by Jeremy Roller

At school, I first ran into Jake in the hallway. I whispered to him that I couldn’t remember anything. As I was talking to him, Michael, a student and occasional customer, gave us a nasty look. He said something under his breath as he passed. We shrugged it off. Jake told me that he took a Xanax shortly after I did and was equally befuddled by the experience. He didn’t even realize I slept at his house. We scanned the classrooms, then found and signaled our friends to meet at Cypress.



I began the interrogation — “The fuck happened last night?” Jake nodded his head in accord.

“You guys really don’t remember?” Ziti replied. “Xanax fucks with your head, when you take too much you can’t remember shit.”

Siggy began saying, “I can’t believe you guys don’t remember. We left Ziti’s half an hour after you took it and went to Michael’s party,” he continued. “You know? My friend who needed bud?”

I had no fucking clue.

“What happened at the party?” I inquired. “I woke up at Jake’s this morning all fucked up. Look at my face.”

“Yeah, we got into a fight with Michael,” Shane explained. “He tried robbing us. When we got to the party, him and a few of his friends cornered us in the basement telling us to give it all up. ‘Well fuck that,’ I said. Then Ziti just rocked him in the face and the whole party got involved. Cops came and everything.”

“That’s why he looked at us that way,” I laughed. “Anything come of that?”

“Well we can’t go to his parties anymore.” Siggy said.

“We fucked them up pretty bad. They had it coming, trying to rob us and all. Someone must’ve heard it happening upstairs and called the police. Once we heard the sirens, we grabbed their liquor, kicked in their window and ran to the park.” Ziti said.

Jake remembered, “Yeah! Jeremy, we hid in that tree for a while and smoked a joint!”



Apparently we all split up after the party for a while until we had a second run in with the police that night. While high, Jake was adamant about getting beer. For whatever reason, the idea popped into his head and wouldn’t shake. As we sung songs and cradled our bottles under the moonlight, we eventually passed a gas station. Jake had a bright idea, “Let’s go in there and steal it.” And so we did. Jake and Shane distracted the employee at the counter while Ziti and I poorly attempted to hide two twelve packs of Bud Light under our hoodies. Somehow the clerk didn’t catch our lazy effort out the door. We began running down the block just to make sure. Siggy waited for us a few blocks down.



In a fit of bad luck, a cop just so happened to be turning the corner to see two plainly underage boys running with cases of beer. He flipped on his lights, probably out of curiosity, and careened onto the block where Siggy was waiting. I was straggling behind Ziti and made it to the street shortly after him. I saw him face down on the police cruiser with his hands behind his back — beer cans strewn on the sidewalk. I doubled-back and ducked into an adjacent car wash. I stashed the beer and hopped the fence. I took off my hoodie and removed my hat in a hastened disguise attempt. I kept jumping over fences through people’s backyards until I eventually wound up at Jake’s house.



“I vaguely remember that,” I said as memories began coming back. “I looked through my texts from last night, and I remember saying ‘I got the beer,’ ‘Where are you?’ and things of that sort. Whatever happened?”

“The cop just had me pay for the beer and my mom had to pick me up. Did you stash that beer you got anywhere?” he replied.

“Yeah.” I told him.

“Let’s grab that after school, man.” he said as we walked back into class.



Over the course of the next few months, we made various connections for better prices and higher quality product still within the realm of familiarity. Siggy abandoned his old friend group and so it became me, him, Ziti, Shane, and Jake hanging out every day. We didn’t consider ourselves dealers, or even delinquents, — but we became notoriously so. We were lawless teenagers. We didn’t know of anything different. We began attracting the attention of the principal and frequently served detention throughout the week. Yet everything was so easy and we stuck together. There was never a second-guess if any of us would have each other’s back. That was a given. This was especially true with snitching. In school, the staff had heard our names strung together in the same sentences but we’d never admit that we actually hung out. That way if one of us ever were to get caught, it wouldn’t be linked to another one of us, and another, and another.

