by Jesse Raub
Shuffled #2

Word on the street was that Dougie somehow scored some pot from his older brother’s stash. Stevie told Karen at lunch, who told Barster and Cramden during Biology. None of us had ever really thought about getting high before, and I know for sure that Barster was scared shitless when Dougie confirmed the rumor. After fifth period out on the stairs he told us we all had to take at least one hit Friday night before we started D&D. I’m still not sure if I was nervous or scared – maybe it was one of those situations where the word “anxious” truly does apply. I think Stevie had some sort of Reefer Madness idea that he was going to get Karen to take her shirt off when we got high.

Friday came and Dougie said he had a good campaign planned – our group had recently encountered some Goblins on the way to a dungeon crawl, so we were all about to level up. My thief was getting to a point of actually being powerful enough to counteract Karen’s ranger or Barster’s barbarian. We all showed up at Dougie’s front door at about seven and made the trek down to the basement. It wasn’t the most prime place to play because Dougie’s basement wasn’t finished and we didn’t have a proper table, just a few old couches set up around an old piece of carpet and a coffee table.

We all sat down on the couches, waiting for Dougie.  He came down last, making sure to make an entrance.  We watched him approach the circle of the couches, shove his fist down into his jeans pocket, and pull out a rolled up baggie. It was wrinkled and opaque, hard to see anything inside, though we could see it had a pliable shape. It looked like he had held it in his jeans pocket for half a week. He dropped it on the coffee table in between our character sheets and sets of colored dice.

“It’s cool,” he said. “My parents aren’t home.”

And then we heard a thudding upstairs. Heavy footsteps. Basters’ double chin quivered in fright.

“It’s my brother,” Dougie said. “No problem.”

He pulled a small glass pipe out of his other pocket with a lighter and set them down next to the baggie. Lord knows how he knew what to do, or if he even was doing it right – we certainly wouldn’t know – but he started pulling little green flecks out and stuffing them into the bowl of the pipe, packing them in densely. He brought the pipe to his lips, flicked the lighter on and inhaled. The bowl glowed bright orange for a second, and then started smoldering. Serpentine tendrils of smoke drifted out of his mouth.

“Whoa,” said Dougie.

He tried to pass it to Barster, who shook his head vigorously. Karen bit her lip, and said she’d try it later. Stevie was about to reach for the pipe when we heard a loud crack. We all turned to see Dougie’s eyes roll back into his head as Dougie’s older brother’s fist retracted from where it made contact with the back of Dougie’s skull.

“Sonofabitch,” Dougie’s brother uttered, shaking out his red knuckles. He looked around the room at all of us, then snatched the baggie from the table and pried his pipe and lighter out of Dougie’s hands.

“Fucking nerds,” he cursed under his breath as he turned up the stairs. We were all stunned. Voiceless. I looked down and saw Dougie’s chubby cheeks were inflamed and pink, with a noticeable welt forming at his crown. His eyes were squinting tight and tears were welling up.

“Fuck this,” I said, sighing. I stood up and headed for the stairs. There was something just juvenile about the whole situation, and it seemed stupid that we were all only three months from going away to college anyway.  I didn’t want watching my Dungeon Master cry on his basement floor to be one of my last memories of high school.  The thing is, in Dungeons and Dragons, the thief isn’t just another character class to play.  The thief class is a projection of the player’s selfishness.  I still don’t know why nobody else could figure it out.

At the top of the stairs, Dougie’s brother was waiting for me with a twenty in his hand just out of earshot.  I nodded to him as I plucked the bill out between his fingers and headed out the front door into the cool night air.

“Doncha Bother Me” by Jesse Raub is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

“Doncha Bother Me” is a fairly loose short fiction interpretation of The Rolling Stones song of the same name from the album Aftermath, released through ABKCO Records in the year 1966. It is the second story written as part of the Shuffled series, in which inspiration is chosen by random computerized algorithms on a well stocked iPod.