Pusher

one.

One Week Before...

As soon as Miles pressed the bag into my hands, I stopped the arc of my swing. My boots dragged along the dirt as I slowed to a stop, the chains above squeaking out one last, long note. My eyes flicked from my hands to my cousin and then back to the marijuana.

"Where do you even get this much weed?" I asked, glancing back at the house behind us. Aunt Kelly might have come to terms with her son being a stoner, but my mom sure as hell wasn't about to accept the same from me. When I didn't spot any peeking eyes in the window, I shoved it back at him.

He didn't take it. His hands floated next to his head in a gesture that resembled surrender.

"That's your solution, Angelica, sitting right there in your hands. Don't push it away so easily."

"Oh yeah, getting high is sure going to solve all my problems," I scoffed. "Why didn't I think of that sooner?"

Miles released a dramatic sigh. He liked to pretend that I was the disappointment of the family. He kicked off the ground, pushing himself into a wide arc. He dipped his head back as the swing made its descent, his shaggy brown hair falling out of his face.

The Great, Prophetic Miles had shrunk back into silence once again and waited for realization to slap me in the face. I reached out and snatched his chain, twisting the swing into something close to a stop. My eyes burned into him.

"You can't seriously be suggesting that I sell this. I don't even talk to anyone who smokes weed." This, of course, was an exaggeration, but I wasn't about to let him know that.

"You said it yourself: No one in this crap economy is hiring. There is no way they're going to pass out minimum wage jobs out to a seventeen year old like you when there is a line of desperate middle-aged workers lined up at the door. That bag isn't just weed, Angelica. It's self-employment right in the palm of your hand," Miles insisted. I released his swing's chain and he rocked back onto his heels, then to his toes. A crooked grin was plastered onto his face.

Before I could tell him he was a moron, he prompted me further.

"You'd be great — don't even deny it. You're a natural entrepreneur."

"Having a lemonade stand when we were eight hardly counts as being an entrepreneur," I said, but I knew what he was trying to tell me. I had already applied to all of the best business schools on the East Coast. Of course, when I imagined running my own enterprise, I always pictured it as something of the legal variety.

"No?" he asked, "You used to sell things to kids at school all the time."

"Middle school," I snorted, and then added more firmly, "I'm not a drug dealer."

I aimed a hard stare right into his eyes. He huffed out another sigh and kicked at the dirt.

Out here, in his backyard, it smelled like upturned soil and the grass right after it rains. When I closed my eyes, I could peel back the years to when we were just kids and actually fit on this tiny swing set. We'd spent the summers together, wading around in the blow-up pool and soaking our tongues in watermelon juice until our stomachs ached.

When my eyes fluttered open, we were grown again. The sky was melting into the horizon behind the bare fingers of the trees in a blur of soft colors, and the world absolutely sucked.

"Don't kid yourself into thinking that this recession isn't beating up on our families too," his voice was low now, eyes stuck on the fenceline. "It's only a matter of time before Kelly gets laid off just like everybody else, and I'm not about to wait around for her to start drowning before I go looking for a life preserver. If selling weed makes me a criminal, then I'll be a criminal, but I won't be some wuss who sits around on my ass while my kid sister goes hungry at night."

Any other words I had were stuck in my throat. Behind my eyelids, all I could see was the pile of bills sitting on our kitchen counter and the laugh lines around my mother's eyes being replaced with stressed creases on her forehead.

"I know it's not fair to push this all on you. You're still a kid, Angelica, but you're too smart to not see what's going on."

"Alright," I whispered, "I'll think about it."

That familiar crooked grin stretched out across his face, but it broke halfway through and didn't reach his eyes. He clapped a hand on my back, "I knew you'd come around."

"That's not a yes, Miles, and you have to hold onto this. My mom would have a heart attack if she ever saw me with this much weed."

I tossed the bag back at him and he snatched it out of the air, shoving it back into the pocket of his white sweatshirt. He was grinning now, his shaggy locks sweeping into his hazel eyes, one of the few traits we shared.

We were family, but we certainly didn't look like it. He was tall and athletic with a natural coordination that I clearly didn't inherit. His jaw was hard and square, often lined with stubble on the days he forgot to shave (which was most days). His eyes were wild and deep-set into his face and his mouth wide, always pulled into a grin.

He was handsome in that grungy, wild kind of way.

I had more delicate features with a soft curve to my face, my cheeks dusted with freckles. We were both brunettes but my hair was darker, thicker, and more coarse. It was a good day when I could manage to tame it back.

I shoved his proposition out of my mind and kicked back off the ground. For just a minute, I wanted our little meeting to be nothing more than it seemed: two cousins wasting away the evening on a swing set built for kids half their age, the boy hardly over the age of twenty-two and much too tall for his own good, the girl just entering her last year of high school and already dreaming of leaving this God forsaken town behind her.