Society Dysfunctional

1. Weed Hoard

Chapter 1 – Weed Hoard

Thomas

I can bet on my parents’ entire estate that there was not a single person here who didn’t want Eddy O’Doherty dead—and that’s saying a lot. We dreamed about wringing his neck, we spoke of tossing him off the roof and letting him free-fall thirteen stories down, we discussed taking a Colt .45 and shoving the barrel right down that bastard’s throat. I can also safely bet that not any of us had a single bad reason to do all those things. Hell, I bet I also had the most reasons to do so.

But on that night … I wasn’t the one who killed him. I swear.

Okay, I admit I was at the scene of the crime when it happened. But I only watched Eddy die. I didn’t move a single finger to help save Eddy O’Doherty, or even to help the killer get the job done. I only watched, my stupid brain trying to process if it was only a hallucination induced by all that crack or if this was the real shit. And then, when I figured out that this was actually real, I had walked away. I figured it was the nicest thing to do for Eddy; after all, I would very much have rather gone over to inspect the body before giving it a good kick to the face.

And anyway, you can’t lay all the blame on me by default. I wasn’t the only one there that night.

Juan leans back, reclining lazily as he slowly exhales the smoke. At the same time he does that, I press the cigarette to my lips, sucking in as much as I can while watching him silently. These stupid foster-home-slash-rehab people are trying to slowly get me off cigarettes by giving me lights. Soon, I’ll have none at all. But it’s no different from right now. Smoking these are like sucking on fucking straws.

“How many more days till they cut those too?” Juan asks, staring at the burning tip of my cigarette.

“Any time next week, I reckon,” I reply, letting it dangle from my mouth as I tap the password on my laptop rapidly before pressing enter. My desktop pops up, a photo of the football team. The football team I was the star wide receiver of. My chest tightens at the sight of it—I have no idea why I still haven’t changed the damned thing—and I open up iTunes with its screen maximized to block it out. “Those assholes think that’ll keep me off them forever, but they’re wrong.”

Juan sneers at that, crossing his legs at his ankles and staring out the huge windows of my room. It’s a beautiful day for a November afternoon. The sun’s out, the leaves surrounding the trees are a brilliant red—as if there are pools of blood surrounding them—and there’s not a single cloud in the sky. Three years ago it would have been beautiful to me. But now I have no cares for such little things; why waste life admiring the landscape? And anyway, I personally think it would look much better if I were high.

“I like this place the way it is now,” Juan comments absently, still looking out at the crisp fall scenery.

“Why?”

His head swivels to me and he raises an eyebrow. “Well, you know why.”

“No, I don’t. Please enlighten me.”

His eyebrow furrowing—the way it always does whenever I play clueless—he studies me long and hard for a moment before sighing. “Y’know, it’s much more quieter around here now that that prick Eddy’s gone. But damn, I still wish I knew where he stashed all those Marlboros.”

I do too. One of the millions of reasons why I wanted to kill Eddy O’Doherty was because that dickhead enjoyed hoarding the drugs and cigarettes Juan and I worked so hard at keeping hidden so we could survive our sentences here. The first time he had snatched that bag of powder just before I was getting ready to sniff it—how better to spend another lonely Friday night high with Juan?—I had slammed the kid into the wall, wanting nothing more than to beat the crap out of him. Just as my fist had met his face only once, Mrs. Cooper walked in on us. Thankfully he didn’t find the substances, but I had still been sentenced to three days in Isolation—which is just a fucking joke, by the way—and a call home. In front of me.