illegal,” I say, still in shock over the whole thing. Why do I even have to point out this fact?
“Yeah but honestly it’s not ‘bad’, bad.” He makes air quotes. “People just think it’s bad because the state won’t legalize it.”
“Being illegal makes it bad.”
“No it doesn’t.”
“GOD BEN!” I pull away from his arm. “What part of illegal and bad doesn’t click with you?”
The arm I had just abandoned retreats back and his fingers run through his hair. He gives me his trademarked Ben Smile, the one with the dimples that have the power to make overbearing fathers let their daughters stay out past curfew. “You just have to trust me on this, Lexie.”
“Okay, sure,” I say, laughing a bit hysterically now. “Sure thing, Ben. Whatever you say. I trust you because you think I should. No questions asked.” I jump off the couch and head for the stairs. Even though my room isn’t my room anymore, I duck inside and slam the door. Ben doesn’t follow me.
I kick things out of my way, letting my frustration out through the toes of my Converse. A box of porn slides across the hardwood floor and crashes into another box that rattles like there’s glass inside. I don’t care. Dad has a garage and a shed in the backyard to hoard all of these forgotten possessions. Why did he have to put them in my room? It still had four pink walls and the purple shag carpet rug is somewhere under all this crap.
My bed, huddled in the corner amongst all the intrusive boxes still has my princess comforter on it. My pillow. Even my stuffed unicorn I had left here for when I came to visit.
Dad is never home. I almost forget what he looks like. Ben isn’t Ben anymore. He’s a pot smoking liar of a brother. I sink into my twin bed and hold the unicorn close to my chest. At least small traces of me still exist in this house, even if everything else has changed.
The lump in my back pocket presses uncomfortably into my butt. I slide out my new cell phone and sit it next to me on the bed. It has two numbers programmed in it: Jill’s and Ben’s. I type in a new number and save it. Even though I’m still mad at her, I call it because I need some degree of normalcy back in my life.
“Hello?” She’s apprehensive. I know I’m not a bill collector, but she doesn’t.
“Hey, Mom. It’s me.”
“Lexie? Where are you calling from?” I can barely hear her over the click click click of her tapping on the keyboard.
“I’m at Ben’s—er, Dad’s house.” Ever since the divorce I’ve had trouble calling this place “Dad’s house” when it used to belong to all of us. “I just thought you’d like to know my new cell phone number.”
There is some shuffling and the typing ceases. “So he got you one? Did you even have to say please?”
“He didn’t mind. He has a lot of money from his new job.”
“I’m very happy for you both.” She doesn’t sound happy. “Is Chris there?”
“He’s in Moscow.”
“When will he be home?”
“Any day now,” I lie.
“Good. Lord knows Ben isn’t capable of taking care of you all summer.”
Two minutes on the phone with Mom is all it takes to make me remember why I’m sitting in this dump of a bedroom, twenty miles away from her. Ben can take care of me, she just won’t admit it. Ben is a better brother than she is as a mother.
Like a flash of lightening, I remember the pot.
“I guess not,” I mumble, more to myself than to her.
“What?” Click, click click.
“Nothing,” I say quickly. “I’ll see you later, Mom. Love you.” I end the call before she can say anything back. We don’t both have to be liars.
Mom had alluded that I’d be spending the whole summer here, so I decide to take advantage of that by actually staying. This isn’t about the fight with Mom anymore. I have a purpose now, a goal to help Ben before it’s too late. I’ll work my little sister magic and put a stop to the pot smoking at beach parties. I will get Ben back to normal.
One by one, I move the boxes on my floor from their helter-skelter arrangement and stack them neatly against the far wall. The heaviest ones contain books from Dad’s law school days. It takes all of my strength to slide them around, but eventually my room starts to look like it used to, minus the wall of boxes.
My desk is just as I remember it once I clear off Dad’s winter coats. The top drawer still has my old binder from eighth grade. Has it really been that long since I’ve spent the weekend over here?
The visitations stopped when Dad’s traveling became too unpredictable to schedule anything. And when I did visit, I was out of place and unwilling to get over the pain
I felt from him ruining our family. Dad and I just don’t mesh anymore.
Mom and I meshed just fine until a few weeks ago. It’s like she fell apart when Ben decided to live with Dad and she feared losing me so much that she stopped letting me do anything.
Sucks to be her, because now she has lost me. Not to Dad like she had feared, but to Ben.
Ben is my only tie to being part of a real family. I need him now more than ever. I won’t let the drugs take him from me.
He knocks on my door a little while later and tells me he’s having friends over for a party. I should probably talk him out of it. I should say no, and start on my quest to make him stop smoking. I mean, that’s the goal I just set for myself like five minutes ago.
But instead, I say, “Who all is coming over?”
“Marla and some of our friends,” he says through the other side of my door. It doesn’t matter who’s coming over, I need to stop this. But curiosity gets the best of me.
“Anyone else I know?”
“Bluntz will be there.”
I should really say no. I should tell him that parties equal drug use and drugs are bad. But I don’t. My thumbs loop around the belt holes in my jeans. I shrug. “Cool, I’ll get dressed.”
Chapter 6
It’s shallow and pathetic of me to still swoon over Bluntz when he’s clearly a drug user. Maybe I need mental help or something because part of me still wants to see him and have him be nice to me like was last night. Plus, who knows? Maybe I could get Ben and Bluntz off drugs—kill two birds with one stoner, er, no, I mean stone. One stone.
The backpack of clothes I brought from home is really just two crumpled up shirts and a single pair of jeans that I’ve worn for the last three days. Suffice it to say I’m not a smart last minute packer. My only pair of jeans will be perfect for tonight—they’re my favorite pair and they fit me as if they were made just for my curves. The bottoms are frayed from years of stepping on them and the left knee has a hole that I earned one day while trying to skateboard.