You know Mya. Maybe you were her. Maybe you still are.
Mya was that kid who went balls-deep into a hobby for about six months and then dropped it like it was hot. It wasn’t the most productive way to live. But, she was sixteen, the youngest of the four Murphy children, and the last kid living in the house with her now very, very busy parents. She mostly stayed out of trouble. Her hobbies were a bit like the story If You Give A Mouse A Cookie and Domino’ed as the following: first, she joined the cross country team and ran a lot. That led to listening to a lot of books on tape or on her iPod. One of those books was Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which was a popular 90s bestseller about the philosophy of cooking. That led her to experiment in the kitchen. All of these obsessions had one thing in common: she was pretty stoned. Even during the running.
This was the early 2000s and Mya, like all high school kids around the country, were purchasing their marijuana from sketchy dudes in oversized UFO pants in the back alley of the Home Depot parking lot. Ok, maybe every suburban kid’s experience wasn’t this specific, but you get the idea. Now, smoking wasn’t ideal for Mya the runner. She needed her lungs to be in top shape for her five-times-a-week, ten-mile habit. And now that she knew about herb extraction and the power of butter from her most recent read, Mya didn’t see why she couldn’t make a perfect batch of brownies. So, she called Travis with the UFO pants’ and Motorola beeper and drove off to Home Depot where she stopped inside to get her dad, Scott, the electric screwdriver he’d been making noises about for the last two weeks. No one had been listening. That seemed to be a common theme in the Murphy household these days.
That year, Mya’s mom had opened up a clothing store with her best friend. Apparently, it had been a lifelong dream put on hold by becoming a mother and raising four children. Her mom wasn’t exactly quiet about the fact that she was now dedicated to doing her own thing and didn’t want to be bothered by other people’s things. Mya’s dad was picking up all kinds of random jobs as a handyman all over town now that all of his money went to the various Northern colleges where his kids attended and were hopefully learning something useful. Mya really missed hanging out with him.
The days when the house was overflowing with people and noises and smells and lives seemed to be over. Even the family’s dog had passed away from old age. So the chaos that had been their daily lives for the past eighteen years was sort of gone. Things were quiet. Mya wasn’t ignored, exactly, it was just that her parents (quite rightly) assumed that she was pretty good on her own. But, the truth was, Mya still needed a little bit of parenting.
She would often find herself reminiscing on her long runs about the picnics her dad used to take her on. She remembered trekking out to the pond to feed the ducks whatever gross new health food her mother had packed them, filling up instead on the potato chips and Oreo cookies that her dad would sneak along in his ancient knapsack. She’d run through the dirt roads, past the cornfields, behind the high school, remembering chasing her siblings down the hill on snow days and catching tadpoles in the creek. She smiled despite the chances of catching bugs in her teeth.
This was Mya’s headspace as she leaned against the side of the Home Depot, her screwdriver purchase tucked under her arm, a present just to let her dad know she was thinking about him. She’d brought along her school bag - a large cross-body messenger style, covered in her Sharpie doodles and pins from her favorite bands. She was quite obviously a child of the 90s. When Travis showed up with his usual personal cloud of weed smoke, much like the rain hovering above Eyore in Winnie The Pooh, Mya was surprised to see how large the package was that he was handing over.
“This is what I need for a sheet of brownies?” Mya was incredulous as she placed the oversized brick into her bag. Travis simply grunted which Mya was pretty sure meant, “Yes.” So, she handed over her cash, a mix of fives and ones, tips from the diner where she waitressed and was training to be a cook. It seemed like a lot but Mya was relatively new to the weed game and didn’t have a great perspective.
That afternoon, she measured and sauteed and added heat, fat, salt, and acid, to make the world’s most perfect weed brownies like an absolute pro. This was no Betty Crocker situation. This was real cocoa powder and butter and her mother’s cake flower. The smell of the chocolate somehow overpowered the smell of the weed. She opened the kitchen windows and turned on the fan, just to be sure, but that seemed to just spread the decadent aroma all over the house. Maybe she overdid it on the heat. Or the acid. Or the salt. She’d figure that out later. Now, she stood in front of her mother’s LIVE. LAUGH. WINE sign, already quite stoned, staring at her confectionary creation steaming from the metal pan. Mya couldn’t wait for them to cool.
She slid a butter knife around the edges, the smell of chocolate filling her nostrils, her stomach grumbling in anticipation, as she brought the straight-out-of-the-oven dessert to her lips. This was a mistake on two fronts. The first one was that she burned her mouth. The second was, as any older millennial will tell you, experimenting with unknown dosage. But Mya didn’t know this yet. This was a lesson that you had to learn the hard way.
Mya sat down on the blue L-shaped sofa in the family’s den. She turned on The Simpsons and cracked open a Diet Coke. Milk would have gone better with the brownies but her cross-country coach disagreed with his runners consuming dairy. And Mya was a good listener. Coach Gibbons never, ever, explicitly mentioned weed brownies. Mya knew she needed to put her baking away but found herself sucked into Bart and Millhouse’s escapades. The couch turned then itself into a sinkhole. Getting up did not feel like an option. Because it wasn’t.
Three hours later, in a different universe, on a planet far, far away, Mya awoke to noises in the kitchen. It took a moment or twenty to pull herself back to Earth. Where was she? Where had the afternoon gone? Why was she so hungry? When her eyes came back into focus, her brain adjusted to her present reality, and her ears picked up on the sounds of someone rummaging through the kitchen. Mya wondered if it were her mom making dinner, her father emptying the dishwasher, or if a pair of uninvited raccoons had broken into the family home. She was just about to laugh at the idea when suddenly, like an anvil in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, she remembered the brownies. The fucking brownies. Shit, shit, double, triple, Lisa and Homer and Baby Maggie SHIT!
It took every ounce of strength in her obviously very strong body to pull Mya up from the couch. Speed was not on her side. Walking into the kitchen felt like the walls were moving like in Jamiroquai’s Virtual Insanity music video. She stumbled around the corner, holding onto the sides of the hall for desperate and much-needed support. This was when she looked into the kitchen and gasped. Because it was the one thing she didn’t want to see.
Mya rubbed her eyes, begging for the image to disappear as a hallucination. Nope, no such luck. She tried to swallow but her mouth was too dry. She tried to talk but her words had not followed her back down to Earth and were still way up in another galaxy, spinning through the ether. But her eyes did not lie. There he was: her father, eating a large square of brownie out of the pan. Mya begged her brain to yell, for her arms to grab, for anything in her power to stop him but it was too late.
“Dad!” The voice that escaped from her throat sounded much like it was underwater or distorted like in an America’s Most Wanted interview to protect her innocence.
“I have to say Mya, these are damn good.” Scott looked tired. He’d been working every day of the week for months. He left his phone on so people could call him late at night with a broken hot water heater or a finicky furnace. He’d been paving driveways and fixing drywall, replacing old pipes, and installing built-in bookshelves. The guy needed to relax. Mya looked at him through her haze and wished she’d got him a massage or tickets to a baseball game instead of a tool for work. Her heart dropped. She wanted so badly to give him the break he so desperately deserved.
But being accidentally dosed on his teenage daughter’s weed brownies? That was surely not on his list of ways he was planning to spend his Friday afternoon. He was not going to like the news. Sure, she’d seen pictures of his bushy mustache in the 70s, his Camel cigarettes rolled in the arm of his T-shirt, the Budweiser can firmly attached to his palm. She knew that her dad wasn’t a prude. But he didn’t know about her weed use. And she’d never known him to partake. This was bad. This was really bad. Anxiety tried to reach up and take the words back from Mya’s throat. But she was too stoned to give in.
And she had to tell him. What was she going to do? Sit and wait until he thought he was having a stroke or a heart attack or a psychotic break? That didn’t feel like an option. She willed her voice to do its job. She must have made a funny noise because her dad turned and saw her.
“Hey, kiddo. Didn’t know you were here. The Westman’s job had to be put off for a day. The paint’s not dry. Damn,” Mya’s dad finished his last bit of the giant brownie, licking his thumb, “these are really, really good. Maybe there’s a future for you in this whole cooking thing.”
Mya’s eyes bulged out of her head. She croaked, she coughed, resembling a dying blowfish.
“Dad, um, those aren’t normal brownies.” Mya just stared at her father. Scott looked at the pan, then to Mya, then back at the pan. Now it was his turn for his eyes to bulge out of their sockets.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“NO.”
“YES!”
“Are you kidding me, Mya?”
“I wish I were. I had one and just dozed off for three hours.” Silence. Nothing. A knot in Mya’s stomach threatened to upheave its contents onto the kitchen floor.
A flicker of an idea flashed across her father’s incredulous face.
“If your mother finds out about this, you’ll be dead. Finished. Grounded till graduation.” Mya’s eyes dropped to the floorboards. She knew that this was true.
“And I can’t tell her!” It was now, just occurring to Scott, that his high was imminent. “Three hours? Three hours!”
Mya felt the heat creep across her face in shame. Her dad was so overworked, doing so much for the family. He probably had other jobs to do that day and bills to pay and all the adult things that seemed to perpetually stress him out. And now his youngest daughter had drugged him and there wasn’t really anything he could do about it.
Scott sighed. His breath might have sounded defeated but his brain was in go-mode.
“Here’s what we’re going to do: you are going to put these in tin foil and hide them in the back of your closet where you usually keep your weed-”
Mya jerked her head back - how did he know—
“You think I don’t know what goes on in my own house?” Mya wasn’t sure whether to be deeply alarmed or to laugh. She wondered what else her dad knew.
“Get your sweatshirt.” Scott was now rifling through the local paper, intent on finding something specific. When he did, he pulled out his reading glasses and hit his hand down on the counter.
“Perfect. Let’s go.” Scott grabbed his non-sawdust-covered flannel and made his way toward the garage door.
“What? What’s happening? Am I in trouble? Where, where are we going?” Mya eeked out. She imagined the two of them sitting in the waiting area of the emergency room, the nurses pumping her poor father’s stomach, and the look on her mother’s face when she got the call to pick them up. This afternoon had started relatively innocently and was now going to be one of the worst days of her life. Mya’s anxiety shot up to her throat, threatening to cut off her air supply.
“Hurry up,” her father called over his shoulder, “we have to get there before it hits.”
“Where?” Mya tried again, wiping her sweaty palms on the back of her cargo jeans.
“Movie Works.” her father replied oh-so-matter-of-factly, “we’ll ride it out there.”
And that is the story of how Mya and her father hung out together for over seven hours, one afternoon in December of 2001, Watching The Lord Of The Rings movie twice. They ate nachos with the fake cheese and popcorn with all of the butter. Coach Gibbons and his lactose be damned. They laughed and cried and talked between showings. They managed to ride out their weed high and make it back home before Mya’s mom got home from the store. To this day, Mya still says that it was the closest she’s ever felt to her father.
When they got back to the house, they were full and exhausted, and both of their faces hurt from smiling. Mya crept into her bedroom as her dad poured himself a glass of water. She came out with the Home Depot bag.
“Thanks, Dad,”
Even Scott will remember this moment for the rest of his life. But, it didn’t last long. Scott had no sooner opened the bag and pulled out the electric screwdriver when they heard the garage door open and Mya’s mom pull her car in.
Mya ran to her room to shower, hearing her mother greet her father in the kitchen.
“Oh my goodness, it smells amazing in here. What has Mya been cooking?” Just before she closed the door, she heard her father’s response.
“I don’t think you want it. It’s kind of a trip.”
Sweet Dreams
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