She left me everything she had, which wasn't much, but it certainly wasn't nothing. It was her. It was tangible proof that she'd been real. She'd existed. She'd loved me.
She left me all of her rings. All of her candles. All of her drapery. All of her beads. All of her books. All of her stones and crystals. Everything. I had all of the things that made her home feel like hers.
Whaya left me everything of her that I could ever want except for the sound of her voice to prove she was still here with me. For that bit, I'd just have to learn to make it on my own.
I'm not going to defend what I did in my response to what happened to her. I know that it's all very much up to interpretation, but I think most people would draw the conclusion that what I did was a vast overreaction. I won't pretend that it wasn't. I'm also not going to lie and say I have any true regrets about it either. I would do it all again. It was a means to an end.
It started with research. I was methodical about it. I didn't choose them at random. They'd followed me, so I followed them back. I followed everything. Every new piece of information was like a string in an outward crawling web.
Since I'm admitting to a crime that's a bit worse than any of the other ones I've mentioned before, I'm going to use fake names. Names don't matter anyways, but I could guess there are people that thought these ones did. Actually, I know. I learned that through my research. I did not choose them lightly. I was aware that some people cared.
Recklessness is a part of it all. I acted with the express knowledge that someone else might act back. I think that's just a cosmic right. I took the risk, and I deserved it if someone else did as well. I can't pretend that my version of justice is the only valid one. If it came to it, I'd go quietly. Trust me when I say that I was aware of my positionality.
It was kind of a delayed reaction. At the same time, I think I moved rather fast. It depends on how it's looked at. I like to think there are just too many interpretations for any single idea to be correct. It was more unexpected that way for everyone involved which was essential to the cause.
Within a week of Whayas passing back into the soils of earth, I broke things off with Adeline, who was well aware that I was not naive enough to believe that God had nothing to do with it. That's why she probably found it shocking when I walked straight out of her bedroom into the living room to speak with her father.
I said, "When do I start?"
He smiled like he'd won, and from his perspective, he truly had. He'd gotten rid of my Whaya in a more permanent sense this time, and I officially had nowhere else to turn. He'd beaten me into submission. Whaya had always said that you could hit someone back without ever touching them at all. He hadn't touched me, but I was now crawling back like a battered woman.
A week later, God handed me a small bag of pills, named a price point, and told me I had a week to offload it. It was surprisingly easy to do. I took more of them than I probably ought to have taken, but I also went to parties and made conversation the same way I had with joints, and very quickly I'd made more money than God had requested through a tedious method of upselling to privileged people that I did not like. When I went to return his profits, he told me to keep the extra and handed me another bag.
I was officially an employed pill-pusher.
The black SUV kept following me. When I was at parties, I still caught glances from men who were much too stiff and blatant in their monitoring of me. God was happy to have me working, but just like me he wasn't naive enough to pretend he'd finished off with the war.
That's when I started watching them back.
That was kind of a longterm task to undertake, so I did other things in the meantime. Namely, I had a lot of grief to process. Processing it was really hard, so I slept around and fucked out my own feelings instead. I do not recommend this method, but I also don't not recommend it.
First it was Colby. He was a painter that I met at the market while working my booth in the springtime. He knew I was selling drugs, because he'd bought weed and pills alongside the crystals he'd purchased off of me. Then he'd asked me out and I'd invited him to my home for dinner instead because I did not want to beat around the bush with my intentions for any longer than necessary. We slept together regularly for several weeks. He painted the outline of a mural on my bedroom wall.
One day he accidentally stumbled into my spare room and found the tables lines with growing marijuana under new grow lights I'd recently acquired with my pill pushing drug money. He also saw the starts of the lab I was making to try and figure out how to make LSD papers. I'd been failing at that quite a bit because science is hard, so I was contemplating growing psybilin mushrooms instead like Whaya had suggested. When Colby saw all of that in addition to the pills God had recently given me, he walked out and never spoke to me again. I gathered that it was intimidating.
After Colby was Lou. He was a barista. I always went to his house to avoid the original problem, and we always smoked weed together in bed while I pretended his coffee didn't make me tachycardic.
I took pills and went home with two football players from the university where my old friends presumably attended. I still never saw them at campus parties, but I went a lot of them to sell pills, and I enjoyed both of the football players less than I'd thought I would. It was underwhelming to say the least. The first one was too over confident, and the second one was so shy and timid that I actually felt bad for him.
There were more. Some weeks I was seeing someone new every day. Sometimes they lasted a little while. It really just depended on the moment.
I was not seeking actual companionship, in case that isn't clear. Even with the more longterm relationships like the one with my painter, Colby, I was not attempting to forge any real bonds. I didn't want that to complicate everything that was going to happen next. I didn't want to endanger anything. I didn't want God to have any targets to look at when I stopped being agreeable.
Then he asked me for a cut of the plants.
I was easygoing for over a year. That's why I say it was a delayed reaction. I did everything I could to keep my discontent quiet and calculated. Big choices have to be thought out, planned, evaluated and adjusted before they're implemented. There's just no way around it.
God had been patient. He'd paid me more than my fair share and he'd let me get comfortable before upping his asks. He was well versed in how to negotiate, and maybe he sensed that my cooperation was not something handed over lightly.
One day, late in spring and well after my 20th birthday, he went to hand me my bag of individual oxycodone tablets and then hesitated. He said, "We need to talk."
He explained to me that he'd been patient. He told me he loved the work I did. He told me I met all of his expectations and that people were constantly impressed by me. They talked about me when I wasn't around. His other pushers were jealous that God liked me so much. Even Adeline, who rarely got my attention, had told me that he spoke to other people about me.
Then he told me that if he was going to continue giving me commission on the pills, then I needed to be more of a team player. He knew I still sold pretty rolled joints and loose bundles of marijuana on the side. He knew I made more money from that than I would let on.
He wanted a cut of that. It was why him and Whaya had fallen out among other things. She wouldn't cut him in. He needed me to be smarter than her. He said this to me as if we weren't discussing a woman he'd brutally taken from me as a punishment for noncompliance.
If I'd cared, I would have argued. I would have pointed out that those plants were a labour of my love. They were tended the way the earth is meant to be cared for. I had gone back to my roots of the honorable harvest. I only took what was needed. I let them flourish. I let parts die naturally as was the way of their life.
But because that conversation was a signal that our time together was soon going to end, I said, "I'll think about it. I'll look over my earnings and get back to you."
Like a business deal.
"That's why I like you," he informed me, his smile genuine. "I always tell people, The Herb knows exactly what he's doing. It's impressive."
I grit my teeth and smiled back. I pretended I didn't hate when he called me that, which was something he'd taken to doing after I'd made a habit of cycling through a practical foraging guide of plant names when I was dealing.
With plans to work on a negotiation that would never happen, I went home and I decided to finish the painting that Colby had started the previous spring. It was a rainbow of color. I painted a forest. I added a sunset. I only vaguely used his outline from before, instead letting the edges bleed into themselves. I painted all night and I didn't stop until the sun was starting to come up the next morning.
Then I had a cup of tea and went to sleep with lavender burning in my bedroom the way Whaya used to do when I was very obviously stressed out.
When I woke up in the early afternoon of the next day, I meditated in the garden, which was something I'd taken to doing every day since Whaya died. I focused my energy's on emptying my mind. I made my thoughts a white hum until all I could sense was the feeling of my body, floating in time and space with the smell of the earth and the plants holding me in reality.
Then I let my clear mind go to work. I let it think of my Whaya. I let it think of my anger. I let it think of everything I'd been forced to give up because a man who fancied himself a god had decided to find me interesting.
It was just entirely unacceptable that he could have the power he thought he had. He had decided I was small and easy to manipulate. He had decided he was allowed to hurt me. He had decided he could get away with causing me harm and I was deciding that I would not allow him to have that power. Whaya told me to be kind and gentle. In this moment, I could not be those things. Just for a moment, I'd need to be something entirely different.
I took a deep breath and breathed in the scent of the garden. Then I opened my eyes to the late afternoon sun and got up.
I am not a chemist. Science is too difficult for me. I don't like absolutes. Trying to make LSD in a home lab was way too hard, especially without my Whaya. That didn't stop me from making something else though. Something weird. Something that was accidental.
I dismantled the lab and grabbed my products on my way out the door after I'd dressed myself and done my makeup. I even trimmed my own hair again, keeping the sides short and the top fluffy. My mothers hair did not need to see what I was about to do. I'd decided that a long while ago.
There were 6 men regularly following me in a rotation with eachother. God clearly favored men, or at the very least he thought I'd be more intimidated by them than I would be by women. Of those 6, only 3 were the focus of my thoughts. Those 3 didn't have obligations or families that they cared to notice in meaningful ways. Those 3 were the cocky ones, the ones that didn't care that I could see them following. Those 3 were the ones that thrived off what they did. Those 3 included the man that followed me to the market infront of Poppy, and the one that handed me pills at parties when they were attempting to make me vulnerable. They included the worst of them all.
The first person I ran into that night was by design. He had fired up the engine of the SUV as soon as I'd gone outside my front door, likely in preparation to follow me. The driver of the vehicle, who was regularly parked infront of my home, was unfortunately a person of interest to me that evening. That was the very same person from the market, and I'd learned through extensive research and vague conversations that this person with the buzzed hair was named Kevin.
I'd never done it before, but I walked up to the window of the SUV and knocked on it. Then I stared expectantly at the tinted window until it was slowly rolled down just two inches. Kevins eyes stared at me through the gap in apprehension.
"Can I help you?" He asked uncertainly.
"Can I get a ride?" I asked, my smile as genuine and innocent as I could muster.
He blinked at me.
"Come on," I pressed playfully leaning against the car slightly. I had anticipated that this would confuse him. He'd spent enough time taunting me to know this was abnormal behavior. Fortunately, my research had told me he wasn't very bright. He'd actually dropped out of highschool, and unlike me he hadn't done well when he was there either. Instead he'd been one of Gods cronies for years and he wasn't even good at it. He just watched things instead of doing them. All his power lied in intimidation, not action. I was hoping to use that to my advantage. "We're going to the same place anyways. I don't feel like walking."
He still looked skeptical, which was good because I had a card that needed to be put on the table.
"I'll give you a joint."
I was heading to a party, except for it really wasn't a party. It was a gathering at a house on the east side of the river in the Hollywood district. It was a far cry from the glamour of Hollywood that normally comes to mind when people think of Los Angeles. Instead it was in Portland and it was historic and old and the place I was going was a house full of quiet drug addicts listening to aggressive music and sitting in clouds of their own smoke. It was a good setting for what I had planned. It was secluded. That neighborhood was a good place for a quick and bad thing to happen. It wasn't in a circle I normally frequented, but the invite had been easy enough to get.
The inside of the car was plush and clean, but it smelled like fast food anyways. I tried very hard not to touch anything. I buckled my seat belt with my hand tucked in the sleeve of my knit sweater.
Kevin and I drove in casual silence. I watched him flip through the channels on the radio. He smoked a cigarette while he drove and I tried hard not to ask for one even though I'd taken to smoking them occasionally as a more flirtatious and social act at parties. People are more willing to buy a pill from someone they have shared a cigarette with. I was quickly gaining a regrettable addition.
Kevin had no kids. I kept reminding myself of that. Kevin's parents lived in another state very far away. They didn't talk often. He had no kids and no partners. He often flirted with Adeline and Adeline really didn't like it. She asked him to leave her alone. One time she got so frustrated while telling me about it that it made her cry. She told me that one time her dad asked him to hit somebody, so he did it. She said she hit him really hard. He did not look remorseful, she said, even though he never did it again.
As far as I could tell, he wasn't a good person. I had to keep circling my thoughts back to that. He was a bad person and he'd stalked me for years. He'd done it because he was told to, but he'd still done it. He'd agreed to intimidate me, and he really had no good reason do to it, and that's why he was on my list.
First times are just hard.
When we pulled up infront of the darkened house off of Sandy boulevard, he looked at me pointedly and said, "Get out."
"He's not going to be mad that you gave me a ride, right?" I asked.
"Listen, Herb," he started.
"My name isn't The Herb," I cut in unnecessarily. I laughed an easy going laugh because annoying him was helpful to me. "That's just what he calls me."
"Get out of the car."
"Don't you want your joint?" I reminded him.
He did want it. He held out his hand immediately. His eyes were hungry even though his face stayed cold.
I had things in my left and my right pockets of my loose flanneled pants. I reached into the left one, pulling a joint out gingerly.
"Don't smoke this until you get home," I said very seriously. "It's going to knock you on your ass and you won't be able to drive."
"I really doubt a little bit of weed is going to do anything," he scoffed, snatching it. "Why is it so fucking tiny?"
I shrugged. I really thought for a moment about how far I was willing to go. I thought about how Adeline cried and about how he stalked me and the fact that the so-called God had taken my Whaya.
"It's a lot," I said, cementing his fate. "Don't smoke and drive."
I climbed out of the vehicle and closed the door behind me. I chose not to ponder how Florence would view this. Vigilante justice is always morally gray, isn't it?
I'll spoil this bit for you. Inside the house that I was about to walk into waited another target. I had stated my intentions to God when he gave me the most recent bag of pills the night before and so his next helper was already here waiting for me. That meant my driver wasn't staying.
My driver would drive away as soon as I reached the front door of the home. Kevin wasn't going to heed any warnings. I hadn't expected him to. Instead he was going to light that joint as he pulled out.
At first he'd feel fine. Then I'd predict he'd get lightheaded. Things would get a little bit swirly, I suppose. I guess I wouldn't know for sure, because I had epically failed at making LSD so many times that I really had no idea what I gave him. All I know is that about 14 minutes after he left me, he lost control of his vehicle, slammed into the guardrail of one of portlands many historic bridges, and eventually plummeted deep into the Willamette river below.
But Whaya was worth more than one single asshole of a person, so I still had work to do.