You Only Get Letters from Jail by Jodi Angel

Author:Jodi Angel [Angel, Jodi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781935639589
Publisher: Tin House Books

GAP

Bobby paid eighty bucks for a handful of Scarlet Pussy—fifteen seeds of Afghani hybrid that the ad in the magazine said “could blow your mind”—and when the first green shoots came up out of the peat moss, me and Bobby started thinking about how much we could sell an eighth for, and what exactly an eighth was—grams or ounces—and we started seeing dollar signs and ’71 Pontiacs with dual exhausts and 455 V8s and 400 Turbo-Hydramatic transmissions. I was six months away from getting my driver’s license, but in my mind I already saw myself behind the wheel, right foot on the gas and everybody wanting me or wanting to be me. The car meant everything. The license was just paperwork.

“They look like tomato plants,” I said. I had Bobby’s closet door open and inside the light was bright and white and hot. There was a tarp on the floor and a pair of Bobby’s dress shoes, and we had the pots lined up in front of a plastic pink fan I’d taken from my sister’s room. I picked up a spray bottle and shot a mist of water across the naked stalks.

“They’re not tomatoes,” Bobby said. “No way. If I find out that I paid eighty bucks for a bunch of cherry tomato plants, I’ll fucking sue the company.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “What’re you gonna do? Ask your mom to get you a lawyer? Take it to The People’s Court and explain how you paid money for some marijuana seeds and what you got were tomato seeds, a total rip-off, and all you want is your eighty bucks back, and maybe some money for your pain and suffering because if your mom knew that you were growing these in your closet, she’d kick the shit out of you and it would all be for nothing if the most you could do was harvest these plants and then go downstairs and make a salad?”

“If you keep opening the closet and looking at them, they’re gonna die and it won’t matter if they’re fucking daisies,” he said.

I shut the door and picked up the January 1980 issue of Playboy that Bobby had on his desk. He’d found a box of Playboys in the shed out back—eleven issues, January through November, that one of his mom’s boyfriends had left behind, along with a broken Coleman lantern and a half-empty box of .22 shells—and now they were under his bed, and the box of shells was in his desk drawer, and we spent a lot of quiet time after school in his room, licking our thumbs and turning pages. We knew the name of every centerfold and her stats, and what her favorite food or color or thing to wear was, and I mostly liked to spend time with the May issue because the centerfold’s name was Martha Thomsen and when she was looking at me over her shoulder, pink satin panties cut like half-moons, I didn’t give a shit if there were

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