Buzzfeed, Boys, Black Magic

rafi, one

My head was still foggy by the time I got to the front porch of Cody's duplex. I think I had a second-hand high. I didn't like it. There are two types of people, I've long heard. People who get groggy and sleepy and soppy on weed, and people who get paranoid and uncomfortable. I thought it was a cruel joke that I was of the latter type. I could metabolize weed only as a pseudo-migraine and a strange disturbed feeling- like a Junebug had tangled itself into my hair.

A moth flew into my mainframe. I was irrevocably uncool, and no systems reboot nor recreational drug could fix that. This had never bothered me. I doubted that a socially- and fiscally-responsible soulmate was worth my current agitation.

I sat on the step for a while. I thought that if I got some fresh air in my lungs it might clear my head before I drove home. I set my elbows on my knees, and my face in my palms. A cricket chirped somewhere. I wanted to smell grass and car exhaust and rain. I wanted to smell a summer night, and all I could smell was weed. Maybe that was me. Maybe I smelled like weed.

I should have just accepted that my soulmate would be an escapist loser who would dump me. Replicants don't normally have soulmates. It would be a stroke of luck for me to have one at all- even for a short time.

This was the life I deserved, I thought.

I felt someone sit on the step beside me.

"You don't look like you've seen anything good tonight."

I didn't recognize the voice. I peeked through my fingers at my interloper.

He was maybe twenty-two. Curly blonde hair, a tan. A white puka shell necklace that somehow seemed nostalgic and sweet in the orange glow of the porch light.

"I haven't," I said.

"You toke any?" His brown eyes were warm. Familiar even. Not too bloodshot.

"No," I said.

"That's cool," he patted a drum rhythm on his thighs. "I'm only a little high right now."

"I can hardly tell," I said this with more snark than I intended.

He smirked and pressed his chin and cheek against his shoulder. He looked up at me from under his eyelashes, childlike.

"Were you a hall monitor?" he asked.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"The kids who put on those dopey orange vests," he pinched the collar of his green t-shirt as he spoke, "and stand outside their fifth-grade classroom and make sure the kindergartners don't get trampled on their way out of school."

"I didn't possess the necessary authority to monitor anybody in fifth grade-"

He stretched his long legs down the steps and shrugged.

"I was a hall monitor," he pursed his lips. "Fucking hate chaos. If chaos were a person I'd Bruce Lee that asshole."

"That- surprises me," I said.

"Yeah?" he chuckled. "Weed is rolled chaos. Started it as aversion therapy."

I wasn't sure he knew what aversion therapy actually was. He must have read the skepticism on my face because then he added:

"Like, entropy can't decrease, right?" He stared out across the street. "If it decreases somewhere, it's gotta increases somewhere else."

"In a closed system, yeah," I said. "but you're talking about thermodynamics-"

"See I figure that the same goes for humans, too." He met my eyes again. "If I control when I go full chaos, I'll control when I get my allotted chaos. The universe will have to distribute chaos elsewhere, and the rest of my life will be orderly."

"Entropy is different from chaos-dragon chaos," I said, before I realized I was trying to make sense out of an intoxicated kid's cloudy interpretation of physics.

"Chaos-dragon?" The corners of his mouth turned upward.

"Your logic is convoluted," I said. I wanted to stop talking, but my useless astrophysics degree did not let me. "Besides, the Earth isn't a closed system. We're constantly getting energy from the sun-"

"You're probably right," he admitted. "I was stoned for most of my mechanics classes."

Mechanics classes? I thought about Ron and Jeremy and Tyson Nugget. This one didn't just seem different. He'd been to a college of some sort. He hadn't yet admitted to a crime, a bizarre avocation, or unironic (I think?) internet misogyny. He seemed so different that he couldn't have possibly belonged there. Who was he? What was he doing here?

"So who are you and what are you doing here?"

Good going Leela.

"I'm Rafi," his forehead wrinkled. "Cody's kid cousin." As if that were a satisfactory explanation. It wasn't.

"Okay, Rafi," I said. "What are you?

"As of three weeks ago, I am a graduated biomedical engineer. What are you?"

I opened my mouth.

"I mean," he interrupted me, "aside from someone who hasn't seen anything good tonight."

Maybe it was his familiar eyes, or some delayed-calming-effect of the second-hand high, or the ticking-two-and-a-half-week-pothead-deadline weighing on my mind, or his mild, adequate mediocrity, but, right at that moment, I got a whole lot smoother than I had ever been. The Chipotle napkin plan was about to chug into action.

"Do you wanna get out of here, or something?"

***