Juan and Big Steve got an apartment in Boonestra for three months the summer after we graduated. I used to hang out there because me and Juan were good friends. I’d sleep on the couch all the time, which they were cool with because it was my couch—my dad was just going to throw it out after the divorce, so Juan came over with a truck and grabbed it off the curb. They basically gave me free reign; I didn’t have a key, but they never locked the door. Sometimes I’d stay there for a full week, contributing a Little Caesars Hot-N-Ready every other day. I wasn’t working, but I still had some money from my high school job. I saw it as my way of paying rent.
Juan said he wanted to keep the place nice, so he gave us a whole list of rules. No smoking inside. Take the trash out to the dumpster every night. If you use a dish, rinse it. He had long-term plans for the place—it was going to be his escape from the little one-bedroom in Newell he shared with his parents and little sister. But it wasn’t even two weeks into them having the place that Big Steve lit up a Djarum Black in the living room and told us he had a new policy —Thursdays were going to be Smoke Inside Thursday. That was the day Big Steve was home all day and he didn’t want to go out to the patio for a cig, especially with how windy that summer had been.
Juan was over at his parent’s place doing laundry. “You think he’ll be mad about that?” I asked.
“I’m the one bringin’ in the dough for this,” Big Steve said. He took a long drag, then opened the pack and pulled two of them out. It was just me, Big Steve, and our friend Bella. Bella also spent a lot of time just hanging out there, but she usually went home at night. When she didn’t, she’d take the couch and I’d sleep in Juan’s bed.
Big Steve sat the Djarum Blacks down in front of us. “Care to join me?”
“Why the hell not,” Bella said. “Steve’s got a point.”
“Okay, but just this once,” I said. “We really shouldn’t make this a habit.”
By the time Juan got back, the whole place smelled like cigarettes, like we were hanging out in the dive bar under the Mojado River bridge where my parents used to take me for chicken fried steak on Sunday afternoons. The moment he walked in the door, you could tell he was pissed.
“Nope, nope, nope,” he said. “This shit ain’t flying.”
“Relax. Sit down and have a smoke,” Big Steve said. “It’s this whole new thing we’re gonna be doing,” and he explained his whole theory about Smoke Inside Thursday—that once a week, we just let loose and do what we want. As long as it was just that one day, the place would air out. It was just a time to not care about the world, to just exist in that little space we’d made. Juan was skeptical. But in the end, it was Big Steve who made the decisions. He quieted Juan by pulling out another cigarette. That was that.
The next Smoke Inside Thursday, Big Steve pulled out a dime bag. It was all four of us there that time. He’d been right about the cigarette smell filtering out, so we all figured the weed smell would, too. Bella rolled the J because she was better at it than any of us were, and we passed it around the couch. Juan plugged his iPod into a speaker and put on some Torche, and we just sat around and got high, talking about all the people from high school we’d never have to talk to again: Rachel Kubota, the yearbook editor who forgot to put Juan’s photo in; and Craig Jones, who used to stand by the vending machine and shake it when people were trying to get a bag of chips; and Marianna Solis, who thought she was better than everyone because her dad was a state senator.
It went on like that for the next few weeks. Every Thursday, the four of us got together and smoked a pack of cigarettes, a couple joints, talked about the life we used to have and the life we thought we’d have in the future. Where we wanted to go when we finally got out of that town. What careers we wanted to have. Me and Juan and Bella all had dreams, said we wouldn’t be trapped on the Gulf Coast forever, that we’d live in a city and would have jobs where we did things—we didn’t know what those things would be, but we knew they’d be important things, that we’d work in office buildings and people would report to us.
Big Steve was the opposite. He just wanted to keep selling drugs for a few more years, then clean up and get a job at the plant. But that all changed in July, when his dad got sick. Suddenly he started talking a lot about death, almost obsessively, about how all of us would be gone one day. He quit everything he was on cold turkey and started looking for a real job and ended up getting one at a gas station, making a whole lot less money than he was making from drug dealing. We kept doing Smoke Inside Thursday for two more weeks just without Big Steve, until one day me and Juan were coming back to the apartment after getting coffee and there was an eviction notice on the door. They had 48 hours to get their stuff and leave the premises, which also meant that all of a sudden, that little space I was part of wasn’t there anymore. I tried to save my parents’ couch, but my one friend with a truck had work that day.
I heard Big Steve quit the gas station a couple months later and headed up to Houston, where he started working as a line cook at some dive bar in the Heights, but I don’t know what happened to him after that. He was never a social media guy and he’d go through pre-paid phone after pre-paid phone. At some point he didn’t tell me when he’d changed numbers. I like to think he’s doing good up in the city, but who knows. He could be back in Boonestra now, since it was where he always wanted to be. Bella’s working as a clerk for a local lawyer—boring stuff, but it’s good money. As for Juan, his parents wouldn’t take him back in after the eviction, so he ended up staying with a buddy of ours, living in a back bedroom that the guy’s parents had just been using to store boxes—mostly Christmas decorations and some old craft supplies from the guy’s mom had. I helped them squeeze a little twin mattress in the corner there, where he stayed for about six months before he left, moved in with a girl he’d been seeing.
Funny thing is, I ended up back in that same apartment last year. Girl I was dating said she heard about a party and asked if I wanted to go with her. We rolled up to that same complex, walked up those same stairs, went in that same door. I expected it to all look the same—that my old couch would be there against the wall and Big Steve would be sitting on it with a cigarette hanging out one side of his mouth and a joint between his fingers. But the building owner had remodeled at some point—the appliances were all new and the walls were white instead of the beige they used to be. It felt weird to be there with all these new people, taking Fireball shots and dancing to Nicki Minaj songs in a place with that much history. When anyone wanted to smoke, the new tenant would point them out to the balcony, where the wind would keep blowing lighters out before we could get anything lit.
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Justin Carter‘s first book, Brazos, is forthcoming in 2024 from Belle Point Press. His work appears in Bat City Review, DIAGRAM, Sonora Review, and other spaces. Originally from the Texas Gulf Coast, Justin currently lives in Iowa and works as a sports writer and editor.
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image: MM Kaufman
Rejection Letters 