I Always Choose You

Chapter 1I thought I had such simple desires. I didn’t think my life would be altered beyond all recognition because of them, or that the choices I made would also affect others so much. The first time I wanted to smoke weed I was fifteen. But my family lived out in the country, and my parents were super over-protective about where my brother and I went, so the opportunity never arose. Eventually I forgot about it. Then my parents divorced and we moved. Now, both parents were completely lenient. I was in my senior year, had turned eighteen in October, and could basically do whatever I wanted. I had no curfew and no consequences to my actions. I wanted to smoke weed again. But now my reasons were multiplied. When I was fifteen I’d heard that getting high made you happy. Now my parents were divorced and I had conflicting feelings about that on top of everything else. All of my friends were really good. Our parties consisted of having bonfires and drinking too much Mountain Dew. If I was going to smoke weed, I was going to have to make new friends. I knew exactly how it would happen, according to what they had always told us in school. If I made a friend who smoked weed, eventually they would peer pressure me to smoke some, and boom, there you have it. But this wasn’t working so far. “RaeAnne, are you coming over?” asked Morgan. “Yeah, I’m ready,” I said. It was a March Friday night, eight o’clock. I had met nineteen-year-old Morgan four months ago when I got a job at our small-town grocery store: J.C.’s. We frequently hung out after work and I knew she smoked weed, among other things, but so far she hadn’t peer pressured me yet. It was getting frustrating. I walked out the front door of J.C.’s with Morgan and got into her car. We blared music and lit cigarettes as we headed to her house. I was about eight inches shorter than she was, with shoulder-length strawberry-blonde hair and glasses. Morgan had chin-length dark, curly brown hair and brown skin. Sometimes she let her hair just go curly and wild, and others she pushed it back with a cloth headband. I had a mild crush on her, but that wasn’t my main reason for hanging out with her. When we got to her house, we continued listening to music on her phone as we went upstairs to her room. She still lived at home with her parents. Her mom was black and her dad was white. I’d only talked to them a couple times, but they seemed really nice. “That was a crazy night,” Morgan said, flopping down on her couch. “Yeah.” I sat on the bed. “Can you believe that guy who yelled at me because he was a dollar short?” “Come on, Rae, it’s your fault he doesn’t have enough money. God, don’t you know that by now?” We talked and listened to a variety of music from rock to pop to rap, and then Morgan got a text. “It’s Ethan,” she said. “He wants to hang out at Sarah’s place.” We looked at each other. We both knew what that meant. I waited. Nothing. I sighed and resigned myself to having her drive me the three short blocks to my house while she went out and had a good time. But as I stood up, I finally realized I couldn’t take it anymore. “I want to try weed,” I blurted. Morgan, unplugging her phone from the charger, stood and turned to face me. “You do?” she asked, a curious look on her face. “I’ve wanted to for a long time, and I’ve been waiting for you to ask me, and you never do!” Now Morgan smiled, then laughed mischievously. “Well, here I am trying not to be a bad influence on you and get you caught up in it,” she said. Her smile kept getting bigger and bigger. “If you really want to try it, now’s your chance.” “Yeah! Let’s go!” We jumped into Morgan’s car and raced off to pick up her friend Ethan. He was nineteen, too. I’d heard of Ethan, but never met him. A brown-haired, white, athletic guy walked out of the brick house we pulled up to in the dark. He noticed me in the passenger seat and got in the back. “This is Rae,” Morgan said. “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard about you,” Ethan said. Giddy, I lit another cigarette as we headed to a small apartment complex across town. The parking lot was almost full when we got there; we found the last spot. “Her apartment is 2B,” Morgan said. We walked to apartment 2A, climbed the stairs beside it, and knocked on the door of 2B. I was still excited, but a little apprehensive as I walked inside to the smell of incense and burning candles. Who would be here? It turned out there were three other people, and Morgan introduced me. Sarah was a young Puerto Rican woman with short brown hair, her boyfriend Zeke was tall and black with impressively long dreadlocks, and surprisingly, at the back of the room stood Kenzie. Kenzie was my age but went to a different school. I’d met her just from moving into town, but I didn’t know her very well. She was beautiful: medium-height, she wore lots of black clothes, and had short, spiky blonde hair. “Hey,” I said in general to everyone. We all gathered in the small living room, sitting on the big couch, the one armchair, and the floor. I plopped down beside Morgan on the floor with delicious anticipation. Music from someone’s phone played quietly in the background. A muted TV at the other end of the room alternated between dark and light flashes of color. Zeke pulled out a bag of weed and set it on the coffee table. He pulled out a couple buds and started breaking them apart on a plate. “He’s separating the seeds and stems,” Morgan explained to me. Everyone turned to look. “This is her first time.” Affirming smiles and nods accompanied this news. “We’ve got to make this special then,” Zeke said, pulling more weed out of his baggie. “Don’t get the papers, Sarah, get a blunt.” Sarah pulled open a drawer of the coffee table and pulled out a cigar. I didn’t know who to watch most, the person breaking apart the weed or the person dismantling a cigar. I wondered if they would put all that loose tobacco to use, but once Sarah had unwrapped the cigar intact, she casually brushed the tobacco into a small trash can. Zeke broke apart more and more weed, and finally he was ready. With much licking, the m*******a was rolled inside the cigar wrapper, and apparently was now called a blunt. Now Zeke held the blunt up to his lips and lit it. He handed it to me. I hit it like a cigarette, then passed it to Morgan. “No, not like that,” she explained, placing her hand over mine and directing the blunt back to my lips. “Take the biggest hit you can, and try to hold it in for as long as you can. That’s what gets you high.” I followed her directions, felt a burning in my lungs, and then finally exhaled a large, dense cloud. I immediately felt light-headed and smiled. “All right!” the others said. “Welcome to the club,” Ethan told me. Now I passed it to Morgan, and it went around the room. The feeling was indescribable. The weed really did make me feel happy. “Shotgun,” Ethan said suddenly. “Shotgun!” The others nodded and laughed. I looked around in confusion. “Watch,” Zeke told me. He put the blunt in his mouth backwards, Sarah got right up to his mouth, and he blew the smoke into hers for quite some time. She held her breath for an even longer time, and finally exhaled a small cloud. “Damn,” I said. “Your turn,” Zeke said. I got up on my knees to be level with him as he sat on the couch. He put his face close to mine and blew the smoke in. I tried to hold it, I really tried, but my lungs burned like fire and I coughed a thick cloud of smoke right in his face. “Ohhh!” the others groaned. I grinned sheepishly and sat back down and Zeke gave shotguns to everyone else. “You ready for another chance?” he asked me after he was done. I nodded and got back up in determination. “Just tap my arm when you’ve had enough,” he said. I opened my mouth, and the smoke went in. This time I tapped his arm, and when he stopped, I held in the smoke. When I finally exhaled, way less smoke came out than last time. “Good job!” said Kenzie. I smiled at her. Not long after that the blunt was almost gone. Zeke set it down in an ashtray and everyone lit cigarettes or hit vapes. I felt relaxed, calm, and at peace with the world. It seemed like all my problems were gone. The others all started talking and laughing, but I noticed the light of the candle flickering on the table and stared at it. The flame was dancing, with tiny tendrils of smoke curling up from it. I had never fully appreciated the magic of fire before. The colors were blue and yellow, the smoldering wick black and red. The melting blue wax made a pool, slowly overtaking the solid wax around it. I realized my mouth was hanging open and I snapped back into focus. The others didn’t seem to notice what I’d been doing. I couldn’t follow their conversation, so next I turned to look at the TV. Whatever was on, I’d never seen before. Two young women looked like they were arguing, and suddenly with a jolt they started kissing. What was this? I leaned forward, intrigued. All too soon, the kissing stopped, and the scene cut to something else. With a shake of my head I turned to the others again. Zeke stood up and was turning up the volume on his phone for louder music. “Remember when you were grounded and stole your own car keys and we drove to Indianapolis?” Sarah asked Ethan. Uproarious laughter. Indianapolis was an hour away. I didn’t have my own car, so I’d never even driven that far. “So, how are you doing?” Morgan asked me with a glint in her eye. I leaned against her shoulder. “I’m doing better than I ever expected.” Around one in the morning, Morgan, Ethan, and I finally left. Even though I had no curfew, I’d never actually been out this late, so I wasn’t sure what would happen once I got home. But the house was dark. My mom and even my brother were asleep. I changed my clothes and climbed into bed, feeling like I was almost floating. I will never, ever forget the first time I got high.