Finding Mary Jane Read online

  Finding Mary Jane

  Part 2

  Amy Sparling

  Copyright © 2015 Amy Sparling

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art from shutterstock.com

  Cover design by Amy Sparling

  First edition June 9th, 2015

  Chapter 1

  As the days of my summer fly by, Jill calls fewer times than usual and comes over even less than that. Jordan is the sole essence of her existence now. And Ben had Marla stuck to his hip on every day she didn’t work. Marla typically worked on weekends at the smoke shop. Bluntz worked there too. I would think that since Ben got miserably lonely without Marla, he would want to hang out with his little sister and do fun stuff to get out all his pent up angst.

  Well, he doesn’t. He just sits in his room and plays Xbox all night, waiting like a lost puppy for Marla to come back and take him for a walk.

  It has been about two weeks since the bowling alley trip which means it has been two weeks since I’ve done anything fun. Some nights when I sit in a bed watching the old nineteen inch TV I had plugged in on the floor, I wonder what is different from life with Mom and life here at Dad’s. Ben was supposed to be the difference; that and no computer-obsessed mother ignoring me. Both my options right now suck.

  My cell phone, though beautiful and now decorated with a cursive L made of rhinestones stuck on the back, is now obsolete. No one ever calls it and I don’t have the numbers to the few long lost girls I was sort of friends with at school, so I have no way of reaching out to find a replacement for Jill.

  A big part of me wants to go home, back to Mom’s house and to my room that has my up-to-date belongings in it, but another part of me wants to stay here. If only to prove my mother wrong. Plus I still have my mission to make Ben stop smoking. That part isn’t going so well.

  Earlier in the week, on a night Marla was working, I walked downstairs to find myself in a fog of marijuana smoke, Ben slumped in between the fluffy couch cushions.

  “Are you high?” I asked, waving smoke out of my face and then coughing for emphasis. He laughed a sinister, cruel laugh. Like I had just made a joke so funny it was criminal. His eyes were bloodshot, which was understandable, but I couldn't shake the feeling that he looked like he had also been crying. An ashtray on the coffee table, filled with black ashes and a small white thing caught my eye. “What's that?” I pointed to it.

  “It's a roach.” Ben laughed again, if you could call it laughing. It was more of exhaling air in a quick fashion, eyes half closed. Geez, he was really baked. “It doesn't look like a roach,” I said, sitting next to him.

  “Well it's not a cockroach.”

  I put my hand on his arm. “Ben, are you okay?”

  His red eyes looked into mine for a long moment before he replied. “I'm perfect.”

  Now, lying backwards and upside-down on my bed with my head hanging upside down, arms swaying across the floor, I realize I have failed entirely on my mission. And also, that I’m getting dizzy from the blood rushing to my head. I sit up and decide to try again. It’s not like I can truly fail at something I never really started.

  I make a mental list of tactics I can use to persuade Ben to give up his new lifestyle. My first instinct is to beg and plead with him, but that has no long lasting rewards. I can try to get him in trouble with the police, but that’s taking things a bit too far because it could ruin his whole life. Plus he’s my brother. I could never ever turn him into the police. Even if I do secretly wonder if it would make him straighten up and stay away from the drugs.

  There’s also my old standby: the guilt trip. It works pretty well when I want to get my way, especially with Ben.

  The most important thing in Ben’s life right now is Marla. If she would side with me, then it would be easy to break Ben. Too easy. Doubt tugs at my heart strings; something tells me that Marla may be part of the problem. She does work at a smoke shop, after all.

  I’m going to need backup.

  Chapter 2

  It’s Friday night. Marla is at work. Ben is in his room playing Xbox, talking strategies with a stranger on the other end of his headset. I knock on his door, something I never did when we lived at Mom’s but something that’s required here. Not by rule, just by me not wanting to see anything bad when I opened the door.

  “Come in.”

  I go in and sit on his bean bag. “What are your plans tonight?”

  He taps the buttons on the controller rapidly until a 10 KILL STREAK award flashes on the screen. “Marla’s car is in the shop, so I’m picking her up after work.” He doesn’t take his eyes off the screen. “We’ll probably just hang out after that. Why, wanna come?”

  Watching Ben and Marla suck face isn’t exactly my idea of an awesome evening. But this isn’t about me. I have a new mission in life and it involves Marla, even if she is making out with my brother at the time. (But God I hope she won’t be.) “Yes,” I say. “I do.”

  I ride in the backseat of Ben’s Beamer. We had picked up Marla from work and then went to their favorite convenient store. There they dropped thirty-five bucks on Sunkist, peanut butter crackers, M&M’s and big bags of beef jerky. Scooping up ridiculous amounts of junk food is pretty much their hobby around here.

  I munch on a bag of candy corn as we drive to wherever we’re going. In fifth grade, I once ate an entire family sized bag of this stuff during standardized testing day. It made me so sick I fell out of my chair and was rushed to the nurse. You’d think a traumatizing event like that would make me stay away from the delicious conical candies forever, but nope. It only strengthened my love of them.

  Marla swings around, her hair flying in her face as she grabs a handful of my candy corn. “Are you dating anyone?” she asks.

  “Me?” I almost choke on my candy. “No.”

  She cocks her head. “Any reason why?”

  I think about it for a moment. There are a ton of reasons why I don’t have a boyfriend: I’m not pretty enough, I’m not cool enough, guys just don’t like me. Marla made it sound like I choose to be single, like I’m some kind of vibrant, independent woman who doesn’t want a man unless he’s worthy of me. In all of her beauty, she must have forgotten what life is like for normal people. Sometimes we don’t get to choose.

  Ben yanks the car to the side of the road and comes to a quick stop in front of an old parking meter. It’s one of those kinds that still take coins instead of credit cards. Marla turns back around, forgetting that I never answered her question. We’re at the smoke shop.

  Almost every business in the historic district of Lawson is closed at this time of night, except for the place that sells square donuts and coffee twenty four hours a day.

  “Is this place open?” I ask. The neon open sign is turned off, but since I’m following them right up to the front door, I feel compelled to ask anyway.

  “It is if you’re me,” Marla says, unhooking a key from her belt loop and opening the door. The shop is dark, except for a small glow coming from the open door behind the beaded curtain. We head through the shop in the dark, stopping at the curtain of beds. Marla and Ben stand in the doorway and talk to whoever is inside. I can hear muffled voices and a radio in the background, but I can’t see around them. I don’t exactly want to peek inside anyway like some kind of nosy tourist, so I stand back about teen feet, nestled between a rack of key chains and shot glasses.

  As their conversation continues, I start getting creeped out. It’s not like I’m scared, but my m
ind wants to play tricks in the darkness and I try not to let it. Marla asks about someone named Max. A voice from inside the room says, “We haven’t seen him all week.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Marla says. “He had to stop by earlier. You probably missed him.”

  “I’m not an idiot,” the voice says. Marla replies with a string of curse words.

  The shop door opens and closes, but I don’t register it because I’m so wrapped up in watching how insanely jealous Ben looks when Marla talks about Max. His hands fold into fists at his sides, and his back goes all straight. I’m so focused on him and wondering what will happen if he gets any more jealous than he is now, that I don’t really notice the shadowy figure approaching from the front of the store.

  And now as the figure behind me gets closer, my brain still doesn’t tell me to pay attention, turn around, and realize what’s going on right next to me.

  “It smells like candy corn in here,” Bluntz says over my shoulder. I jump, knocking him in the ribs with my elbow. He stumbles back and crashes into the rack of key chains.

  “What the fuck is that?” yells someone from inside the room. Marla’s eyes go wide as she shoves Ben in my direction to check out the damage. “Nothing,” she snaps. “Pass me that joint.”

  “You okay?” Ben asks me, looking from Bluntz back to me. Bluntz rubs his chest. “I’m fine.”

  “Sorry,” I mumble. Ben fist bumps Bluntz. “Hey man, you got here just in time. We’re about to watch the band practice, but I think Marla wants to-” Ben stops, glancing at me.

  Really? I give him a questioning look. I know what they want to do, but I want to hear him say it. If anything could make him feel guilty enough to consider quitting getting high, it would be looking his sister in the eyes and telling her he was about to do drugs. “We’re going to smoke a bit before we head upstairs,” Ben says. “Hey Lex…Do you want to try it?”

  I shake my head. So much for the guilt trip. Bluntz taps my arm. “Come on, we’ll go upstairs.” I follow him through the darkness without looking back at my brother. I’m thankful that he had saved me from Ben. But it’s not like he did it because he wanted to. Once again, he’s my babysitter while my brother gets high.

  He leads me through the back of the store to another doorway with a beaded curtain. There is no real door, just blackness. He steps inside, pushing his hand between the strands of beads and holds them open for me. I can barely make out a stairway in front of us. Steep, narrow stairs that probably led to the servant’s quarters when this place was built over a hundred years ago. Now, I had no idea where they went. It can be a secret torture chamber for all I know.

  Awesome.

  As if the store isn’t dark enough already, let’s add a scary staircase.

  “There’s not a monster up there, ya know,” he says. I stick my head in and look up. There is no light of any sort up there. A strand of beads slip out of his grasp, smacking me in the head. “Shit, sorry about that.” He grabs them with his other hand. That arm is decorated with a dozen bracelets, all made of hemp, beaded leather or multicolored string. One of them has a silver peace sign knotted between black strips of leather. It’s the same one I wear around my neck.

  Bluntz never looks annoyed, impatient or any of the negative feelings people get in social situations. He is always calm, and although it’s a term I never like to use, I have to use it on him: he is chill. I stand in the doorway under the protective shield of his arm for a full minute before he says anything. “I’ll go first if you prefer.”

  “Yes,” I squeak. He turns toward me and takes a step backwards onto the first stair. He flashes me a bright smile and then he’s gone, a trail of squeaky wooden footsteps the only sign that he was even here. I grab the handrails and blindly sprint up the stairs after him.

  The rush of racing up a dark staircase makes it all go by faster than it should. Suddenly I’m slamming into his back, smelling his cologne and shampoo.

  “Sorry,” I mumble, sliding down a step.

  “No worries,” he says with a chuckle. “It’s really beautiful up here,” he says, turning a creaky doorknob.

  The stairs don’t lead to a stuffy servant’s room from the Victorian age. They lead to a terrace. A beautiful balcony that extends about fifteen feet out from the second floor and stretches the entire length of the building. It’s bordered with a wrought iron railing swallowed by vines, potted plants, ferns and flowers of all kinds. Old fashioned lamp posts give the terrace a slight glow, and the full moon above casts its sullen light down on us. Lush, organic fragrances fill my lungs. It’s the most amazing place I’ve ever seen.

  “Wow.” I look at Bluntz and find that he had been watching me.

  He raises his arms above his head and yawns. “Told ya it was beautiful.”

  He ducks under a covered area of the patio and pulls two chairs over to the railing, sliding one toward me.

  I grab the railing and rest my chin on my hands, while a cool breeze blows across my face. From here I can see the rest of downtown. It’s not much of a sight from only two stories high, but then again, Lawson isn’t much of a town.

  Bluntz leans back in his chair, resting his fingertips on his thighs. One thing I’ve learned about him is that he doesn’t partake in awkward silences like most people. In the few times we’ve been together, including that random dance, we never said more than what was necessary.

  With anyone else, I would have felt horribly awkward. With Bluntz, it’s okay. Nice even. I don’t know how much time goes by as we sit here watching the street light at the intersection of Main and Forth cycle from red to green to yellow and then red again, but I don’t care. It’s fun being here on the secret porch, until I realize why I am here.

  I slouch down in my plastic patio chair, folding my arms across my chest. “You’re babysitting me again.”

  His voice is smooth. “I wouldn’t call it that.”

  “Then what would you call it?”

  He pulls his hair back into a ponytail, wrapping it with a rubber band from around his wrist of bracelets. “I think for it to be considered babysitting, I would have to get paid.” His voice is smooth like honey and I can’t tell if he’s being serious or joking.

  “You know,” I say, leaning my head back in my chair so I can look at him better. “They’re not really good friends if all they do is make you watch after their dumb little sister.”

  “I would be here anyway,” he said. “Even if you weren’t sitting next to me.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask. I try to ignore the ideas of him being up here, bored, because he doesn’t have a date. Those kinds of thoughts make me embarrassingly happy.

  He nods behind us, toward the second floor building. “I live here.”

  “In the store?”

  He grins. It’s the kind of grin that can really make you feel like an idiot for whatever you just asked. “All the stores in the building have an apartment upstairs,” he explains in that sexy freaking voice of his. “Bob and Carol own the smoke shop and they rent me the apartment.”

  “Do you live alone? Wait, does Marla-”

  He holds up his hand to stop me. “It’s just me.” He doesn’t seem to like Marla.

  “You look too young to live alone,” I muse, leaning forward to rest my chin on my hands.

  He nods. “I probably am.”

  The silence after that is deafening. It’s not that kind of weirdness that happens around cute guys, either. The tension I feel with Bluntz is different. All I want to do is find out more about him. I need to figure out this mysterious guy. “How long have you known Ben?”

  “Maybe three months.” Three months. That’s how long Ben had been dating Marla. That’s a relief. I ask, “So Ben is new to this … lifestyle, huh?”

  “By lifestyle, you mean?” He’s going to make me say it.

  I cringe. “Smoking…and all that.”

  “Not really. He’s been coming by the shop for a year or so.”

  “There’s no
way,” I say, shaking my head. “Ben hasn’t been smoking pot for that long.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  My head shakes so quickly it’s vibrating. “It’s just…so not my brother. He’s a good guy.”

  “He is,” Bluntz says with a nod.

  My eyes pierce into him. “Good guys don’t smoke pot.”

  His casual expression lifts into a grin. He shuffles in his chair, sitting forward so that we are only inches apart now. “Does that mean I am a bad guy?”

  “I—” My mouth falls open and I can’t seem to close it for an achingly long time. Finally, I shake my head. “You don’t seem like a bad guy to me.”

  “Then how can you say the same thing about your brother? Surely you care about him more than you do me, some guy you barely know.”

  I sigh. “It’s illegal. If Ben were smoking cigarettes, I’d be mad that he was giving himself cancer but at least it’s not illegal.” I stare at my hands because all of my arguments are starting to fall apart at the seams.

  Bluntz considers this a moment and then focuses his piercing brown eyes toward me. “The sad thing about our society is that yes, cigarettes are legal. They’ve also been proven to cause cancer. Alcohol rots your liver. Pot just makes you feel good.”

  “Pot rots your brain,” I say, holding up a finger as if I’m suddenly the smartest person in the world.

  “That’s not scientifically proven,” he says. His head tilts to the side as he watches all of my arguments fall apart. “Hard drugs are shit. I give you that one. If Ben walked in here wanting to try Meth then I’d kick his ass myself. Same with any other drug. But weed comes straight from the ground, from God Himself.”

  “I guess that makes a little sense,” I mutter.

  “It makes all the sense, Lexie. Pot doesn’t rot you. It doesn’t cause cancer. It takes away your anxieties, your fears, your worries. It lets you relax into who you are, into the moment.”

  His eyes narrow in on mine and a shudder goes through my body. “It makes you a better person. Maybe not for everyone…not the pathetic junkies who are high on several types of drugs at once. I’ll give you that one. But for a good person, it only makes you better.”