Reggie declared that rich kids like opiates from their parents’ medicine cabinets and buy Adderall from the back pocket of another private school kid and snort coke off of smooth knuckles. Nobody gets arrested; they get sent to rehab.
“Weed,” Reggie proclaimed, standing on the break room couch for his lecture’s finale, “Is what
tells these brats who bitch about the hot tub jets and the bedsheets not being at a high enough thread count that we,” he swung a finger between me and Jen, still in our uniforms that smelled like grease and, always and oddly, of the lobster tank, “Are not like them. We are below, if not unseen.”
“Under the sea,” Jen crooned.
“You’re stereotyping,” I said.
“You’re naive,” he retorted before adding, “They’re all the same.”
And tonight, as a sneer jumps between the four sunburned faces around the bonfire, I can feel
myself fading into my prior invisibility.
“All you brought is weed?” One of them—Lauren—asks.
“It’s really good,” I try. My voice is pathetic and watery. The ocean continues its thrashing in the
dark, flicking silver daggers of moonlight at me with each foamy crest. A salted wind tugs hair from my ponytail. I remember my uniform, shoved into my backpack. I hope the wind doesn’t free its stench.
Emily’s smile wavers and my stomach clenches. Smoke stings my nostrils. Why would I think
she liked me? All she did was touch my shoulder when she asked if I wanted to meet her on the beach tonight.
“Could you bring something?” She’d added, one eyebrow raised with a glossy smile.
I knew she meant drugs but I could barely answer from my dry mouth. She brushed my faded
gold hoop earring with a finger. I nodded helplessly. She was blond and her eyes were a languid,
springtime green. I’m stupidly easy—I get heartbroken by girls who never would’ve been friends with me in high school. Or today, actually.
I wanted so badly to please her. But now, I wish I could burn my humid ziplock of weed.
“‘Em, I thought she had stuff,” a girl whines.
“I do,” I say. My chest pinches.
“We don’t want that shit,” someone sniggers.
“Guys,” Emily tries but her protestation is swallowed by a log’s pop as it splinters in the pit. I stare at the bursting flames as they devour the flimsy wood.
“Did you make a pool boy do this?” I nod to the fire. When I joined them, I hadn’t thought about
them arranging the wood and striking the match but now I can barely imagine it, the image flickering like an apathetic mirage.
Their silence tells me I’m right.
My eye catches Emily’s and I remember her father shoving his plate of steak at me. “I said
medium-rare,” he snapped. She picked at her salad without flinching as he continued, not to me but to the wife, “First the terrible room service and now this?”
The wife nodded. When I turned away, I heard Emily’s airy response to her father, “This morning’s eggs were terrible.”
Now, her eyes drop from mine but I’m the one who feels caught in my own naïveté, stupid and
hot-blooded. My cheeks flush. With pursed lips, I stand and kick sand until the fire is extinguished, the girls coughing.
“What the hell!” One of them—all of them—cries.
Get your own drugs, make your own fire. I go up the beach without a backward glance, clutching
my ziplock and backpack, crammed with the apron and button-down shirt that I won’t have time to wash before the morning’s shift.
If you like what you’ve read here, help keep the site going and
Valerie Hughes
Valerie Hughes (she/her) is a writer from New York, NY. She has been published the websites Breadcrumbs Mag and Paragraph Planet. She writes fiction (long form, flash) and the occasional poem. She is currently working on a novel about re-exposure to trauma, desire itself, and desire to gain control over the past through the present.