“It’s natural.”

“So is arsenic.”

“You drink and smoke! Those are so much worse.”

“They’re legal!”

“Weed is legal in some states!”

“That’s not entirely--”

“You told me you wanted to get high.”

(He thought of Will and that mischievous glimmer in his eye at the mention of his past.) “That was before I knew you better.”

“Said you wanted to escape your life!”

“And I’m here with you!” Hyde was emphatic but kept quiet so the kids in the loft couldn’t hear the argument.

Baylee’s eyes turned from disappointed anger to understanding. “I know how you feel about it and I’m sorry for pressuring you. I don’t want to be that kind of girlfriend. If you tell me to stop bugging you, I’ll stop. But you haven’t actually told me to stop yet, so part of me thinks that part of you doesn’t want me to stop.”

“You already sound high.” He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror of some scuzzy college kid’s studio apartment. He felt gross, but the dust bunnies in the sink made him reconsider washing his hands. He kissed Baylee’s forehead. “I’m not a prude. I want to smoke, but I want to be a good example for you because I don’t like when you smoke.”

“So you’re allowed to do it but I’m not?”

“I don’t know.”

“Figure it out, dork! We need to go back out there. This looks weird.”

“Bah! I wrote a winning speech in my sixth-grade D.A.R.E. class and I vowed never to--”

“Vow, vow, vow.” Baylee unbuttoned her jeans and pulled them down. She lowered the toilet seat and sat.

“Oh,” Hyde said. “Sorry.” He turned and grabbed the door.

“You’ve never seen a girl pee before? I thought you were married.”

“We do that separate.”

“Turn around and talk to me.”

Hyde obeyed.

“If you want to get outta here, we can go back to the hotel. I’d love to spend every second I can with--”

“I’ll do it.”

“Do it?” She wiped and stood.

“I’ll smoke with you.”

“You will? Are you sure?”

“It’s my decision and I say fuck it.”

Baylee squealed and pecked his cheek. “I promise you’ve been making a big deal out of nothing.”

Hyde searched the echoing caverns of his personality for his long-lost ego. Before the theater--before William--he was the alpha-dog in his circle of friends. But when he left them for Brandywine’s crazy neighbor-prophet, he quickly fell into the role of sidekick.

The kids sat in a circle of Goodwill couches and sheetless beds. As further proof of his waning social skills, he had already forgotten their names.

Hyde watched a girl accept a passing blunt as the host (Jeremy?) used an extension cord to plug in a toaster-shaped vaporizer. Hyde recognized the device from the small-appliance aisle of his store.

“Somebody got a cold?” a boy asked, stealing Hyde’s joke.

“Gives a cleaner high,” Baylee replied and took the blunt from Cougs. She brought the cigar to her lips as she explained the benefits of smoking cannabis with a vaporizer.

Hyde cringed. It wasn’t the fact that she was doing drugs that hurt him, it was casual ease at which she accepted and held the blunt; the way she inhaled the smoke without missing a beat of conversation. The notion of “being high” was a natural extension of Baylee that he didn’t yet understand, and with every moment that passed between her turn and his, he felt left out of some hilarious inside joke.

Bay’s voice dropped in pitch as she sealed the smoke in her lungs and reminded Hyde of his mother’s raspy croak in her final years. “People call it vapor, but that’s not the right word because it doesn’t use water. But it minimizes the smell so it’s good for home-use, and it doesn’t release carbon-monoxide into your blood so it’s healthier too.”

Hyde prepared himself for the blunt, but when Baylee finished her toke, she passed it over him to the couple on the chair. “Umm...”

“You don’t want the blunt baby. It’s just the seeds and stems from last night’s vaporizer.” She snapped her fingers to Jeremy. “Hey Jer, give my boy the hose.”

Everyone cheered. One of the boys cupped his mouth like a foghorn. “Viiiiiirgin.”

“Decided to pop your cherry after all?” Jeremy asked.

“I’ll try anything once!” Hyde said, feeding off the renewed excitement.

The kid settled into the couch between the girls. “It’s ready to go old-man. Just flip ‘er on.”

Hyde scooted the machine across the table until the hose reached his lips, then hit the blue switch. All eyes were on him.

Baylee touched his chest with her palm. “Remember, it’s not like a cigarette. You need to inhale for as long as you can, then hold it in your lungs--”

“--for a long time,” someone added. “Seriously bro, don’t exhale for like, a long-ass time.”

“Coughing is normal for first-timers,” Baylee said. “But you probably won’t do that as much with the vaporizer.”

Hyde put the tip of the rubber tube in his mouth and tried desperately to look cool. He looked to Bay, then inhaled.

“Suck it!” they cried and Baylee laughed.

Hyde’s eyes were wide and he nodded approval as if he could already feel the effects.

“Keep going!”

“Go, go, go, go!” the girls chanted.

He dropped the hose from his mouth and continued to nod.

“Don’t let it out!”

“Hold. That. Shit. In!”

Hyde looked around the circle. His face was probably bright red, but he didn’t break. When his brain screamed for oxygen, he exhaled a smokeless breath of air.

Nothing.

“You okay, baby?” Baylee whispered.

“Uh huh. I don’t think I did it right.”

She didn’t respond, but flicked her enormous pupils between his.

“My face feels a little tingly... but that’s all.” Hyde pouted and shook his head to the anxious spectators.

There was no transition. It just happened as if he realized he was awake instead of asleep. “Ha!” he blurted.

The group of girls fell together like bowling pins in fits of laughter while the couple in the chair nodded with knowing grins. Baylee raked her fingers through his hair and squeezed until it hurt. Her tongue tasted... better. Much, much, so much better.

For two years the worries wove in and through Hyde’s mind until they became a hairball of tangled knots and loose ends. But now his problems were sectioned into easily manageable cubbies like the clothes in his suitcase. Suddenly, he had the perfect words to make Kayla leave. He knew just what to tell Will so he could fix his relationship with Sarah. He finally had the poetry to explain his love for Baylee.

Somewhere between handfuls of Cheetos and his second cig, Hyde broke his silence with words both eloquent and profound. “I was nineteen when I dreamt that my mother had lung cancer. She was a smoker from the day she was born, so it made sense that the dream was a manifestation of my fears. I don’t remember the dream, but when I woke up I had this horrible feeling like I knew she was going to get cancer. There was this weight on my heart like God was telling me I had to talk to her; I had to tell her to quit. But at the time I was too busy learning to run a business. We didn’t have the sort of relationship where I could tell her big things like that... so I didn’t. I didn’t tell her about the dream and I didn’t tell her about my feeling of dread. On my twenty-first birthday, I was out with friends at a steak house eating peanuts by the bucket... my phone rings and Mom tells me she has ‘squamous cell carcinoma.’”

“I’m so sorry...” someone said.

“To this day there isn’t a doubt in my mind that my mother’s lungs were still clear on the night God gave me that dream. If I would have sat her down and just... talked to her...”

Baylee’s head was in his lap. She traced invisible letters on his knee but he couldn’t make out the words.

“God gave me the chance for a miracle... and I blew it.”

Baylee lifted her head from his lap and forced a smile behind a single black tear; not a blubbering mess of phlegm and spit, just a single droplet and he kissed it away.

*  *  *

It was Bay’s idea to ride out the remainder of the high with sex at the hotel (”It doubles the intensity of your orgasm,” she said), but a call from her best friend ruined the plan.

“I’m so sorry, sweet-boy. Jank is drunk off her ass and she needs a ride to a different party.”

Hyde reassured her by kissing her arm. “You’re a good friend.”

“It won’t take long. I’ll drop you at Cannonsburg and I’ll be back in twenty.”

“Cannonsburg? The ski resort?”

“That’s where the party’s at.”

“I can’t come?”

“She doesn’t want you to see her drunk.”

“You’re kidding. Why would I--”

“I won’t if you don’t want me to.”

He kissed her hand. “Of course I want you to.”

“I’ll make it up to you tonight. I promise.”

The mountain was chilly with a soggy blanket of spring fog. Bay left him beneath a lamp on a dirt patch caught between the road and a cliff. She seemed confident in her plan when she was explaining it, but as Hyde kicked a shoe-full of gravel down the rocks, he wondered if it was wise to listen to the expertise of a stoned nineteen-year-old.

At the loft, Hyde’s fear of being discovered fell to the wayside and made room for more positive and relevant thoughts. But now a car approached through the thickening fog and he could only assume the figure behind the headlights was an old friend. Shit, he needed to think of a good lie! Why was he was alone on a mountain instead of a business meeting? 

The headlights grew larger as the car ascended the winding hill. It was slowing down... he was sure it was slowing down! 

But it didn’t. It passed. And he exhaled.

The fog was tangible and pure like the constant stream of mist from the vaporizer. Hyde breathed in and held it, but it was only air.

Another car. Nowhere to hide. He sat on the dirt and scooted his butt to the edge of the hill and ducked his head. Trees--mostly pine--descended the cliff like green stalagmites into vapor. His feet kicked the tips and the second car passed.

Hyde thought of home. He thought of his stores. He thought of Kayla, beige walls, bible studies and nine-to-five.

When people heard the name “Hyde Whitaker,” what word or phrase did they first conjure? “Electronics?” “Dance?” “Dead Mom?” “White?” “William Carmel’s Friend?” Did Sarah have the same problem? Is that why she left? No job, no passion, no identity besides “William Carmel’s Wife?”

The night they met, Will knew Hyde better than he knew himself. Will saw a man so transparent he could have been the cookie-cutter prototype for every white, twenty-something male with a smorgasbord of stock hobbies and commonplace beliefs worthy of a phrase on a rock.

Baylee wasn’t just passion, she was definition.

“I don’t hide anything,” William once said as he devoured a lemon. “I destroyed my ambitions, rebuilt them, then left them behind.”

As Hyde’s mind rambled, the cool air packed the remaining fog into an eerie sheet at the base of the mountain. Grand Rapids was off to the left, blocked from his field of view by the mountain’s foliage. The Midwest landscape of farms and forest bucked and rolled to all corners of Hyde’s visible world, and scattered house lights momentarily distracted him with a game of connect-the-dots. He found a shark, a vacuum cleaner and a brontosaurus.

One lamp stood out. It was brighter than the rest and whitish-blue instead of yellow-orange. The rogue dot was closer to the horizon--above the horizon?--and Hyde suddenly understood the source of his mindset. It wasn’t the weed. It was that light.

His feet clamored against the cliff and he stood. He snapped out his arm and pointed at the distant light and screamed across the void, “What do you want me to do!” His voice skipped across the rippled fog like a flat pebble on a lake. “Do you want me stay with her? Is that the right thing?” Hyde knew it could hear him; that light, that stage. It heard everything, stalking him like those growing headlights, accelerating faster and faster but never passing. “I hate her!” he shouted. “Do you understand that?” But the spotlight remained firm.

Another pair of headlights and Hyde was trapped. Maybe it was Sarah Carmel’s car. Maybe she would understand the feeling of “no way out.” Maybe she too was hiding from that distant speck.

Hyde didn’t try to duck the approaching headlights. They slowed. They stopped.

It was only Baylee. And her friend was in the front seat.

*  *  *

Morning arrived without dream or nightmare, but morning was afternoon and Hyde awoke between them both; Baylee nude from head to toe, and Jank down to her underwear.

He slid his arms from beneath the girls, then sat up and massaged the sickness from his cheeks.

He didn’t remember when or how, but in black permanent marker--upside down from wrist to elbow--“U R MY EVERYTHING.”

Signed, “Baylee.”

*  *  *

The room smelled like lubricated sex and dying Chinese food, half eaten on the table by the blouse-shaded lamp that illuminated lace patterns across the wall. Bed sheets crisscrossed the naked mattress like discarded togas in an escalating war with the maid. Every morning the woman meticulously rebuilt the bed for Hyde and Baylee to destroy.

The bathroom tile was slick with puddles from yesterday’s bubble-bath and unblushing showers with open curtains.

Pastel bras, panties, pink tees and loose jewelry were meticulously sorted from Hyde’s dirty clothes which he checked for stains, refolded and organized back into suitcase cubes.

Scratch marks down his back, bite marks on his chest; Baylee wasn’t careful, but Hyde had to be.

The curtains blocked the sun’s reminder of passing time, but the bedside clock ruined the false-perception of infinity whenever he glanced at it’s digital display.

Girl in his arms, fully clothed for the first time today, Hyde spent these moments snapping mental pictures to preserve the experience. Fine white fuzz on her open shoulder, invisible to everyone but him, tank-top loose with a fallen strap. Snap. This could be the last time they touched; her toes under his pant leg, grazing his shin with clipped and painted nails. Snap. How could he make this last? Baylee’s cheekbone; eyes turned down in his arm. Her earring; metal links in a diamond shape, slack below her lobe. Snap. 

He would’t take these moments for granted.

*  *  *

What he said was, “Please be safe.” What he meant was, “Don’t be stupid.” 

Baylee didn’t just hug him, she jumped him, wrapped her legs around his waist and slobbered him a necklace of goodbye kisses. “I’ll be safe,” she said. “I promise.”

Hyde watched her reflection shrink in his rearview mirror through a world-blending glaze of tears. His pain clouded her figure; a puddly silhouette against kaleidoscopic downtown lights. He wiped his eyes and watched her until the last possible moment. The second she disappeared from view, his phone buzzed. 

“my last text 2 u: check ur glove box. xo”

Hyde didn’t open it but let the excitement linger as he batted wet lashes and searched for an empty lot. When the car was parked, he opened the glove compartment and found a plastic pipe, rainbow box of salvia, dime-bag, and note: “Whether or not the future brings us together, you’ll need these. Straighten things out on your end and we’ll do it again soon.”

“(ps. I love you.)”