"Hello/Goodbye"

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A sizable gust of wind and a sudden awareness of the artic-like temperature in my room roused me from my sleep. Begrudgingly I got up and walked over to the cause of the frigid climate; a window that I had left open last night. I closed it, retreated back to the warmth of my covers and attempted to answer the call of dreamland.

It seemed the damage had already been done though. Try as I might, I couldn’t fall back asleep. I put the pillow over my head, hoping the coolness of the sheet against my cheek would help me return to the dream I’d been having.

I could only faintly remember it but I knew it was a pleasant one, and that it had something to do with a pretty girl. It was probably Shelby. I’d found that my mind had been drifting to her of its own accord with increasing frequency lately. Maybe it was because we’d been spending a lot of time together. Not only had she become one of my best customers, but she was also one of the coolest girls I’ve ever met.

Or maybe it had been Jackie? She still popped into my mind all the time too. It was almost impossible not to think about her when I spent every Spanish class cracking jokes from behind her—when Senora Loeb wasn’t speaking Spanish at breakneck speeds. And we’d even begun to text more, although it still wasn’t regular, and it usually was either about Spanish homework, or something stupid that I brought up.

On the verge of abandoning my efforts and actually getting up, I reached over and grabbed my phone to check the time.

                                                                 10:47

                                          (1)    New Message- Customer #6

I was awake before noon on a Saturday? Seeing the time did nothing but cause me to redouble my efforts to fall asleep. I checked the message, which was nothing but a kid wanting to buy a dime, and laid my head back on the pillow. He could wait until after noon—there was no way I was getting out of bed for less than $30.

I found it funny that I could say things like that now. Business was booming. I’d sold to so many different people in the last few weeks that I had perfected the “handshake/secret product exchange”. (Admittedly there had been a few times at first when I had embarrassed myself by not making the transaction fluidly, and even dropping the sack one time.) I wasn’t the only one who’d been making a name for myself in the last few weeks though.

We’d all quickly gained a decent amount of customers from various facets of the school. We’d been capitalizing on the connections that we’d already made in the last three years. Toad mostly sold to the wrestlers and the gangsters of the school. He hadn’t been a member of the gang, but he was cool with all of them, which proved beneficial for him. Eric was selling to the track and basketball team. Most of the athletes smoked and Eric had become the go-to weedman for them. I was taking advantage of the smart kids who smoked. You’d be surprised at the amount of kids on the honor roll that rolled up. And Rock was supposed to be selling to the football team but that’d been proving\\\to be a less than lucrative circle of consumers. The first week of school the coach had told them that he’d be doing random drops, and though he hadn’t done one yet, barely any of the players wanted to chance it.

Even with Rock barely contributing any cash we were doing better than we had expected though. It was the first week in October and we already had more than half of the cash we needed. We just needed a little over a jar and then we’d be done with this whole fiasco.

We’d decided that the best way to tackle this was as a group instead of everyone being responsible for raising their own $500. We were pooling all of our earnings together, at my house, and keeping them in glass jars. Every time one of the jars reached $500 we would start on a new jar; we already had 2 jars filled, and a third jar that was only $50 short of being full.

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