Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

She took the first hit, quickly, as though she was just getting it started for them, and passed it to Jared. Simon noticed a mark on the back of her hand, an almost-star, all but the last two lines drawn. Thin, white lines. A knife, or a razor blade. He watched the star twinkle at him as she fingered another sugar packet. When it was his turn to take a hit, he realized he’d forgotten to watch how it was done, and he’d never smoked anything before. Why couldn’t it at least have been a joint and not this bulbous, lemony thing?

His fingers felt clumsy around it. He saw in flashes how it might fall to the ground and ruin everything, the privilege of being there so new. On the inhale the air came too easy and felt like nothing.

“Here,” Elena said, moving his finger over the hole on the bowl’s side. Like a music teacher, she was patient. “Tap.”

He looked at Jared, mercifully unaware, picking something off his tongue.

When Simon pulled it into his lungs, the weed turned to orange embers, darkening again on the release.

“Hold it in,” Elena said, and put two painted fingernails, pink and green, to his lips. It burned him up bad on the inside, but he would never cough onto her rough little fingers, her star scar.

The smoke had to come out somewhere, though, and it came out in his eyes. His vision blurred and tears trembled in the corners, waiting to fall the moment his head tipped a centimeter this way or that. Elena, with no expression he could read, kept her fingers to his lips, almost cruel — was she trying to kill him?

When she finally did take her hand away, Simon tried to keep his choking on the inside. Was he high? Was this high? He was happy and afraid, but this had more to do with Elena’s knee brushing his where they sat Indian style on the poured concrete and sharp bits of pebble and glass.

Now Elena took a long, slow hit and let the smoke out smoothly, as if it were only hot breath on a cold night.

How he knew he was stoned had to do less with a feeling and more with the fact that when he smiled he went blind, eyes so small. Jared’s eyes, at least, were red, but Elena’s were round as ever, calm, curved pools, surface life on the plane of her face. Maybe she’d built up a tolerance for weed, or a total immunity. That would be sad. Or maybe she was high all the time and had one of those miracle faces that never showed it.

“Look at fucking Simon,” Jared said. “He’s turning Japanese-a.”

They both started to laugh. You’re blowing it you’re blowing it you’re blowing it. Stop smiling, you idiot. You have nothing to smile about. The sound of Elena laughing made the cotton in his mouth sink down into his stomach and grow. This helped some, brought his cheeks back to normal, though his eyes still felt small, like pink and green fingers pressed to his lids.

Jared clapped his hands together. “Your face is amazing, man.”

“He’s cute,” Elena said, but like she felt sorry for him.

Simon’s mouth was dry and probably he had to throw up. He felt like a science experiment gone wrong, and what if he just cried in front of them.

Elena leaned closer. “You are cute to smile,” she said, her English worse than it should have been. Had he ever even heard her speak before? Was this the first time he was hearing her voice?

Before he realized it, she was kissing him, once, not long but sweetly and sweet, sugar granules pressing off her lips, that thick, musty smell on both their mouths stronger when multiplied, and Simon did the worst thing he could have done. He smiled, so that she kissed his teeth.

She straightened up, wiping her mouth, the star a comet across her face. She leaned her head back against the car door and closed her eyes. Jared had done the same. Simon sat and waited for someone to do anything, but they seemed to have gone to sleep. He cleared his throat. Jared scratched his nose.

Simon saw himself out.

On the subway home, he cursed himself for the smiling and the dryness of mouth. Also, for not buying a soda at the bodega on the corner, that was a mistake.

—

It was half past six when he got off at the Eighty-sixth Street station and started for home. Coming up on the corner of Broadway was the supermarket where a hundred times on the train he’d imagined himself buying a can of Sprite, but before he reached it, he saw his sister, sitting on the wooden bench put out by the ice cream shop. She was looking down, apparently into her belly button, and her short, feathery hair fell forward, hiding her face. She hadn’t seen him, and the Sprite was so close.

But she looked very small, his sister, and very sad, and he wondered for a second if she knew something, if someone at the school had seen him. If Jared and Elena had been arrested, his name would have come up. The school or some precinct might have called the house, and his mother might have sent Kay out so she and Simon could talk alone. That was how Simon buried himself, in the middle of Broadway, because of something he saw in the curve of his sister’s back, what had made her so heavy.

“What are you doing here?”

“Buying ice cream.”

She didn’t see him look pointedly from her place on the bench to the ice cream shop and back. “You know, you have to go inside for that.”

“In a minute.” She strangled a shirt button by its thread. The shirt was a leftover from elementary school dress code, white but graying, and she hadn’t matched the holes up right. Simon remembered the early mornings when she’d fought against these shirts, before the big middle school privilege of getting to wear what you wanted. The novelty had worn off, though — freedom of expression was another kind of nuisance — and she’d gone to wearing bits and pieces of uniform again.

Simon had meant to avoid Kay’s looking at him closely, in case his eyes were strange, they still felt strange, but she was almost crying now, and he sat on the bench beside her. “How much did Mom give you?”

“I had money from lunch.”

“You didn’t eat lunch?” So it was something that happened at school. Simon remembered that high people got paranoid. This wasn’t about him at all. Still, what it was about, she wouldn’t say, so he touched her shoulder like someone she didn’t know was there and said hey and nodded toward the white light inside the ice cream shop, where the menu hung glowing from the ceiling.

Ice cream helped, a little, even though Kay let most of her grasshopper pie run down her fingers and gather in the cave her palm made. Simon got butter pecan, his favorite, which their father called the geriatric flavor, but he felt wrong to enjoy it with his sister so upset. Plus, he knew, marijuana made pigs out of people.

It was a great test of his burgeoning manhood, but his affection for his sister, or maybe just curiosity, kept Simon from stopping for the soda he wanted. Kay was moving now, dropping bits of cone into the corner trash can, almost home, and he followed her.

The doorguy was helping some building people load luggage into a taxi, a relief to Simon, who liked the doorguy but not always the banter that came with him, how much he joked with Kay. In the gold-green light of the elevator, he stared into the brass plate that framed the buttons, where he and his sister reflected back at him, warped around the engraved numbers, their bodies strange of size. Their eyes were the same in this light, over-small and under-bright. Simon forgot to press the button. But Kay remembered.

Their mother was in the kitchen with a pot of spaghetti and a head of broccoli. Sometime that year she’d started making dinner every night, which meant less meat. She didn’t like to handle it. Their dad was still at work. He was never home this early.

—

It was the smallest decision Kay could think to make, smaller even than doing nothing, which felt like deceit. Showing Simon would be like showing herself, because he was theirs too.