Hades' Melody. JD Belcher
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Название: Hades' Melody

Автор: JD Belcher

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Религия: прочее

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isbn: 9781954095175

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СКАЧАТЬ of our free time together, squandering many evenings away watching pay-per-view movies and cooking meals with one another at her new place. Friends around campus began asking why she wasn’t with me when they saw me alone. At this point, we were having sex on a regular basis and dating exclusively, but still never discussed what our relationship had turned into.

      Being certified is a strange thing. People tend to live outside the boundaries of law and order for as long as they can get away with it. That’s exactly what Nicole and I seemed to be doing. I honestly didn’t realize how much we were together and still had not yet asked her to do the “official” thing and be my one and only. We were just like those couples who stayed common law husband and wife forever, shacking up and living years and years with each other but never getting married.

      One morning, near the end of the summer, I called Nicole to find out what her plans were for the day and perceived that she sounded different on the phone. I knew she periodically became depressed about one thing or the other, but from her tone, I could tell that something was wrong. I noticed how recently she’d make random references about her mother’s death, but never went into detail concerning the circumstances of how she passed.

      Sometimes, she’d jokingly give hints about committing suicide when school became too much of a strain.

      She didn’t know it, but I always took them seriously. So, when I hung up the phone, I flew down Fifth Avenue to her apartment on my bike. My hunch had been correct.

      I found her on the couch with lime-green vomit all over her T-shirt and on the floor near her feet. Her eyes were glazed over and rolled uncontrollably in a dazed, lethar-gic swirl. The first thing that came to my mind was that she had overdosed on sleeping pills.

      “You took sleeping pills, didn’t you?” I asked.

      “Where are they?” She wouldn’t tell me. I didn’t think she could have told me if she wanted to, being in the condition that she was in and all. But I had to find them and make sure she couldn’t take any more. Out of nowhere, something told me to check under the couch where she was sitting. I moved the sofa, with her still on it, and there, hidden in the corner of one of the indented impressions in the carpet were the pills. After I cleaned her up and laid her down in the bedroom, I thought about calling an ambulance, but stupidly decided to let her naturally sober up. I figured that most of what she had taken had probably been thrown up onto the carpet or on her soiled clothing.

      Later, I tried to talk to her about her depression, but couldn’t understand her point of view. During a conversation we had while sitting atop the fire escape on Louisa Street, for the first time, she came out and cautiously mentioned that her mother had died the previous year in a house fire. I knew the death of her mother, which happened before we met, obviously had a significant role in what she was going through, but due to her silence on the subject, I had little to glean from. I suggested professional help, but she refused. I thought all the marijuana we were smoking might be adding fuel to the fire, so I suggested that we slow down with getting high and just have an occasional drink here and there. Nevertheless, like clockwork, her depression always returned, and so did the marijuana.

      AJ, the brother closest in age to me of my three younger siblings (he was older than Tre, and Tre was older than Antoine), moved in as my new roommate after taking what he called a break following his freshman year from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Right away, I saw that he did a much better job of being a so-cialite in Oakland than I had done, and I always teased him by saying that he was the most popular “non-student” on campus.

      He made many friends, one of which was a guy named Dave, a Panamanian New Yorker. AJ and Dave looked like twin brothers—much more related than AJ and I. They both had curly, sandy brown hair and golden skin. My hair was straighter, jet-black and my skin a few shades lighter toward the beige side of the spectrum. As a fellow Pitt student, I understood how Dave struggled in search of cheaper housing, as most students did, so I made an agreement with him to move in as a second roommate. The three of us befriended a likable German student named Wolfe who lived across the hall, and by the start of the fall semester, all five of us—including Nicole—became a motley crew with one thing in common: smoking weed. We loved getting high together. At least four times a week, we’d meet at my apartment, ante up money for a purchase, and one of us would make a run. Night after night, we’d roll up blunts and smoke, play tournaments of Super Mario Kart on Nintendo 64, listen to music, and often cook and eat together.

      But soon, the marijuana got out of hand. We all spent money we didn’t have in order to smoke. It had gotten so bad that Wolfe had even gone as far as walking to the South Side from Oakland every other week, a six-mile trip, to donate blood for money to buy an eighth of an ounce of weed.

      We turned into untamed savages when we’d sit around and smoke blunts, behaving terribly and doing uncivilized things, like getting angry when someone held it too long before they passed it on to the next person.

      We were especially hard on the new arrivals that didn’t belong to the immediate in-group. It wasn’t uncommon to hear someone being called out: “You wanna pass the damn blunt? Other people are trying to smoke in here!”

      To curb that activity, we made a “two and pass” rule.

      After two hits, the blunt was required to be sent on to the next person.

      There was a knock at my door during one inconspicuous evening while we were all lounging in our usual spots in my living room, passing the weed around and playing Nintendo. I opened the door wide enough to catch the chain latch. Wolfe’s large blonde head peeked through.

      “It’s me,” he said.

      Dave pressed pause on the game and unlocked the latch.

      “I have an announcement to make,” he said as he plopped down into an empty space on the couch. “Hey, everybody, guess what?”

      “What?” we questioned.

      “I got next on Mario Kart,” he said with a laugh.

      “No, but seriously, I’m dropping out of school for the rest of the semester.”

      “Why?” everyone asked at the same time.

      He gave an unclear explanation about flunking out of a few courses and not having enough money to finish out the semester.

      “Anyway,” he said after a brief retort, “I have a check for $1,200 to pay for a semester of school that I won’t be attending. How much does a pound of weed cost?”

      We all dropped our jaws. Dave and I looked at each other and smiled.

      “I think I might know someone who knows someone who can get you a pound for, like, a grand,” AJ said.

      “Okay, that leaves me with $200, and don’t bring me any of that cheap pebbles and stems crap either. I want some mid-grade shit.”

      By the end of the evening, we all sat in the exact same places as earlier, staring at a pound of marijuana in a large plastic bag in the middle of the floor. I had never seen so much in one place in my life. The thought of having access to such a large quantity was exhilarating, but the sight of it frightened me. The last thing I needed was the police rushing in and finding it inside an apartment that had my name on the lease.

      “Get that shit out of here!” I yelled to Wolfe. “Now!

      And don’t bring it back!”

      “Well, СКАЧАТЬ