So one might criticize my reaction to that initial night of sexile, since the blue scrunchie maneuver was something I might have given Peter reason to think was okay. (I hope to god Peter didn’t show that Chinese girl his “blue scrunchie maneuver” if you know what I mean, because what I mean is some kind of sex act).
The next day I got up and left the room without speaking to him. I made up for my lack of sleep by getting an extra couple of shots in my Frappuccino, which is a made up word… though it could be real, seeing as how the Oxford English Dictionary is written by word-whores who just want their vocabulary “bigger! Bigger! BIGGER!”
Later that evening, Peter was playing Starcraft and I was like “Hey. Last night was not cool.”
He turned away from his zerglings. “Oh, no, brah! It was very cool!”
“No. I mean, did it even go through your head that I was asleep? That I need sleep? For like, those times later when I need to be awake?”
“Brah, you got to chill the fuck out.”
“You keep calling me brah. I’m not a breast enclosure.”
“Yeah, brah. Like Bro, but kinda lazy, you know? Like lazy bro is brah.”
“Are you speaking English?”
“I’m from Jersey, brah. ‘Course I speak English.”
Even now, I maintain that that statement is dubious.
“Speaking of Jersey, I’m going for a smoke.” What kind of euphemism might one be positing if one was to “smoke a Jersey” I wondered. Some kind of sexual friction combined with sportsware? A shitty and esoteric marijuana reference?
And that got me thinking. I had already seen Peter sexile me. I had already seen him smoke outside the building, and just that morning detected the faint waft of motherfuckin’ Parliaments in my towel, leading me to suspect that he had been smoking in our poorly ventilated bathroom as well, but… did he smoke pot?
At the time, I wasn’t one to jump to conclusions about people, but his stars did seem to be lining up to form the southern hemisphere constellation Drugus Fiendus. Having seen him leave the room ten times in the last two days to smoke, I knew already that he’d be gone for at least ten minutes. I got up and walked over to his desk, pulling out the drawers it contained and rifling through their contents. I felt the cool fingers of morality plucking at my heartstrings, but the thought of my sexile (or more accurately his sexiling of me) jammed them into the fretboard of my sternum. His penchant for lackadaisical familiarity, that is, his reference to me and all others (especially, curiously, the fairer sex) as one of his “brah’s” then snapped morality’s wrist and I kept pawing through his things.
There it was: in the far back of the lowest drawer, the big one that seems like it should hold manila folders nicely but is secretly a centimeter too thin, was a thin metal case with a tiny latch. His stash was mine. I opened it with haste, thinking already of Campus Police’s number and the location of my perambulatory cell phone, and already leaping imaginative bounds towards that wonderful future of Peter’s lengthy imprisonment and my uninterrupted slumber. I found, to my horror, an empty box.
Not even the barest flecks of resin lined it’s cold interior. I sniffed it, and found it odorless.
I should note here that I am not a drug user. But, having gone to public high school in California, I have seen enough drug use for a life time, and know well the dank scent of cheap weed, for it is the smell I hearken back to every time I pee, as it was the pervading scent of my high school bathrooms.
My mind reeled. This was so clearly a stash box. But it was unstashed: virgin, pure, exactly unlike the girl Peter had brought home last night, whose vague intoxication and high-pitched giggle as she had passed me reminded me more of a harem anime love-doll than such states might reflect an actual flesh-and-blood human being. But the box… the box was clean. I jumped to the only logical conclusion–Peter was Mephistopheles himself, come down to earth to play mind games with me.
Was this empty stash box some kind of Hickory Stump from which Peter was going to challenge me to fiddle-duel for my soul? Or was it just part of the opening gambit of some longer Faustian combat?
Only time would tell.
