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A moth flittered through the lamplight in the empty parking lot, passing the line of smoke drifting gently into the clouded night. The smoke was coming from a point a few feet away, obscured in the shadows below a tall hedge off in the grass.
Berdly pulled up the collar of his jacket. He’d always loved the outdoors when he was younger, but nowadays it seemed a lot less appealing. Bugs always swarming you, the wind giving you shivers even on the warmest of days. And the smells. The outdoors always smelled. Not that they were particularly outdoors; the hedge was entirely artificial, and there was an office building on the other side of it. But it was the closest to the outdoors you could get out here in the city, and the furthest from any prying eyes.
He glanced over to the smell that had put him on this particular train of thought. Kris was holding some sort of paper roll… a joint? That sounded right. He imagined a blunt would look bigger, at least if the name was anything to go off of. Berdly had been the one who bought it for them since they were still a few months too young, but he hadn’t had any idea what he was actually doing. He’d just rattled the names Kris had given him off to the cashier, the same way he did every time Noelle coached him on the answers to the next day’s quiz.
The sound of coughing roused him from his stupor.
“Ough, went a bit too far with that one.”
He was glad Kris had said something first, as it gave him time to suppress his instinct to chastise their unhealthy behavior and think of a more suitable response.
“Here, do you want me to…?”
Reaching out, he took hold of their novelty ashtray and the little sandwich bag they used to hold their supplies. Kris bent over and coughed a bit more, before straightening up and waving the mystery paper roll in the air a few times, as if hoping to lure in some unseen prey. Looking closer at the ashtray, he noticed a little cartoon cat painted on the surface. It looked handmade, like the sort of thing Kris would’ve gotten at one of those countless little markets they’d dragged him along to. Seized by a moment of suspicion, he angled it to catch what little ambient light made it over to their pocket of darkness, but the eyes were just a standard black on white. Kris still hadn’t told him everything about what happened to them back in high school, but he’d been able to put together a good bit just from the time they’d spent alone together since.
The smell was back. It was unpleasant, but at the same time, it was worth it just to spend a little time together. Kris was always working the night away, so it was hard for an early bird like him just to find time to hang out when they were both awake. He held out the ashtray, and they tapped a bit more of that black dust into it. They always asked him to hold the ashtray when they were smoking, and he always cleaned it up so they never had to look. He’d been curious enough to ask about it one day, but they’d muttered something about an old man and quickly changed the subject.
He’d been staring at them for quite a while, he realized. They were nearly invisible to anyone looking in, but once you were in the shadows yourself, you could start to make out quite a lot. The gentle curve of their sweater’s fabric flowing over their arms, the way their hair moved in the breeze, the casual dip of their head. Whether they were getting high or just getting tired, he wasn’t quite sure. Berdly started chuckling before he could stop himself.
Kris eyed their friend suspiciously.
“Sorry, It’s just that you insist weed doesn’t do anything to you. But every time you go out smoking, you end up coughing up a lung, and by the time we get home, you’re falling all over me!”
Kris rolled their eyes as their back straightened. “I never said weed doesn’t do anything to me, I was talking about being high. Do you think people cough from being high?”
Berdly crossed his arms in defiance. “Look, I’m not the one rotting my brain with illicit substances-”
“It’s not illicit dude, you literally bought it from the store.”
“And why couldn’t you buy it yourself then, hmm? Illicit. Anyway, how am I supposed to know? I don’t even drink coffee.”
“Sometimes I breathe in too hard and some of the ashes get caught in my throat, that’s all. What does drinking coffee even have to do with it?”
“My point is, I’m not expected to know any of this to begin with. If anything, assuming I would makes YOU the dumb one, not me. In addition, you absolutely act different when you’re high! The other night you spent an hour just flopping on me and fiddling with my tail feathers.”
Kris gave him that infuriating look of theirs, as if by simply not making any counterargument whatsoever they had not only proven their intellectual superiority, but also that his argument had never had a chance of victory to begin with. It was as if they’d only been humoring him, and since they let him get in the last word, anything else he could say would only be proving his desperation and therefore increasing the potency of the look even further. He sighed, lamenting that he could simply never get them to see reason.
He wasn’t right about everything, of course, but he was pretty sure he was right a lot more often than they were. And yet, he could only actually remember them admitting defeat twice in his entire life: Once in that place where all of the light ran out, and once when they had spent five agonizing minutes trying to use his can opener on some cat food only for him to turn it over and show them the pull tab on the other side.
Kris grabbed a little tube from the sandwich bag and slid the remainder of the joint back inside it. Berdly didn’t really feel like that should be allowed, but Kris knew more than he did, so he supposed it must just be what you do with this sort of thing. Saved money, at least (quietly, he held the opinion that buying anything that you didn’t need to survive was a waste of money, though he rarely phrased it like that since it for some reason it always lead to concerned follow up questions). Kris looked over and gave one of his feathers a flick.
“Ready to head back?”
The pair walked back out into the light, leaving the little dark world they’d found behind and coming back into the land of the living. A car trundled slowly past as they made their way through the still empty parking lot. Berdly slapped Kris’s hand to remind them to put everything away before they got back to their room. Noelle could be touchy about this sort of thing, and they figured what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. Besides, there was a lot more she didn’t know about… they hoped.
As they crossed the street, the lingering wisps of smoke finally faded, and the moth was at last alone in the lamplight.