Love and Weed

What begat such an inception? The infancy of my love being caressed like no other. My sister and myself were to make a trek with our aunt and uncle to a family summer vacation spot in a mountainous region of north-eastern Tennessee. A lovely place it was in the summer, especially on this day, the summer solstice. I could feel a precense in my stomach. I looked to my sister and she had fallen asleep within the last two and a half-ish hours that it took us to get here from Eastern Kentucky. We passed the usual old church, now emptied of all worshiping souls, a landmark I never usually cared about being a temporal being, but it lit me up with excitement as we passed it and went through the gates.

An unfamiliar man was turning open the aluminum chain-link, a friend of my uncle's who was going to help him start on the annual yard-work that had to be done. Just two weeks prior they cleared out the area and tilled a nice little patch for the garden. My sister and I headed straight for the black berry bush as we usually did, but this time with a bit less enthusiasm. Now fifteen years old (my sister was eighteen), I had a certain maturity to uphold that cannot be interrupted by a sweet little fruit, even if there wasn't a soul to witness, or so I thought.

Catching the corner of my eye was a pale carapace, a complexion very fine, that of someone no more than my age. She wasn't extravagantly dressed, but who would be when dragged all the way from your home many miles away to a strange place to watch your father mingle with a college football buddy. An old green bench, now peeled of quite a bit of the latex paint my mother and I laid on it some years ago, leaned idly against the east side of the two-story white house I've spent so many summers in, with her shapely backside lightly resting upon the thick treated wood.

I took it upon myself to be the first to converse with her. I looked with an expression of incongruousness at the small amount of open space next to her, she looked back up at me with a friendly smirk of agreement. Her eyes were dark brown, just like mine. She lifted her bum a few centimeters off the bench with her palms and shifted her body over to the right to allow me room to sit. "Thank you..." I hummed. I leaned casually against the house and put my hands in my lap. We were quiet, almost to an awkward level. The sun hadn't exactly set, it was the solstice and it was only about seven o' clock, but the western sky was a lovely red and purple array of that one lost summer I'll never get back.

I looked up, but out of the corner of my eye I saw a large grin on her face. I moved back a long lock of gold tressings from the side of my face to get a better glimpse without breaking my cool and staring at her. "Ain't it nice? You know... the sky and all." I hadn't realized how stupid I was sounding in the precense of this particular girl, she also leaned back against the house, "Mhm..." emitted through her nose. I couldn't tell if she was just shy or I wasn't interesting. I turned my head to her, watching her glimpse at the sky and occasionally over at my sister who was sitting in the grass playing with our grandmother's dachshund.

I never really got a good look at her until now. She had black hair, but it was silky and natural looking, and halted just above her shoulders, and sported purple tips on the front. I thought it was interesting. I could see her bra strap underneath the thinner straps of her tank top, it was white, and quite small. She couldn't have been anything greater than a 38B, but that didn't keep her from being as pretty as she was. She was wearing a pair of capri jeans, and a pair of sandals slipped between her toes, beholding toenails painted a dark purple. She probably wouldn't believe me if I told her how pretty I thought she looked. She wasn't wearing makeup, which made me appreciate her natural beauty even more.

"So, where do you come from?" I asked, not really seeming concerned about it. She's probably getting the impression that I'm a pothead from the total disintrest in my voice, "Mississippi." She replied. "Oh, well... that's pretty far away from here, huh? I think your dad went to college with my uncle." She nodded, and looked over to the garden, in which most of my mom's side of the family was working. She looked down at my leg, then back up at me, "Aren't you gonna introduce yourself?" She giggled at me. Her smile was cute, and her giggle complimented it well, "Oh, uh. Right. Yeah. Uh. I'm... You can call me Joey." My sister had already went inside the house with my cousins to play video games, and I hadn't even noticed.

I was infactuated with this newcomer, "Well?" I interrogated playfully, smirking. "Well...?" She interrogated back. "Aren't you gonna tell me your name?" She stood up in a slightly seductive pose, but in a playfully childish manner, "Well... You tell me what that in your pocket is, and maybe I'll consider giving you my name, Joey," She smiled, and I looked down. "Oh shit..." I murmured under my breath. A plastic baggie was sticking out of the pocket of my cargo pants, just a little bit of it. I could tell by the way she was talking she knew what it was. It was a baggie containing five grams of weed and a blunt already prepared. "Um... uh..." I studdered. I began to step backwards up on the hill towards the hamock and pic-nic table, and the nifty little stone oven we have for cookouts. She followed me, giggling, "Come on! I just wanna take one little peek." We were now at the highest point of the back yard, near the barn. It was used by the last people to own the house, but now we just use it to play in. It's two stories, and has a few windows cut out of the top, but there's no glass.

We meandered through the door and out of the side of the others, "Well, O.K., I'll show you, but just one little peek and you have to promise that you won't tell anyone, alright?" She cut me off at the last little part of my verbal agreement, and snatched the bag out of my pocket, dangling it in front of my face, laughing at me, "I KNEW you were a pot head." She accused, beginning to climb the ladder to the hanging-over second floor of the barn, dragging my contriband into clear view. I went up after her as quick as possible and grabbed her by the hips, pulling her to lie down next to me just short of one of the windows.

We both turned on our sides to face each other, and concerened I asked, "What the hell? You're gonna get us in tr-," She cupped her hand over my mouth and remained giggling, "Quit being silly. Just relax, O.K.?" She reached into her back pocket, I was so infactuated by staring at her hips I didn't realize she had the blunt in her mouth, lighting it, and when I looked back up I had a mass of smoke huffed in my face. I breathed it in, it was sweet. This blunt was going to be good. "Hey... Hey. If they see that smoke we're gonna get cau-," Again, I was interrupted, but this time it was something unexpected. She put her mouth to mine, both opened, and blew smoke down into my lungs. My stomach sank, it wasn't exactly a kiss, but it was close enough.

Eventually we had it down to a roach and she flipped it back into the baggie, stuffing it in my pocket. We cuddled up together, both of us feeling phenomenal, her leg was propped across both of mine, and her arm on my chest, lastly her face was in my shoulder. This was probably the best I've ever felt in my entire life. I closed my eyes for a second, I've been really tired because I stayed up the night before finishing some bullshit summer English assignment. It only felt like a second, but just seconds prior to waking I was thinking of this girl, and how I need to find out her name, "Hey, hey-," I leaned over to wake her up, but there was nothing there. I shot up and looked over at the clock on the church tower, four AM. I felt my heart shatter. I leaned out the middle window of the second story of the barn to find only one vehicle... My aunt and uncle's truck. The stranger's black toyota was gone, on it's way back to Mississippi.