Nell Zink - Mislaid

“Let me try,” Temple said. He accepted the knife and proved to be much stronger than the girl, able to cut slices from the block of hashish as though it were a fruitcake.

“Slow down!” the girl said. “You’re going to get us all fucked up. That is a lot of hash.”

“Is it? I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“This is plenty for brownies,” she said. “You want to hang out and help eat them?”

“Oh, Temple!” Karen cried. “Don’t you dare!”

“Just one little taste?” he asked her. “For Baudelaire’s sake?”

The whole room laughed.

“We don’t do illegal drugs,” Karen said. “Don’t you have, like, alcohol or anything normal?”

“This is the drug frat,” a boy explained. “Didn’t you see the sign?”

“There’s no sign,” the girl said, in an aside to Karen. “They lost their charter.”

“I didn’t want to join a fraternity anyway,” Temple said. “I was going to join a liberty first, and then an equality.”

“There’s punch downstairs,” Byrdie said to Karen.

“I’ll get you some punch,” Karen said to Temple.

Byrdie accompanied her down the stairs, admiring the deft way her sneakers skidded down the slick carpet below her short skirt. He thought: I know this girl. But how? He put the question out of his mind and led her to the back porch, where a plastic garbage can stood filled to the brim with rum punch nearly invisible under rafts of floating strawberries that had been soaked overnight in grain alcohol. He dipped out two generous servings and watched her walk back upstairs.

About seven hours later, Byrdie thought to reascend the steps to his room. Temple was on his sofa. Something smelled bad, like bathroom. He looked closer. Temple had puked and soiled his pants. He tried to rouse him and got only groans. The others were gone.

But where? That motherly little girl wouldn’t have left Temple alone. The lowborn damsel who unleashed all the protective urges in Byrdie. He walked the length of his hall and then the length of the halls upstairs, and heard nothing. Then he walked the halls again, opening every door.

Finally he found people awake and switched on the light. Karen lay on her back on a bed that had been shoved into the middle of the room, at the center of a group of boys wearing only boxer shorts. They had swastikas drawn on their chests in Magic Marker. There was a smell of incense and sweat.

“What the fuck are you doing,” Byrdie said. “I mean, what the fuck are you doing?”

“We convened a fraternity council to assess her eligibility to become our fertility goddess,” a boy named Mike said.

“We’re casting lots for her garments,” another added. Karen didn’t move or make a sound.

“Get the fuck out, all of you,” Byrdie said.

“This is my room,” Mike protested.

Byrdie repeated himself yet again. Then he picked up a broadsword that was leaning behind the door because Mike was in the Society for Creative Anachronism. All the boys retreated to the hall. He closed the door, locked it, and turned to Karen.

She was fully clothed, which was a relief. He peeked up her skirt to make sure. On her T-shirt, below the swastika, someone had written “Sex Receptacle.” His eyes burned with shame. She was breathing evenly, with a slight gurgling sound. He turned her head and body to the side and a thread of drool trickled from her mouth. She made a humming sound and never opened her eyes. One arm reached out and touched his leg.

Byrdie hoisted her into the air easily, cradling her in his arms, and carried her down to his room. Her boyfriend hadn’t moved. He positioned her on his bed and poked Temple a couple of times in the side. “Yo, bleed, wake up,” he said.

“I can’t. I’m dead,” Temple said. “Where am I? Oh shit.” He choked out a strange sob and buried his face in the couch. Then he suddenly sat upright and said, “Where are those guys? Where’s Shadow?” He lurched into the bathroom and vomited, moaning. As he ran, Byrdie saw that his pants were stained brown in the rear. It was not Temple’s best moment.

“Your friend’s okay,” Byrdie called to him through the door. “Where does she live? I’m going to take her home if you don’t mind.”

“Get her out of here,” Temple said. “This place is cursed. It’s literally hell. I deserve to be here.” Another catastrophic heave took him by surprise, and there was a sound like a long, damp fart.

“Take your suit off and throw it away. Throw away all your clothes, man. Put them in the trash bag and tie it up real tight, and take a shower. I’m serious. Take some of my clothes. They’ll fit you.”

“Oh, God,” Temple said. “This is the worst day of my life.”

“Where does your girlfriend live?”

“Dabney three-oh-two,” Temple said.

Byrdie was surprised. He had figured she was a townie.

“Tomorrow I’m going to a revival and surrendering to Jesus,” Temple added, burping loudly and returning to the toilet.

“Stand in the bathtub when you take your clothes off,” Byrdie suggested.

“I’m so sorry,” Temple groaned. “I can never make this up to anybody, ever. This is rock bottom.”

Mike, the boy who had hosted the fertility ritual with Karen, spent most of the following day in a police station downtown. He was interviewed by two local police detectives, playing good cop and better cop. With him were two young criminal defense lawyers hired by his father. They occasionally resorted to holding their heads and gasping in horror. One of them eventually said, “Please can it and leave the talking to us. One more word and I’ll pop you this time for real.”

The reason was this: The Thetan House Halloween party had been the occasion of a very straightforward entrapment sting.

The political background of the police’s actions was unimpeachable. There were murmurings of dissatisfaction in the local black community that had spread to the Democratic Party, endangering the mayor’s reelection campaign. So many black people had been busted for crack cocaine while college students went on snorting the expensive stuff unimpeded. All sorts of hard drugs drifted around the college, nearly always ignored. A cloud of pot smoke at a concert on-grounds was a chance for campus cops to roll their eyes. The same cloud in front of a black nightclub in town led to convictions and ruined lives. It was high time, the liberals and the fuzz agreed, that some lives be ruined on the other side of the fence.

But it’s hard to catch someone in possession of a drug he takes once a month or so, bought in the quantity he’ll need for a single evening. The dealers were impossible to pin down, because they seemed to overlap with the users. When one had drugs, they all had drugs, in uninteresting small quantities, and when the town was dry it was dry. Once you bust them, they get careful. They didn’t get into UVA for nothing. They’re smart.

Thus it was decided to run a sting. Armed with little more than longish hair and a superficial knowledge of Tolkien, a grown man moved in with the Thetans. It wasn’t a dorm, after all, or even officially a frat house anymore — just a big rented house, and he demonstrated his superiority to competing student applicants by laying claim to a reliable source of excellent LSD. To no one’s surprise on the official, organizing end of the sting, the students didn’t bat an eyelash. Why exactly it would be legal for him to do that — poison college students in their home — no one could say.

Mike had accepted three tabs of four-way blotter from the paid informant. The police knew that twelve hits of acid cut with methamphetamine is much too much for one person. It would make him feel desperately ill for a good long while. Thus if the next day he can’t produce it, yet walks and talks, he is — with near certainty — a dealer of LSD.