Read Online The Cake is a Lie by mcdavis3 - Free Book Online Page A

honors English, and solving equations on
the big board in math class. It was even worse during the car ride
with my mom and step dad over to Duncan’s house that night,
constantly aware that life would not go on if they smelled the
odor.
    It was all worth it. I walked into
Duncan’s basement, threw the baggy on his coffee table and sat down
next to him like nothing happened. Duncan was speechless, trying to
piece together what was happening.
    “ Is that weed, Marco?” He
calmly inquired after a moment.
    “ Maybe,” I replied
mysteriously. The baggy sat alone for five minutes while we tried
to out chill each other. When he finally picked it up to
investigate, my own urges became too much and I began trying to
grab it from him. I had to feel it again. We fought over holding
it, touching the sticky texture, smelling the bizarre aroma. The
weed was just one solid, really hard green thing. Not fluffy and
spread out in small bits like I’d always imagined. Jae had called
what he sold me a “nug.” He’d kept going on and on about how big of
a nug it was, how he was the best hook up ever. My favorite part
had been how tightly and crisply rolled up the bag had been before
I opened it.
    I kept unsuccessfully rolling the baggy
as tightly as I could to try and duplicate the way Jae had
originally wrapped it.
    Duncan told me his big weed story again
even though I’d heard it a dozen times.
    In 4 th grade his mom and her friends
let him puff on a pipe they were passing around. It was a stupid
story because it had a terrible ending–Duncan couldn’t even say for
sure if he’d gotten high or not. I’d demand he think harder and
remember, but he just couldn’t say.
    Soon I’d have my own weed story to brag
about. We had to roll it up though, I knew that was what you had to
do. Like cigarettes. Plus, one of our friends from the neighborhood
went through a phase where he’d meticulously pick out a variety of
colorful plants from his garden to roll up in newspaper and smoke.
We’d laugh and make fun of him, then we’d puff on one with him. It
was always quite a debate whether anyone was actually getting high
or not.
    I instructed Duncan to get me some
newspaper and some tape. I pulled apart the nug into smaller chunks
and lined them up on the paper. I roll it all up the best I could
and used a small piece of scotch tape to keep it together. Then I
put the concoction in my mouth and pretended to smoke it over and
over while we waited for his Dad to go to bed.
    I could hear his dad’s dateline murder
mystery through the living room floor boards above. “The sleepy
little town had no idea there was a monster on the prowl.” With
every creak and cough from above I looked up alertly in the hopes
of picking up some signal that he was finally going to
bed.
    I ran through my head whether this was
the right thing to do. As much nervous and scared as excited. I
reweighed the risks over and over. Everyone knew pot was the
training wheels of all drugs, if you were going to do one, might as
well be the absolute safest. I mean, I’d never do cocaine. I
wouldn’t bike down dead-man’s hill, but pot had never killed anyone
in the history of the world.
    I thought about all my idols that
smoked pot: Jonsen, Janae, Mia, Pacey, Loren. If they all ended up
drug addicts or dead what would be the point of living anyways? I
thought about Bob Marley, my dad’s favorite musician. Bob Marley
smoked weed his entire life. In fact, Rastafarians believed smoking
pot was the key to happiness. I’d read that the Rastafarians lost
all sense of time after a while. How liberating. My dad had never
touched a drug in his life. My nervous, anxious dad who ruined our
family. My dad who sets all his clocks ten minutes ahead so he was
never late. I thought deeply about it, but I’d made my decision
long ago.
    When Duncan’s dad finally went to sleep
we walked up to his kitchen then into his backyard. Arrogantly, we
didn’t open the creaky back door that