“Pot like pot? Like marijuana?”
“No, pot like for tea. It’s hard to get your hands on ceramic cookware,” she deadpanned, looking exasperated. “Yeah. You know. Ganj. Whatever you’re calling it now.”
“I missed the last teen-slang standardization meeting, but I think we’re calling it weed. You don’t, like, have a person?”
“I think he graduated. I’ll tell you, being retired and running out of your stash is kinda like having a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich without the peanut butter. Or the jelly. Just two dry pieces of bread.”
Gamely attempting to roll with this, I agreed faintly, “That sounds like . . . not a good sandwich.”
“Don’t look so shocked. Getting high is just about the only good thing about being my age. Which is seventy-one, by the way. If there’s some kind of crone age requirement for your project.”
“That’s a great age for my report, and you’re not a crone,” I told her firmly, trying and failing to feel out where all this was going.
She gasped like I insulted her. “Don’t say that! I love being a crone.
“I don’t know who came up with the stupid idea that we appreciate the little things, like domestic chores or sitting and watching the sun set like it’s a goddamn Bourne movie. And you can use that in your report, by the way—if you help me out and track down a new dealer.”
“Um, I don’t think I know anybody.”
She snorted derisively, reaching up to adjust the cockeyed tumble of gray hair looped up in a claw clip.
“What are you, sixteen?”
“Fifteen.”
“In this town? Every other kid in your class probably has a hookup.”
“I don’t really—”
“Those are my terms, lady. Take it or leave it.”
We sized each other up for a minute. She tilted her head up high, like she was challenging me. For a second I felt like Al Pacino in that scene in The Godfather where he shoots all those guys in that restaurant and then flees to Sicily and marries that girl who doesn’t speak his language but has really nice breasts and then she gets blown up in a car.
Finally, I relented. “You’re on.”
Things I am extraordinarily good at locating: public restrooms, novels about hedonism and angst at exclusive private schools, quickly canceled cult TV shows, and free bagels. Controlled substances are not, and will never be, one of those things. Even picking up antibiotics for an ear infection at CVS makes me feel vaguely shifty and hyper-self-conscious, like a minor character on The Wire.
Fortunately, Ruth was right: Weed was as ubiquitous at school as folded brown-bag textbook covers with Drake lyrics scrawled on them. I located a hookup almost immediately when I sidled up to Mark Petruniak during Phys Ed and awkwardly said something like, “Hey, do you, like, I know you smoke, but do you happen to deal? I mean deal weed. Not, like, ‘with issues.’”
To my relief, Mark laughed.
“Yeah, dude,” he said super-nonchalantly, his eyelids drooping, and I caught a whiff that verified his honesty. “Hey, I didn’t know you smoked.”
“Well, sometimes,” I lied modestly, basking in taking a well-liked guy from school by surprise. “You know. Not a lot.”
(I smoked weed one time. It was at one of Ashley’s parties. I freaked out, locked myself in the bathroom, and sobbed uncontrollably until Dylan Dinerstein drunkenly climbed in through the window to pee.)
After Phys Ed, I handed Mark a fifty, and he gave me a small plastic bag with some green stuff in it that could totally have been Astroturf and I wouldn’t have known.
“Good shit,” I said, as if I had a Ph.D. in Discerning Shit Quality.
“You should come to over my house and smoke sometime,” Mark said casually.
“Yeah, definitely,” I lied.
In retrospect, I felt fortunate that a number of small miracles had transpired: I managed to purchase marijuana without asking Mark what exact unit of measurement was in a dime bag, without getting arrested, and without being so nervous about potentially being arrested that I Maria Full of Grace-ed it home in my vagina.
I stopped by Ruth’s house after school, just as the sun was setting, incredibly jittery from playing Pokémon with narcotics at school and hoping this stupid report would be worth all the anxiety.
She answered the door in the middle of my second knock.
“Yup.”
“Hi. I got the thing. The stuff. You know.” Beat. Nothing. “The stuff.”
“Oh, right.” A light clicked on behind her eyes. She looked mildly impressed but quashed it immediately. “Great, come on in.”
The foyer was warm and cluttered in an eclectic, lived-in way. Best of all, there were books everywhere, mostly very old ones, lined up on one single long shelf that looped around the room endlessly, like literature dominoes. I glanced a little closer and saw that a lot of them were feminist theory—some I recognized from my own late-night smart-girl Googles, but others I didn’t know.