6. Andrea

CHAPTER 6

Andrea

" W ow," Priya says in a low whisper from up in the passenger seat. "I'm touching marijuana."

She's holding the plastic bag featuring the dispensary's logo with just the tips of her fingers, like it's an ancient relic from an Indiana Jones movie—awe-inspiring, but possibly about to shoot out poison darts at anyone who tries to touch it.

I press my lips together to keep from laughing and look over at Naomi in the seat beside me. Her shoulders are shaking like she's trying not to laugh too. I lean forward, trying to catch her eye, and when she notices me, I grin and tilt my chin toward Priya.

The corners of her mouth twitch up into the hint of a smile, but then her gaze drops to the floor of the minivan. I notice her fingers are clamped around the edge of her seat, squeezing hard.

Like I make her nervous.

I can't tell if I want to reassure her enough to make her grip loosen, or if I want to lean in even closer and see exactly what happens when Naomi Waters runs out of places to hide.

Something clenches low in my stomach, and I turn to look out the window instead. Whatever I want to do probably shouldn't happen in the backseat of a van with her two best friends sitting up front.

Whatever I want to do probably shouldn't happen at all. I shouldn't even be in this van. I should be working on sorting my life out, but it's hard to say no when the universe delivers an infinitely more fun opportunity.

I rest my temple against the cool glass of the window and watch the tourist-packed streets of downtown Ottawa go by. We're close enough to the ByWard Market that every sidewalk is lined with tour buses and frazzled staff with clipboards running around to organize their groups. The sight brings back a few fragmented memories of a first grade field trip when they took us downtown to see the Parliament buildings. That was way back before the divorce, when Mom and I still lived in Ottawa with Dad.

I push the memories away before they can start to sting, and then I tune into what Priya and Shal are saying up front.

"It's easy to get way too high on edibles," Shal tells her sister. "Trust me. I've seen it happen. It's better that we actually smoke."

She steers the van onto the winding parkway that runs along the Ottawa River and over to Dad's mansion-laden neighborhood, dark sunglasses covering her eyes. She speaks like someone who's seen it all, but I've spotted a few cracks in her confidence during the couple hours I've known her. She almost reminds me of my mom.

Everything about Shal is calculated, carved from hours of effort to look like it takes no effort at all. She sucks in her surroundings and spits them back out as whatever the people she's looking to impress expect.

Experience with my mom tells me that on the rare occasion she can't meet those expectations, she crumbles, all the versions of herself she's worked so hard to construct crashing down around her in a heap.

"I can't believe we're doing this," Priya says, still grasping the bag I handed her like she's considering chucking it out the window. "This is so illegal. This is the most illegal thing I've ever done."

This time, I can't help laughing out loud.

Shal's head tilts up to look at me in the rearview mirror. "What's the most illegal thing you've ever done, Andrea?"

There's a hint of a challenge in her voice. I feel a smirk taking over my face before I can stop it.

"It was probably the time I spent my birthday participating in an ecstasy-fuelled orgy inside a government building me and my friends broke into as part of a political protest," I answer, tacking on a wistful sigh at the end. "What a way to ring in my sweet sixteen."

Naomi makes a sound like she might have just choked on air. I glance over and find her eyes are bulging out of her head.

" Sixteen ?" Priya squeaks, the bag sliding off her fingertips to land with a plop on the floor of the van.

Even Shal has gone silent, her mouth opening and closing like she's trying to talk herself into calling my bluff.

I can only keep a straight face for another couple seconds before I burst out laughing. "Oh my god, you guys, I'm kidding."

I wait for them all to let out nervous laughs of their own before I add, "Or am I?"

I manage to catch Naomi's eye again, and I can't resist the urge to wag my eyebrows at her. She's still laughing, reaching up to cover her mouth as her cheeks flush pink.

"What made you all want to try weed anyway?" I ask, settling farther into my seat and stretching my legs out.

They all get quiet, darting looks between each other as we turn off the parkway and onto a residential street.

"Well…" Priya begins. "We have this, um, list that—"

" Priya ." Naomi grinds her friend's name out through clenched teeth. I look over to see her shooting a pleading look at her friend, but Priya is still staring out the windshield.

"Is it a…secret list?" I ask, directing the question at Naomi.

She looks like she'd rather jump out of the van than answer, but after a moment, she sighs.

"It's not a secret," she says. "It's just our…summer bucket list…thing."

Her face is shifting from a glowing, timid pink to a blazing, embarrassed red, and I can't tell which colour is cuter on her.

"Well…" I can't stop myself from leaning a little closer to her. "If item number one is smoking a joint, it sounds like you're in for a pretty fun summer."

"Actually, it's item number three," Shal says. "We're not really going in order."

"So what are one and two?" I ask. "And how long is this list? Now you've got me curious."

"It's, uh, just ten things," Naomi answers.

"And those things are…?"

She twines her fingers together in her lap and stares down at them as she speaks.

"Well, number one is, uh…" She stops and coughs. "I think number one is skinny dipping."

I feel that tightening low in my stomach again, the sensation sharper this time.

I can't stop staring at her as I answer, "This is sounding like a very fun list."

We turn onto my dad's street, and the process of getting through the gate and out of the car keeps me from asking anything else until we're in the house.

"Do you have this summer list written down somewhere?" I ask once we're gathered around the kitchen island, the dispensary bag resting in the middle of the marble slab like an autopsy subject.

Once again, they all share a few glances, like they're having a silent debate about whether or not they should be embarrassed.

"Oh, come on," I urge. "I bought you weed. The least you can do is let me know exactly what I've enabled."

Nobody moves.

"Or not," I add, lifting my hands in surrender. "If it's some kind of secret BFF pact, I—"

"Okay, we might as well show her," Shal says with a huff. "We're not cringey enough to have a secret pact. It's just a list of things we want to make sure we've all done before we go off to school in the fall."

School in the fall.

The words feel like a chilly breeze sweeping into the kitchen, sucking up the summer before it's even had time to begin. That cold wind carries my mom's voice from this morning back to my ears.

Just because you decided you needed this whole gap year thing does not mean you get to opt out of being a grown-up.

To her, it didn't matter that I'd been working a full-time job and paying my share of the rent every month. It didn't matter that I did my groceries, my laundry, and even my taxes. If I wasn't working for the company, I was giving up.

On her.

On myself.

If I had any idea of what else I'd do with my life besides take the internship, maybe her disappointment wouldn't matter so much. Maybe I'd feel like I could be enough to make her proud even if I didn't take the job.

Only I don't know what else I'd do. I don't know what I'm good at besides bantering with customers while I wait tables and keeping people entertained at parties by playing stupid little songs on my guitar. I spent a whole year trying to build a life that let me finally breathe the way I never could in Toronto, but all I did was postpone the suffocation.

My shoulders tense, and I have to fight to keep all the muscles in my face from clenching.

If I'm going to get on a train straight back to where I started, the least I can do is make the most of the time I have left.

"Let's see this list then, ladies" I announce, my voice loud enough to echo through the kitchen, "and then let's get high."

"I don't think I'm feeling it."

Naomi's voice is sluggish and dreamy. She keeps running her hands over the planks of the deck, where she's lying flat on her back. I'm sitting on one of the rattan couches with a blanket wrapped around my shoulders and a bowl of popcorn in my lap.

"Like, my brain is all fuzzy, but I don't think I'm high."

I laugh, and a piece of popcorn flies out of my mouth. I'm buzzed enough that I think it's funny instead of embarrassing. "Yeah, hate to break it to you, but that's kind of the definition of being high."

"Oh." She screws her face up like she's thinking really hard. " Ohhhh . Okay. Yeah, yeah maybe I'm high."

I laugh again and pull the thin blanket a little tighter around me, mostly to ward off the couple mosquitoes that have started to buzz around the deck. The air outside is still hot enough to feel heavy against my skin, but the sun has almost sunk below the horizon in the pink-streaked sky, and I know the temperature will be dropping fast.

The girls took so long to work up their nerve that we ended up eating dinner together before anyone even took the pre-rolled joints out of the bag. We each took a few puffs while sitting out here on the deck.

Priya somehow got way higher than all of us despite smoking the least. We spent a good half hour trying to keep her calm and assure her that her heart wasn't beating loud enough to burst her eardrums. At some point, she went from paranoid to extremely sleepy and passed out on one of the lounge chairs, where she's still snoring loud enough to make Naomi and I jump at the noise every few minutes.

Once Priya was out of commission, Shal decided she wanted to experience music while under the influence and has been sitting cross-legged on one of the pool chairs while staring up at the sky with her headphones on for long enough to put a meditation master to shame.

Turns out I'm the only one who's got the munchies.

"You doing okay?" I ask Naomi when she pauses her stroking of the deck and frowns.

"Yeahhh." She drags the words out and bobs her head in a couple slow nods. "I'm just not really sure what to do about my existence, you know?"

"Huh." I pop another handful of popcorn in my mouth and chew for a moment. "That's a really stoned thought, and I don't think I'm quite on your level, but somehow, I think I know what you mean."

She wrinkles her nose, and even my high brain can't ignore how cute she looks doing it.

"You do?" she asks.

I nod. "Uh-huh. I was taking a gap year in Montreal before I start this internship at my mom's company in Toronto, but honestly, I was hoping a year would be enough time to figure out what else I could do with my life. I thought a new city and a new guy would help me find the answer, but I just…didn't. Sometimes it felt so close it was like…like a little butterfly flitting around my head, but every time I turned to look at it, it was just gone ."

I swirl my one of my fingers through what's left of the popcorn and realize I might be higher than I thought.

"Sometimes I feel like there's this…this thing other people have that I don't," I continue, "or at least, I haven't found it yet, but everybody expects me to have it, so I look for it, but I never find it. Sometimes I get so close, but it always slips away. Always. So I fill myself up with other things instead, but they…they just make me feel even more empty. Sometimes everything in the world makes me feel so goddamn empty, and I don't know why."

I stare hard into the popcorn bowl, like the fluffy white lumps are going to arrange themselves into a message from the universe, some buttery epiphany that will give me the answers I'm dying to hear, but all I see is popcorn.

I scoop up another handful and keep eating.

"That sounds lonely," Naomi murmurs.

Something about her voice makes my chest ache.

"Yeah," I say, lowering my voice to match hers. "I guess it is."

"I'm lonely a lot too."

I go so still I even stop chewing, something in my brain deciding that even the sound of popcorn squeaking between my teeth might scare Naomi off.

Hearing her speak almost feels like taming a deer, like I'm luring her in with a handful of clover, stretching out my hand in some wildflower-strewn meadow to show her I'm safe.

Only I lured her with marijuana, and I don't know if I am safe for her.

I know I probably only keep trying to flirt because we're both here and queer. She doesn't seem like she's down for a hook-up, and even though making her blush is becoming my new favourite hobby, part of me knows I'm not either.

I've never had sex with a girl, and it's not that I'm waiting for some magical moment of being deeply in love, but I'd probably rather it didn't happen with a girl I'll never see again in a couple days at a time in my life when I'm living out of garbage bags.

"I feel like I'm missing something as well, something everybody else has, just like you said," she tells me, staring up at where a few inky streaks of indigo have started to bleed into the pink sky. "There are things that just seem so easy for everyone else, so natural, but they take so much work for me. Every second I'm around almost every other person in the world feels like work. It's exhausting, and it makes me so anxious I literally throw up for no good reason sometimes. Isn't that crazy? I'm crazy, right?"

The dreamy tone fades from her voice, revealing an aching self-loathing so raw it makes me want to jump off the couch and squeeze her so tight she never has to feel lonely again.

"You're not crazy. Don't say that, Naomi."

"How do you know?" she murmurs. "You've known me for two days, and I've barely said anything to you. I literally hid in my bedroom because I was so afraid to talk to you, and if I weren't too stoned to even consider getting off this deck, I'd still be terrified to talk to you now. You must think I'm a little crazy."

"Hey." I give in to the urge to be closer to her and lower myself down to sit cross-legged on the deck beside her. "Hey, hey, hey."

She snorts. "Hay is for horses."

That makes me giggle, and in a matter of seconds, we're both laughing so hard we end up wheezing and clutching our stomachs.

"Wow, we really are stoned," I say once we've managed to calm down. "But look, what I came down here to say is that none of that makes you crazy. Everyone is their own flavor of weird, and I think yours is…pretty damn cool. You're pretty intriguing, you know that?"

She lets out an unconvinced huff.

"I mean it," I urge. "I mean, come on, we have the same favourite movie. That means you're at least somewhat cool."

I watch the corners of her mouth lift, and for a second, I feel like I've managed to pull the sun back up over the horizon.

"And now that you've managed to talk to me, you can't go back to hiding in your room, okay? We've reached a new level of familiarity we can't go back from."

She keeps grinning. "Um, I don't know if that's how weed works, so I guess I'll just have to take your word for it."

I nod. "Yes, you will. Besides, I've already seen your pickle pajamas. You can't get much more familiar than that."

She groans and clamps her hands over her face.

"Oh my god," she moans from beneath her palms. "I still can't believe you saw those."

"I thought they were pretty cute."

The words slip out before I can stop them. Naomi stiffens before she slowly peels a hand from off her face and turns to blink one of her eyes at me.

She really is very pretty, even when she's so stoned she seems to have forgotten to put her other hand down. The half of her face I can see catches the last of the light in the sky, reflecting it in the depths of those swimming pool eyes of hers.

She has eyes like summer: filled with long, lazy hours sparking with the potential to turn into something unforgettable.

Only I'll be gone before those sparks turn into fireworks. I'm leaving, and they must be meant for someone who isn't me.

Someone who has whatever it is I don't.

"Andrea…" she says.

Something about my name on her lips feels like magic, like she's taken the sound that's followed me around my entire life and turned it into an incantation I've never heard before.

My name is a spell, and it's pulling me closer.

We're way too close. Her eyes are the size of two moons, big enough to turn all my tides.

I must have gotten absolutely stoned out of my mind without realizing it because I can't stop moving closer, and I can't stop thinking crazy things about moons and sparks and her saying my name again and again and again.

"I HAVE REACHED ENLIGHTENMENT!"

Shal's shout is so loud even Priya sits up on the couch, glancing around with bleary eyes and a bit of drool on her chin. Naomi and I scramble away from each other like we've been zapped by a mosquito rod, and I realize I'd been leaning over her while she'd been rising up to meet me. Our faces were only a few inches apart.

I do an awkward backwards shuffle until my back thumps against the side of the nearest couch. I sit there with my heart pounding in my ears as Shal stumbles across the lawn towards us with her arms held up like some kind of messiah.

"Enlightenment!" she repeats. "I have found it!"

Priya rubs her eyes and mutters something under her breath. Shal reaches the edge of the deck and clutches the banister while she climbs the short set of steps up to meet us.

"That's…cool?" Naomi says.

Her voice is a little breathless, and the sound makes my heart beat even faster.

"I don't really remember what it is," Shal says, facing us with her hands on her hips, "but I found it halfway through Taylor Swift's discography, and no one can take that away from me."

I give her a short round of applause, since focusing on anything that will distract me from Naomi seems like a good idea. "Amen to that."

Priya gives a disoriented shake of her head and stares at my hands. "Your hands sound weird. Am I still high?"

"I'm going to go with yes," I tell her.

Shal navigates a path around us towards the house, moving like she's trudging through piles of sand.

"Come!" she shouts. "I need snacks, and I don't know how to work the fridge."

I'm sober enough to know you don't need to work a fridge, and the fact that Shal isn't means she's definitely going to need help in the kitchen. I push myself up to my feet, and even though the backyard looks a little hazy, it's not nearly enough to justify how dazed I felt with my face so close to Naomi's.

A shiver runs through me as I turn and head for the sliding door, ignoring every instinct in my body that's screaming at me to look back at her.

I can't look back. I have to leave this house. I don't know what I'm missing in my life, but I know I'm not going to find it getting high at my dad's house and using the nearest shiny, exciting thing I find to fill me up before I start feeling empty again.

I reach for the door handle while Shal stands waiting for someone with functional motor skills to pull it open, and I tell myself I'll book the train to Toronto in the morning.