Crossroads

Beyond the exit door, off a hallway leading to the church’s attic stairs, was a second door, dangerously difficult (from a fire-hazard perspective) to push open against the snow. Outside was a narrow alley, lit only by Chicagoland sky, against a retaining wall that marked the boundary of church property. In a nod to the rules, everyone climbed up onto the snow-covered grass above the wall. Becky stuck close to David, feeling safest with him; he was one of Perry’s best friends.

“For the record,” Kim said to the others, “Hildebrandt gave her okay for this.”

Becky chuckled in a voice she didn’t recognize. “Put it all on me, why don’t you.”

“I think her presence here speaks for itself,” David said. From a neat metal case, he produced a doobie smaller than the ones Becky had seen at parties, and Kim reached over to light it with a Bic. The smell of pot smoke was autumnal. Holding it in, David offered the doobie first to Becky.

“Sorry,” she said, taking it. “How do I do this?”

“Long, slow breath and keep it in,” Kim said kindly.

Becky took a puff, coughed, and tried a deeper breath. It was as if she’d swallowed a burning sword. Smoke was deadly—people died from inhaling it—she wondered if this thought was the first sign of being high or just an ordinary thought, and then if wondering this was itself a sign of being high—but she managed, with watering eyes, to hold it longer than David had held his. After Kim and Darra and Carol had taken their turns, the doobie came back to David, who offered it again to Becky.

“Um,” she said. Her throat was full of scorch. “Is it okay?”

“There’s more where this came from.”

She nodded and filled her lungs again. She was smoking marijuana! Either the drug itself or the excitement of smoking it was flooding the same nerves that kissing Tanner had lit up the night before. Suddenly her life was changing fast. She was being initiated into sensations she’d barely been aware were possible.

When David grabbed her arm, she understood that she was fainting from too conscientiously holding her breath. She let out smoke and took in winter air. What had been a dark alley seemed almost daylit in the whiteness of the sky and snow, as if the darkness had only been her starting to pass out. The taste in her mouth was Octobery. The heat surging in her face and behind her eyes was like molten fudge. She felt walled off by the heavy hot sensation, not at all connected to the other miscreants, who were expertly snapping drags off the dwindling doobie. Which now came back.

Again a foreign-sounding chuckle, hers.

“Okay,” she said. “Why not.”

Her third hit hurt her throat less, not more, than the first two. This had to mean that she was getting high. The molten-fudge sensation seemed to be receding, boiling off through the top of her head, fizzing away through her skin. For a moment, she felt entirely poised, entirely present in a winter wonderland, safe with friends. She wondered what would happen next.

From inside the fire door, right below her, came a shout and a thud. The door swung open and stuck in the snow; and there stood Sally Perkins.

“Aha!” she cried.

A hairy mass in the dimness behind her resolved into the shape of Laura Dobrinsky. Becky violently coughed.

“Jesus Christ, Kim,” Sally said, clambering up onto the retaining wall. “What ever happened to sisters sharing?” She extended a hand to Laura and yanked her up.

“I didn’t see you,” Kim said.

“Ho-ho-ho, right.”

Becky was definitely high. She seemed to be standing next to herself, wondering where to place herself. She took a step backward, away from Laura. Her foot came down in a hole of some sort, which sent her falling back into a snow-laden shrub. The shrub embraced her and held her unsteadily upright.

David had taken out his little case again. “You and Sally have such keen noses,” he observed to Laura, “you could be of service to law enforcement.”

“Not true,” Laura said. “I can only smell the high-grade stuff.”

“Well, isn’t this your lucky day.”

He lit up a second joint and handed it to her.

“Jesus,” Sally said. “Is that Becky Hildebrandt?”

“The very one,” David said.

“My, how the mighty have fallen.”

Laura exhaled smoke, turned toward Becky, and pierced her with a terrifying look.

“Becky’s like her father,” she said. “She doesn’t know when she’s not wanted.”

Becky extricated herself from the shrub and brushed snow off her coat. It seemed important to keep on brushing, down to the last flake, to make herself presentable. Then she found that she’d lost interest in it.

“Hey, Sally,” she said. “Hey, Laura.”

Laura tossed her head and turned away. Now no one was actually looking at Becky, but it seemed as if the entire world were examining her. It seemed as if she’d said the wrong thing and had been somewhere else, not present, in the moments since she’d said it. There was no telling where she’d been or what she’d done there. She only knew that she’d broken the law, poisoned her brain, destroyed her mystique. She wanted to run away and be alone, but if she ran away the others would know she was having a less cool experience than they were, which would be even worse than staying. She needed to be cool, but there wasn’t a particle of coolness in her. She didn’t like being high. In fact, getting high was the most horrible thing she’d ever done to herself. She wished she could undo it, but she could feel that, if anything, she was getting higher. In her mind’s eye, her thoughts were laid out like snacks on a lazy Susan. They weren’t evaporating the way thoughts were supposed to. They just sat there, going round and round, available for second helpings. Why had she had to take a third puff on the doobie? Why even the first? Some evil thing in her, whose presence it now seemed she’d always sensed in herself but done her best to ignore, some vain and greedy and sexual thing rooted in a deeper self-loathing, had seized control of her and made the worst decisions.