You can't go home again. (Thomas Wolfe)

She invited us into the house. What a gem that was. I don’t mean to be stuck-up. I know this house marks the humble beginnings from which my mother pulled herself up from and I can appreciate that. I respect her more for having seen it. It’s not like I think money and nice things are everything but, come on, would it have hurt for my mother to send them a cheque or two? The orange-brown-vomit color of the shag carpet hadn’t been fashionable or even sanitary for a decade or two. Nothing matched. Everything felt like it was covered in dust, not because the house wasn’t being cleaned but just because everything was so old. There was dust embedded in everything so deep that no amount of cleaning would fix it up. The only bit of consistency in the décor was the religious paraphernalia guarding everything. When she hung up that cross-stitched “The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want” she really carried the theme throughout the house because I didn’t want anything there, hell, I didn’t want to touch anything there. I sound terrible, don’t I? Wait for what happens next before you get too sympathetic for my newfound grandparents.

We stayed for dinner. Potatoes that were cooked so long they crumbled at the sight of my fork. Meat that had been cooked so long it would take a jackhammer to break into it. Rice – what the hell are you doing here? Bread pudding; I think I’m ready for the cheque.

The conversation though, now that took the cake. After a decade and a half of absence my new grandfather, who just seemed to emit bad vibrations, managed to wait until the coffee and tea were served to lay into my mother.

“You must have your mother’s brains,” he told me after she made a big to-do about how smart I was. I’m not sure he even believed her about my intelligence, but my grandmother ate it up like the gospel gracing the walls. “Let’s just hope you have better sense than her. Speaking of which, where is Tommy?”

“He’s on a business trip with Tony and Senior.”

He raised an eyebrow and repeated, “A business trip?”

My mother took a long sip of tea before replying dryly, “Yes, a business trip.”

He slammed his cup down on the table breaking the handle clean off and spilling black coffee over the white table cloth. Things were getting exciting in the sleepy sanctuary.

He shouted at my mother: “Give it up!”  

They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other. (John Irving)

A firm rapping on the window startled me.

“Penny! Penny!” cheered the frayed-looking lady. “Penny, you came home.”

“Drive, just drive,” I said in a hushed but firm voice from behind my mother.

“Mom!” The word was like a ray of sunshine breaking through her gray cloudy face. Suddenly everything was in color.

My mother hopped out of the car and raced around to embrace her mother. It was a touching little scene. They both cried and I was uncomfortable. I tried to blend in with the black leather interior.

“Is this the baby?”

My mother didn’t make words just awkward sniffling snorting sounds. It was unattractive.

The woman, my new grandmother, climbed into the backseat and held me. She rocked me and cried. She smelled like beets. She was really soft but maybe not in a good way. She wasn’t nearly as beautiful as my mother. I wondered how long this hug would last. I began to go through the periodic table of elements in my head as I waited for it to end. I had a chemistry exam coming up and I didn’t need to but I wanted to memorize the periodic table. I got through the noble gases and she was still clenching me – it was beginning to hurt a little. I finished the non-metals and had recalled almost all the semimetals before she released me.

“Let me look at you,” she cried. “My God, you’re beautiful.”

Maybe I could warm up to this woman.

Tell me what life is like past that city limits sign. (Doc Walker)

The plane rocketed down the ad hoc airstrip we used to call a driveway. Thank God we were so far from the roadway because if our driveway had been any shorter they would have landed in the trees. I loved our house. I loved the grounds: the meadow, the forest, I loved it all. As I sang Leaving on a Jetplane loudly but muted under the noise of the engine I realized that would be me. I would be leaving. I felt a twinge of sadness in my chest and mentally began to say goodbye to my home.

Scotch hung around for the evening. We ate cake for dinner and drank coffee. We cried and complained and all our drawn words were ripe with concern. We watched Grease, the movie not the slimy oily substance. My mother and Scotch argued about who looked more like John Travolta: my father or Uncle Tony. The joke was on both of them because a blind man wouldn’t mistake either of them for John Travolta. It was nice though to sit with women and chat, I don’t know if I had ever chatted before. We sipped on red wine and I was nearly sober but I didn’t mind. I forgot what it was like to be a girl.

Scotch slept over. Uncle Tony’s bed would have been lonely without her. Since Scotch had come back into his life, no matter how intermittent her presence was, he slept well once again. Thus my father did the night shift alone. I’ll never understand how he lived his life without sleep. I guess the occasional hibernations were what got him through. He would crash sometimes and sleep close on a week. Still, if I pull an all-nighter with him I have to write off the next day. I need sleep – I think that’s human though. I don’t know what that says about dear ole Dad.

My mother drove Scotch home. Sometimes I forgot that she could even drive. I stayed in the backseat of my father’s Cadillac even after we dropped Scotch off. I pretended I was being chauffeured around town. When the car slowed in front of a modest little house, I was confused.

“Where are we?”

“This is where I grew up.”

“No,” I disagreed.

My mother had a faraway look and I thought she might cry.

“This is a dump.”

“No,” she dismissed, “this is a decent part of town.” She sighed as the car slowed to a stop. “It’s just as it was back then.”

“Why have we never been here before?”

“Your grandparents and I had a bit of a falling out.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“We didn’t see eye-to-eye on some things and they tried to take matters into their own hands and, well, here we are: estranged.” She wasn’t talking to me anymore. “I never imagined that I could be estranged from my family. We were so close and…” she swallowed as tears began building in her eyes. I thought she might be holding her breath. She cried a lot lately. I didn’t get it. Save an occasional spike in hormones that made me cry for no real reason, tears were foreign to me. Sometimes I cried to be dramatic and fuel fire to my cause of the day, but those weren’t real tears. Maybe I could be an actress when we moved out to the City of Angels.

Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons. (Donald Miller)

When we left our family owned a private jet.

When we left, the move away from the crime of Philadelphia had become a strategic move that put a significant spike in our family’s crime. We could go to the source. We could cart heroin all around the country to clientele anywhere, though it would likely just be those well-established in Philly and those to come in California. Senior didn’t understand that we wanted to get away from crime. To him, crime wasn’t a choice or an avoidable entity; it was simply our way of life. We were a crime family.

When I told my mother about the plane as she set out the meal that had just been delivered, she was shocked. Senior assured her that he had bought it as a going away present for us. It was a means of keeping us close even when we were a country away. Senior was smooth with words. As he explained that he couldn’t bear the thought of seeing us only on holidays and occasional vacations even I was convinced by his clear emotion. As he told her we could hop on the jet anytime we wanted to pop back for a visit even I was moved by his generosity. So I guess it wasn’t fair for me to think my mother a mindless drone for believing it all. But as she was moved to tears and hugged Senior thanking him for everything he did for us, I was sceptical as to the assumed intelligence we kept crediting to her.

Manipulation: making smart people do what you want is one thing, but I wanted to reach the next level, the Senior level. I wanted to have the power to make smart people think, feel, believe what I wanted them to. Senior was my hero. My father and my uncles had their shining moments but Senior was the spring, they were just the pooling water in comparison.

About a month later as I was counting down the days until we moved, the boys – even Senior – piled onto the plane bound for Vietnam. Their dirty diplomat had arranged for his source to provide a planeful for them.

I couldn’t decide whether or not my mother actually believed that this was just a little leisure trip. It didn’t matter because before he left my father told her the reality of it. I lay in my bed listening to her crying through the wall. It was dangerous, more so than other trips. They were returning to the country where drug dealers had shot Ricky dead. She had probably believed it was a leisure trip before Tommy came clean with her. He should have just left it well enough alone. Senior had an ability to turn the most farfetched lies into blindly followed gospel. I don’t know why he was compelled to tell her the truth when it wasn’t even him who had actually lied to her.

My father was not a righteous man, in fact, he was anything but a righteous man. He sat vacantly in a church pew back when my mother had forced us to go but that was hardly grounds for righteousness. Yet when it came to my mother, he followed all the rules: thou shall not lie, thou shall not cheat, or however those commandments go. If there was one thing I was sure of as a kid it was that no man would ever treat me as well as my father treated my mother. To be fair, I was also quite sure I would never treat a man as well as my mother treated my father. It’s a two-way street.

So all the men in my life left on a jet plane and John Denver said it first: I didn’t know if they’d be back again. I thought they would. I trusted them and their competence in the criminal world. However, the way my father spun my mother around in a youthful embrace just seemed to scream: don’t know if I’ll be back again, babe, I hate to go. Then her tears coupled with Scotch’s tears, well, it didn’t seem promising. Still, I thought perhaps they might be too dramatic. They were attached to gangsters, they weren’t gangsters themselves. They didn’t understand this business like I did, or thought I did anyway, at the sage age of 15.

You love it here. You've got to stay. (The Kooks)

My father put his arms around my shoulders as I sat at the kitchen table across from my mother. He kissed the top of my head. “This girl is brilliant. She’s so smart and grounded. I can’t believe this is my daughter.”

My mother smile meekly. “Let’s go.”

“Where are we going?” asked Uncle Tony when he walked in.

“We’re moving,” I told him with excitement. “We’re going to live with Uncle Rider.”

“In his bachelor apartment?” Uncle Tony asked.

“As it turns out he bought that whole building.”

“No? Since when is Rider a slumlord?” asked Uncle Tony.

My father shrugged.

“I don’t know about this,” said Uncle Tony.

“Going to miss us?” I chided.

“No,” he said looking away thoughtfully. “I’m just trying to figure out what I’m going to do with all the spare room.”

“Uncle Tony,” I cried.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll miss you. I’ll have to get Scotch to move in or something just to keep the place from getting depressing.”

“A ball of dust blows through the empty kitchen,” I envisioned. “Grass starts growing through the tiles. Spiders will be dangling from cobwebs in the corners.”

“When do you think this move will be?” asked Uncle Tony.

My father looked to my mother, who promptly informed him that it wouldn’t be until I finished school for the year. I sighed because that was my main motivation for getting out of Philadelphia.

“But that’s only another couple months,” complained Uncle Tony. “Have you even told Senior yet?”

“Told me what?” he asked as if speaking his name aloud had summoned him into the room.

“Tommy’s moving,” Uncle Tony said as if he was tattle-telling on his older brother.

“Where?”

“West,” my father said proudly, “with Rider.”

Senior considered this for a moment then walked away.

Everyone exchanged anxious looks. My mother opted to go for a walk about the grounds. As soon as she was out the door Uncle Tony reached for the heroin. The three of us got sufficiently high. Who says families don’t do anything together anymore? Then Senior returned with his jacket on.

“Come on,” he heckled and the boys jumped. We piled into his Mercedes and drove to an airstrip at the end of town.

“What are we doing here?” asked Uncle Tony.

“Making an acquisition,” Senior said with a sly smile.

“Are you buying me a new brother? I was getting sick of this one anyway. It’s for the best that he’s leaving.”

“Shut up, Tony,” my father said in tandem with Senior.

I giggled and touched my hand to Uncle Tony’s shoulder sympathetically. He shook his head at me as if to say: the stuff I put up with. I responded with a smile that said: I know.

Failure is a fantastic teacher. (Forces of Nature)

I hated school. I was smarter than all my teachers. I was better than all classmates. I dated guys just to manipulative and abuse them – not physically, but mentally and emotionally. It was fun and I liked the little injection of power into my otherwise mediocre lifestyle at school. I rarely brought them around the house and if I did it was only to torture and terrify them by letting the men of my family have a go at them. I never loved them, I rarely even liked them. For some reason they kept coming back for more. No matter how I treated them, they were like horses, once you broke them in they would do whatever you wanted, it didn’t matter how I yelled at them, ordered them around, or how hard I dug in my heels, they were mine as long as I wanted them. It was a social experiment more than a relationship each time. That was the other thing: there was no shortage of them. I cut one lose and there was another to take his place. It’s like they loved to be treated badly. It set a bad precedence in my love life.

One night my father was on the phone with my more or less estranged uncle in California. He was getting all excited. My mother rolled her eyes, not in the sarcastic, you-are-an-idiot way that I do it. She rolled her eyes in an oh-my-he-is-so-silly sort of way. When he got off the phone he announced: “We’re moving!”

“We’re what?” my mother asked.

“Moving,” my father repeated. “Rider was telling me about his life there and about all the opportunities. Remember when we visited him, we loved it.”

My mother nodded half-heartedly.

“Rider bought his apartment complex and now he wants to buy another one. He’s going to be a property tycoon. I told him about the crime here and the troubles Honey’s having and he told me we should move there. I can help him with his properties, you can teach, Honey can go to school with nice kids.”

My mother didn’t know where to start. “What about aerospace engineering? What happened to his career?”

“He failed the drug test. He’s getting clean and trying again. This property business is like his new drug, he’s addicted to it.”

“But he’s going to try again.”

“Yes, that’s why he needs our help. We can take care of things when he passes the drug test and starts his career.”

“I don’t know the first thing about managing properties.”

“You can teach. I’ll take care of it.”

“You don’t know the first thing about managing properties.”

“I’ll figure it out. I’ll be his second-in-command until he leaves and learn it all from him.”

“When did Rider become an expert?”

“I don’t know but he is,” my father said enthusiastically. My mother didn’t look as enthusiastic. “Our life would be so much better there. It’s sunny all the time and everyone is happy out there, why wouldn’t they be its sunny all the time. Come on, Penny, just think about this. We can’t stay here forever. We don’t even really like Philadelphia anymore. There’s so much crime and trouble here. We can start over.” He looked to me. “Honey, wouldn’t you like to start over?”

I knew he was referring to the hippie. I knew I was supposed to be upset about it. I pretended to be more moved by it because I knew it would worry them more if I didn’t care. My mother was more upset about it all than me. Sometimes while my father was luring around the kitchen in the middle of the night I could hear her crying in their bedroom. I knew she was lying in bed thinking about the body, thinking about the fact that her daughter was a murderer. She was thinking, she was crying. So when my father asked me, “Honey, wouldn’t you like to start over?”

I smiled brightly and said, “I’d love to.” I said it for my mother. She was apprehensive but I thought it was ultimately what she wanted.

“Are you sure, Honey?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It would be cool to see Uncle Rider more. We could go to the beach anytime we wanted. It would be an adventure. I love Philly, but it would be nice to broaden my horizons.”

Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping. (Anita Shreve, The Pilot's Wife)

So my family protected me. They took care of it. That was when I finally realized what it meant to govern ourselves.

Senior gave me the boat as a birthday present. He told me it was a small token to compensate me for my troubles. He apologized that I was unsafe in his house and promised that it would never happen again.

I named the boat Freedom.

Scotch didn’t come around much anymore and her friends had permanently moved on. There’s nothing like a murder to clear out a house. It was for the best because those hippies attracted a lot of attention from the police. My family did a lot that was outside of the law but they were quiet about it. They paid police when they needed to. They didn’t bother the general public. They operated as innocently as criminals could.

Hippies, however, have a different mandate. They want to change the world. They want peace and are willing to stir up as much unrest as required to achieve it. They want the law and the government to support their change so they argue and fight and challenge.

Gangsters merely operate in another realm. Agree to disagree, they politely tell the police.

It’s ironic really the way hippies want peace but gangsters achieve it. How does protesting, which is anything but peaceful, bring peace? Practice what you preach; that’s what I’d like to tell those hippies. That’s the only way they will get peace. Actually, if I was to be perfectly honest, I would have to admit that there will never be peace. My father loves peace. He loves the idea of it. He loves talking about it, singing about, he just loves it. Not me, I don’t think it’s healthy. Peace sounds a lot like communism to me. If you don’t have conflict then everyone is just blindly accepting commands somewhere. I think getting along is nice and I’m not a big fan of war, but peace just seems silly to me. Maybe I’ve just read a few too many autobiographies of insolent dictators and rebels.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. (Bertrand Russell)

After your first murder there’s really not much that can faze you. The aftermath is messy. The actual action on the other hand is the cleanest most concise moment of clarity in your life. You are in control. You have the power. You, you, you. To be honest, it’s exhilarating, at least that’s how it felt for me that first time. I was taking back control of my life. It was a step forward for women everywhere. A man thinks he can overpower you with his strength, turn that notion on its head. Now I’m not saying I encourage murder, but I am saying if I had the chance to do it again I would, in a heartbeat. The aftermath, well, that was a little more complicated.

Senior was the first one to enter the room.

“Shit.” That was his response. He scooped me up and carried me away from the mess. My parents were next on the scene along with Uncle Tony. Aside from that, I’m not sure what else was going on. Senior carried me to his bedroom. I had only ever been inside his room while hurrying to the panic room. I admired the majesty of the room through the blurred vision of teary eyes. I started crying as soon as Senior picked me up. I cried and cried but I wasn’t sad or remorseful, I was just overwhelmed. There’s something about having a bunch of people looking at me and speaking to me with sympathy that always makes me cry.

The man was a transient hippie. He had no family who would notice and once Scotch dispelled the story to her friends, there were no friends who would care or contest. They didn’t believe in guns but they didn’t believe in policing either so one cancelled the other. Uncle Tony cleaned up my parent’s bedroom.

Senior bought a boat and the next day, Christmas Day, on its maiden voyage, we dumped the body deep into the Atlantic Ocean.

Maybe we should have gone to the police then. I mean it had been self-defence. But it's all part of living the way we did. You give up your right to be governed by the law the moment you decide to live outside of it. We would be hypocrites if we evaded all the restrictions of the law but raced to the courthouse to follow procedure by the letter the moment something went wrong.

Maybe the law could have protected me. But if I was to be honest, I didn’t believe that I needed protection. There would be no one to report the murder. It seemed I was free and clear. After all, who would believe that a fourteen year old girl murdered a man? They would likely assume it had Uncle Tony or my father or Senior. Even if they did believe it was me, what good would that do? Even if it all came out as it happened (like they would believe that) my permanent record would be tainted with murder. What college wants to accept a murderer? Shit like that stays with you for life.

Forgetting him was like trying to know somebody you never met. (Taylor Swift)

“Tommy,” I yelled out. I didn’t want to be vague. “Penny! Help!” I screamed down the stairs but the noise of the carolling 15-piece band tuned me out. If I had realized the danger one stoned hippie could cause I would have ran down those stairs like a bat out of hell, but I hesitated.

Never hesitate.

He picked me up. He looked scrawny and weak but I was helpless in his firm grasp. It was a suffocating feeling. He pulled me into my parent’s room and as dumb and dead as he looked he locked the door and blocked the exit. I looked at the window. It was only the second floor. I would cut my bare legs on the glass, maybe break my legs, but I would live – I would definitely live, I was pretty sure of that.

I jumped back when he tried to grab my arm and he instead landed an iron grasp on my leg. I couldn’t believe this. I had trained all my life to be superior to people like him. I had believed all my life that I was better than people like him. Yet here I was being defeated by him.

He put a firm hand on my other leg and I fell to the floor trying to pull away. I reached and leaned and stretched and when I finally placed my hand on the handle of the bedside drawer I promised myself I wouldn’t hesitate.

I pulled hard on the drawer handle and the entire drawer fell out. It hit me in the face. Instantly I began to bleed. All I could see was stars, stars everywhere. So I felt around blindly until I put my hand on it.

No hesitation. I pointed the gun and pulled the trigger. A bullet smashed into his head with such force that he was killed on impact. If you seen the mess you would understand why I can say that with such certainty.

I killed a man on the eve of my fifteenth birthday.

Is there a place for the hopeless sinner, who has hurt all mankind? (Bob Marley)

When I was fourteen, the eve of my fifteenth birthday in fact, I was lying in bed reading a book about civil unrest in the Middle East – a light read. It was a Friday night. This was what I did on Friday nights. Like I said, high school wasn’t really my time to shine. I had bigger fish to fry.

Scotch was hosting a big Christmas Eve party. Scotch turned holidays and quiet family Friday nights into wild party extravaganzas. She had a lot of friends and as far as I could tell none of them had a home, aside from a Volkswagen van or canvas tent. There were lots of sleepovers and my sleepovers I mean Woodstock was happening in our living room every weekend. My family still stuck to the kitchen though. Scotch circulated. Our house smelled like cannabis. The maid and my mother brainstormed new and innovative ways to clean but there was nothing that could get rid of it. It wasn’t just the smell, Scotch’s friends were messy. They were destroying our house, but it reached the boiling that night on the eve of my fifteenth birthday.

A belligerent looking bloke stumbled into my room. He had long brown hair, graced with a couple half-dreadlocks.

I looked up from my book and said, “Sorry buddy, the party is downstairs.”

He didn’t understand this. His glazed eyes weren’t open enough to register what was in front of him.

“Wrong room,” I repeated as he staggered another step into my personal space. Lock door, I noted to myself.

“Shh,” he said and closed the door behind him.

“Hey,” I said sternly and put down my book. “You’ve got to get out of here.”

“We got to party.”

“I will scream and if I do my father will be up here in a millisecond and you’ll regret ever setting foot in this room.”

“No regrets,” he said musically. For a second I thought he was going to start into a rendition of Bob Marley’s One Love, but instead he began quickly and unevenly trudging toward my bed. I leaped out before my bed caught his fall. In my oversized pink t-shirt I ran for the door. I was at the top of the stairs before I realized that I was about to race downstairs into a party of free love with no pants on. This was a problem.

99% of the world's lovers are not with their first choice. That's what makes the jukebox play. (Willie Nelson)

My parents came back and tried to scold me for being so rude to our dinner guest but I showed them the caterpillar on the windowsill and instead of sitting through a lecture I sat with my parents and watched a fuzzy caterpillar making its way across the windowsill.

When Uncle Tony returned he interrupted the ad hoc nature show we were watching in rapture.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that. How am I supposed to be with someone who smokes grass? That’s crazy.”

We sat together on the other side of the table and watched him freaking out. He ranted and roared and asked for our thoughts but didn’t wait for answers. We nodded and shook our heads appropriately when it was required. I don’t know about my parents but all I could think about was how long his arms looked.

In the end, he decided he couldn’t bridge the gap between their worlds. I think my father was disappointed. He thought her ideals were quite fanciful. He talked about the things she had said as if it were gospel long after the dinner debacle.

I think Uncle Tony was disappointed with his decision too. He missed her. He got high and drunk more often, which speaks volumes in itself because it was already a pretty frequent occurrence. In the weeks that followed Scotch’s visit I don’t remember ever seeing Uncle Tony sober. He seemed to stop sleeping altogether too. My father was never big on sleeping so they kept each other company. Sometimes they would wake me up in the middle of the night with their shouting and shenanigans. Senior didn’t like it. Uncle Tony was a mess and Senior really didn’t like that. Uncle Tony bailed on my father when he was supposed to go to Washington and so my mother replaced him.

Another time she was at school (she was a substitute teacher at the time) so Senior had to accompany my father on the trip. Senior really, really didn’t like that.

Senior fired up his engine when he returned home. He revved the engine and left tire marks on the floor of the garage as he sped out. Rarely did he make a scene like this. When he came back he had Scotch with him. She was, more or less, a permanent fixture in our house after that. I loved her. She was like the big sister that I never had.

Scotch came with baggage though. She was a lovable girl and she had received plenty of love in her day. Her ex-boyfriends were constantly coming around. They would bring their acoustic guitars and play love ballads barefoot outside our house. They would call her name. They would cry, no wail, like starving babies who had no other way to ask for food. One night Senior took a gun and opened fire all around one of the poor mopes. He didn’t hit him but he didn’t come back. He must have spread the word because the lovelorn traffic depleted significantly after that incident.

Our family was too strange and weird for even Santa Claus to come visit. Santa, who was jolly - but, let's face it, he was also very judgmental. (Julia Sweeney)

My family was a heroin family. It was not only the drug of choice in our house, it was the only drug in our house. The idea of something else was weird.

“You won’t do heroin but you’ll smoke marijuana cigarettes?”

“It’s natural, Tony. It comes from the earth and it gives you a natural high. It’s not like your body’s chemical reaction to those toxins you shoot into your veins. This is an organic experience. This is how God intended it to be.”

I might have been a Sunday school dropout, but that was where it got fishy for me, I knew enough about right and wrong to know drugs were wrong and I knew enough about drugs to know cannabis was a drug. All in all, I was educated enough to know Scotch didn’t know what she was talking about. God did not condone drugs.

Senior left without notice. I spotted the garage door rising and his Mercedes pulling out. He didn’t make a big deal about things. He was mature and quiet. What I always respected most about Senior was his ability to convey his feelings so coherently without a word. Everyone knew what he felt and thought and wanted and he never had to rant about any of it. He lived a fluid sort of existence.

Scotch rolled her marijuana cigarette and passed it around. Even my mother was curious enough about this holy high to take a drag. For once she didn’t gripe about me joining in on the fun. It was okay. It wasn’t heroin, that’s for sure. I just felt kind of dumb and dull. I wasn’t excited. I didn’t feel invincible. I just felt dumber. Wait, is dumber a word? See, that’s the kind of shit smoking pot will do to you. Maybe if you were stressed out or had a really rubbish life that you wanted to disconnect from, then I could maybe see it being a viable substitute, but it would never be the drug for me. Heroin is the drug of world powers; marijuana is the drug of hippie bums.

Uncle Tony still couldn’t grasp her lifestyle. “You do this but you don’t drink?”

“This is good for you. Alcohol is poison and it’s addictive. This relaxes you and releases your body from the stress of the world.”

I snorted as I tried to retain my laughter.

Everyone looked at me and I could help but let it go. Giggles and chuckles and chortles and laughs fell out of my mouth.

“You’re stupid,” I laughed, “like you’re just really dumb.”

Scotch just smiled mildly.

“I think it’s time to drive you home,” Uncle Tony suggested and without reproach she collected her things. My parents walked her out with Uncle Tony and thanked her for the meal, promising to return the favour. Sometimes I could almost forget that my family wasn’t normal.