Finding Mary Jane by Amy Sparling Page A

end of his headset. I knock on his door, something I never did when we lived at Mom’s but something that’s required here. Not by rule, just by me not wanting to see anything bad when I opened the door.
    “Come in.”
    I go in and sit on his bean bag. “What are your plans tonight?”
    He taps the buttons on the controller rapidly until a 10 kill streak award flashes on the screen. “Marla’s car is in the shop, so I’m picking her up after work.” He doesn’t take his eyes off the screen. “We’ll probably just hang out after that. Why, wanna come?”
    Watching Ben and Marla suck face isn’t exactly my idea of an awesome evening. But this isn’t about me. I have a new mission in life and it involves Marla, even if she is making out with my brother at the time. (But God I hope she won’t be.) “Yes,” I say. “I do.”
    I ride in the backseat of Ben’s Beamer. We had picked up Marla from work and then went to their favorite convenient store. There they dropped thirty-five bucks on Sunkist, peanut butter crackers, M&M’s and big bags of beef jerky. Scooping up ridiculous amounts of junk food is pretty much their hobby around here.
    I munch on a bag of candy corn as we drive to wherever we’re going. In fifth grade, I once ate an entire family sized bag of this stuff during standardized testing day. It made me so sick I fell out of my chair and was rushed to the nurse. You’d think a traumatizing event like that would make me stay away from the delicious conical candies forever, but nope. It only strengthened my love of them.
    Marla swings around, her hair flying in her face as she grabs a handful of my candy corn. “Are you dating anyone?” she asks.
    “Me?” I almost choke on my candy. “No.”
    She cocks her head. “Any reason why?”
    I think about it for a moment. There are a ton of reasons why I don’t have a boyfriend: I’m not pretty enough, I’m not cool enough, guys just don’t like me. Marla made it sound like I choose to be single, like I’m some kind of vibrant, independent woman who doesn’t want a man unless he’s worthy of me. In all of her beauty, she must have forgotten what life is like for normal people. Sometimes we don’t get to choose.
    Ben yanks the car to the side of the road and comes to a quick stop in front of an old parking meter. It’s one of those kinds that still take coins instead of credit cards. Marla turns back around, forgetting that I never answered her question. We’re at the smoke shop.
    Almost every business in the historic district of Lawson is closed at this time of night, except for the place that sells square donuts and coffee twenty four hours a day.
    “Is this place open?” I ask. The neon open sign is turned off, but since I’m following them right up to the front door, I feel compelled to ask anyway.
    “It is if you’re me,” Marla says, unhooking a key from her belt loop and opening the door. The shop is dark, except for a small glow coming from the open door behind the beaded curtain. We head through the shop in the dark, stopping at the curtain of beds. Marla and Ben stand in the doorway and talk to whoever is inside. I can hear muffled voices and a radio in the background, but I can’t see around them. I don’t exactly want to peek inside anyway like some kind of nosy tourist, so I stand back about teen feet, nestled between a rack of key chains and shot glasses.
    As their conversation continues, I start getting creeped out. It’s not like I’m scared, but my mind wants to play tricks in the darkness and I try not to let it. Marla asks about someone named Max. A voice from inside the room says, “We haven’t seen him all week.”
    “That’s bullshit,” Marla says. “He had to stop by earlier. You probably missed him.”
    “I’m not an idiot,” the voice says. Marla replies with a string of curse words.
    The shop door opens and closes, but I don’t register it because I’m so wrapped up in watching how insanely jealous