I MIGHT AS WELL BE a vampire. That’s how much time I’ve been spending in my closet lately. Being a college girl, constantly surrounded by dumb college guys, I can already hear all of the dumb-college-guy-caliber comments, so let me say, for the record: I’m not gay (I still fly the flag), and I’m also not rubbing one out.
I’m in here writing letters I then shred, and packaging one of the Seven Wonders of the World into Mason Jars. Also, obsessively Googling the name “Robert,” paired with a few key phrases.
Weird, I know. But weird is not a bad thing.
The letters are personal. Private. I don’t write them very eloquently, but that’s okay, because no one is ever going to read them. I can’t seem to make myself mail any of them. It’s a good thing, I guess. A practical thing. But every time I listen to the grinding sound my shredder makes, I find myself rubbing my chest, because it hurts a little.
The name “Robert”—well, that’s personal, too.
As for the wonder, and the Mason jars... it’s business, baby. My business.
Yeah. I have my own business. I’m proud of that. I never have to ask Mom or Grans for money. I never have to want for anything material. Sometimes I buy things I know my sister Mary Claire wants, pull off the tags, and mail them home, posing them as “second-hand.” One day soon, I hope to set up a Chattahoochee College grant for a hearing impaired student from my hometown. Yeah, you guessed it: Mary Claire.
I do business on the black market, but I keep it as classy as possible. When I deliver orders, I have everything all cute and tidy: product inside a baggie, tied at the top with a little strip of ribbon (sometimes I even do different sorority colors), then the baggie tucked into a Mason jar with an adorable colored lid. (Sometimes, I make the lid match the ribbon—if that’s possible, given my limited selection of colored Mason jar lids).
Like most things I do these days, I make dealing drugs look effortless. And it is—mostly.
For the record, it’s not really “drugs.” It’s weed, which is legal in some states and will probably be legal everywhere in another decade. That makes me a trailblazer.
Getting my cute Mason jars organized and ready to blaze is no easy task. For starters, my bedroom is the size of a square of Chiclet chewing gum, and located in a sorority house, which is officially drug free. Even worse, it’s wedged between the bedrooms of Milasy and Stephanie—my sorority’s president and vice president, neither of whom, you might have guessed, is showing up for any pro-marijuana rallies.
So yeah. I have to be covert. And that means packaging in my closet. It’s not a big closet. It’s where my desk is, and also where I keep my LELO. The walls are bright pink, courtesy of the last Tri Gam treasurer.
Right now, I’ve got less than thirty minutes until our Wednesday night chapter meeting, and here I am: slaving away over my precious buds. Picking out stems and seeds that Kennard told me wouldn’t be there this time. Freaking Kennard. Medical grade my tight, tanned ass. This shit is barely even mid-grade. Bitches like Holly and Neda will probably try to get a discount. I can’t do discounts. Not this week or any week.
I look down at myself: at my Seven jeans, my Gucci boots, my pink Kors sweater. These things don’t buy themselves. I need money to survive here, in this lifestyle. Without my dealing, I’ve got nothing but a scholarship and a room down at the mold-infested swamp dorms. I might have good grades, and I might go to a lot of trouble to keep myself in good physical condition, but you think the campus’ most exclusive sorority would let me in if I wasn’t forking over giant quantities of the green stuff? (Not that green stuff. I’m talking about Benjamins). Not a chance in hell.
People here think I’m a rich girl. A rich, delinquent girl who likes pushing boundaries and breaking rules. It’s so not true. I was the girl found crying in the first grade bathroom because I wasn’t coordinated enough to put one foot right in front of the other as the students in my class filed, in a line, from our class room to the lunch room.
My mother is a seamstress, and my dad died when his eighteen-wheeler rolled over, hauling logs from Dawson