Marijuana Girl by N. R. De Mexico

just yell a little and then go to the school, and yell some more, and then Joyce would be back in and she'd graduate. Why couldn't she face the consequence of what she'd done? But then, there was always something a little funny about Joyce. Not that it made any difference with him, Tony.
    You had to take the bad with the good in another person, and things couldn't always be your way.
    Then he indulged himself in a moment of tender dreaming about Joyce--about the fact that she was his girl and everything was going to be all right.
    He tossed away his cigarette, then, seeing the spark still glowing on the lawn, got up from the bench and stepped on the butt. Then he went into the house.
    9 ~ Flight
    Even the single crisis Joyce had feared she easily managed to evade by a quick fabrication. She had been terrified that her aunt would insist on attending the graduation exercises. But her aunt's interest was not really that deep. When Joyce told Priscilla that she had decided not to participate in the commencement exercises, the older woman had been more than pleased at the assurance she would not have to cope with that additional burden.
    Priscilla Taylor was not a lazy woman, but a tired one. The comfortable income her brother provided in return for her care of Joyce was not enough to make up for the life which had somehow slipped by her, but it did ease the struggle to maintain the struggle. Once Priscilla Taylor had harbored a desire to have a life of her own, a husband of her own, a home of her own. Now, the money provided by her brother was an excuse for abandoning the desire, and she had reached the age where she had convinced, herself that she preferred things as they were.
    Joyce never understood this mechanism--but she regarded its effects as all to the good.
    At the Courier she had progressed. At first tentatively, and later because it had proved practical, Frank had given her minor assignments to fulfill. Once, when Lew Myron had 'phoned in sick, he had sent her in Lew's stead to cover a meeting of the Community Welfare Society, and her tense anxiety to satisfy had resulted in a more than routine story on the normally tedious.
    Then he tried her on day police court. She had covered the routine arraignments with the elaborate attention to detail of a proceedings-reporter for the Congressional Record, and the enthusiasm for color of a Time-staffer.
    So Frank gave her a raise, and told her she could call herself a reporter--although copy traffic was still her proper province.
    As the summer wore on, Frank took her repeatedly to the Golden Horn, to the Stuyvesant Ball Room where the greatest of Dixieland musicians held forth weekly in the best New Orleans tradition, to Jimmy Ryan's, to Birdland, to the Three Deuces, to all the places where he was known by the musicians as a connoisseur of jazz. He introduced her to players, famous and infamous, and took a strange pride in the way she took to them and their music, and the way they took to her.
    Cautiously, for fear of the police and not for fear of any other consequences, he further taught her the use of marijuana. Solemnly he steered her away from the junkies, users of heroin and cocaine, and solemnly explained the perils of those drugs with a "hook."
    "Look," he told her one night when she asked why he regarded marijuana as so right, heroin as so wrong, "heroin has a hook. It's a narcotic. If you take it once you only need a little tiny bit to get high, and it'll give you a lift that takes you right through the ceiling. But the next time you come around it won't do the same thing for you unless you take a little bit more, and, every time you use it if you go at it regularly, you've got to keep adding to the dose. Pretty soon you need two capsules, then three, then five, just to get your regular kick. All right, that might not do any harm. But, suppose you take three caps or five for several days running. One morning you wake up and find you're clean. You can't put your hands