Like Peaches

If you get shit-faced enough, the apples at the apple orchard supposedly taste like peaches.

I wouldn’t know; I was too wussy throughout my high school career to even consider eating fruit off the tree. What about insects, rot, disease, dirt, or pesticides? I was the weakest fag ever known and barely even knew it.

The flames of the lighter without a safety lit the weed inside a pretty bowl with little objects floating in its glass. Eric took a hit first and breathed it in like he was sneaking ambrosia. I personally never felt "high" like everyone else claimed to; I felt a calmness and ease of tongue, to say what I normally couldn’t, but there was no bliss.

"Seth, Seth, your turn, mon amour," Eric said between laughs. He shoved the setup into my skinny, freckled hands and leaned back against our log. It was the perfect night, crisp like the apples that surrounded us in droves. We were out somewhere by the sewage treatment plant, over a really low fence and fifteen minutes’ walking distance from the nearest Wal-Mart. No one went back there. It was probably someone’s private property.

I felt the eyes of my current girlfriend on me then. She was some girl that I never really cared about - then again, none of them really felt special. To impress her, and to lessen that feeling of impatience I always sensed from her, I took my hit. My lungs burned and I thought about what our health teacher told us about weed burning hot and pinpricks being scorched into our lungs.

She grabbed it all from be before I even got a chance to exhale, and proceeded to take what surely had to be the biggest hit I’d ever seen. She was frustrated by me and about to dump me the way she’d asked - no, forced - me out.

Kristian was the fourth of us, the prettiest goth guy I’d ever seen, who acted like a real asshole for reasons I could never fathom.

The philosophical conversation was coming on; I could feel it.

"So what do you think we are?" Eric asked.

"Atoms, and electrodes, and ESP," my girlfriend replied. She was flirting, already moving in on someone else. She blatantly sat on his lap.

Eric glanced at me nervously. I smiled and shrugged. "Well, the SOL system is like electrons surrounding the nucleus."

"So maybe our entire universe is like an atom," Eric said, pointing at me excitedly.

"Maybe we’re a part of some guy’s leg," I replied jovially, hitting my own thigh for emphasis. I was acting like a shit and she - oh lord for a moment I couldn’t even remember her name, probably repressing it - was toying with Eric’s dreds, much to his dismay. He stared at me with his "I’m helpless" expression and I rolled my eyes. She wasn’t apparently, my concern anymore. I looked to K, but he had disappeared.

"Gonna find K," I said, stumbling to my feet.

"Okay, later Seth," she said pointedly. I hit her in upside the head, playfully but not really, as I left. I think she got it. I think we both got it.

Kristian was eating an apple, glaring forward.

"Like peaches?" I asked, patting his back.

He glared. "We’re a part of some guy’s leg?"

"Shit," I said. "What crawled up your ass and died?"

He stared at me and I thought that maybe I was imagining tears. He checked his apple into the darkness. "We’re wasting everything," he told me as he pulled a stick from the ground. "Our upper-middle-class white existences. Our pretty years."

I laughed. "Pretty?"

"You’re one too," he growled. And he jammed the stick into the side of his head, repeatedly, until I began to fear for cranial damage. Using both of my scrawny arms, I yanked the stick out of his hands, and he leaped on me.

"Everything you are, you’re oblivious to! You are such a living lie!" he yelled. "If you knew, you wouldn’t act like this!"

Like what? Like what? I wanted to yell back, but couldn’t, because I was too frightened. Everything opened beneath me. I realized why my girlfriends never worked out. I realized what was wrong.

Eric and my ex-girlfriend came to my rescue, pulling the bleeding K off me. My face was covered in little splatters.

"You okay?" Eric asked me as K stormed off into the night.

I nodded.

Five minutes later, as I went home, it occurred to me that the blood felt like kisses.