THE WEED MADE ME PARANOID BUT I WAS RIGHT

The clock strikes midnight with the sound of a ledger snapping shut, and Peter clocks in for another shift at the Hopetown Gas & Go, where the fluorescent lights hum a frequency that vibrates at the exact pitch of his guilt and the parking lot stretches into darkness, a ninth circle of suburban hell waiting beyond the glass, and he's been doing this for eight months now, ever since his mother got sick and he made the decision that would define everything that came after, the decision he tells himself was about medical bills but knows, in the place where truth lies beneath the narratives we construct, was about something else entirely.

Peter moves through the aisles with mechanical precision, his hands stocking shelves while his mind calculates the weight of the Ziploc bag in his jacket pocket, not the pre-rolled joint he tells himself is just to take the edge off but the real product, the inventory he's been skimming from the back room for three weeks now, boxes labeled as motor oil additives that contain something that pays considerably better, something that makes the Hopetown Gas & Go less a gas station and more a distribution point, and Peter has been stealing from people who do not take kindly to theft.

At two in the morning Peter steps out to the back loading area where the security camera has a convenient blind spot that he's sure isn't accidental, and he lights up, pulling smoke into his lungs not for pleasure but for courage, because tonight he has taken enough product to pay for the experimental German treatment his mother's insurance denied, and the high comes on gentle at first then keeps going, deepening, and Peter realizes he's smoked more than he intended, but tonight the paranoia feels different, feels earned, because Peter is doing something worth being paranoid about.

When he goes back inside, the fluorescent lights seem to expose him, seem to announce his guilt to anyone who might be watching, and he thinks about his mother in the hospice facility, the way she looked at him last week when he told her about the German trial, the way her face had transformed with something that might have been hope but also might have been accusation, and she'd asked: "Where did you get the money, Peter?" and he'd lied, told her he'd been saving, but she'd known he was lying because mothers always know, and she'd asked again, slower: "What did you do?"

A car pulls into the lot at two-seventeen, a black sedan with tinted windows, and a woman in her mid-thirties gets out wearing clothes too nice for the pressure cooker of a gas station at this hour, and she walks toward the entrance with the purposeful stride of someone who knows exactly where she's going and why, and when she comes inside the door chime sounds like a verdict being read.

She walks directly to the counter and looks at him with eyes that catalogue everything, his dilated pupils, his shaking hands, the way he's positioned himself near the backroom door, and when she speaks her voice is casual in a way that feels practiced: "You're Peter, right? Trevor's night guy? I'm looking for something specific. Trevor said you're very observant. Notice things. Patterns in inventory."

Peter's heart is doing something arrhythmic and violent in his chest, and he understands with chemical-enhanced clarity that this is a test, that his manager knows exactly what Peter has been noticing, exactly what Peter has been taking, and this

woman is here to determine whether Peter is a problem that needs solving or an opportunity that needs exploiting.

"I notice the regular stock," Peter says carefully. "Motor oil. Snacks. Nothing special."

The woman's smile doesn't change. "That's disappointing. Because Trevor was very clear that you notice the Thursday deliveries. The ones in the sealed boxes. The ones you've been helping yourself to."

Peter makes a calculation that feels less like a decision and more like a coin flip determining whether he lives or dies. "I took three boxes. I needed money for my mother's treatment. I can pay it back. Or I can be useful. I can move product. I'm here every night. Nobody pays attention to the graveyard shift."

The woman studies him with the intensity of someone appraising merchandise, and Peter can see himself through her eyes: desperate, compromised, already guilty, already complicit, the perfect candidate for further exploitation because people who've crossed one line tend to find the next lines easier to cross.

"You can pay it back by working it off," she says. "Stock the shelves. Clock in. Clock out. But on Thursday nights, you'll move the special inventory from the storage room to the marked cars that come through between three and four. You'll keep your mouth shut. You'll be invisible. And in six months, we'll be even. Maybe you'll even make enough extra to actually afford that German treatment. Maybe your mother gets to live a little longer."

She slides a card across the counter with a phone number written on it, and just before she reaches the door she looks back: "Trevor says your mother worked in pharmaceutical distribution before she got sick. Says she knows how supply chains work. Interesting coincidence. Makes me wonder what she might have taught you."

The door chimes as she leaves and Peter stands there holding the card, and the implication lands on him with the weight of a building collapsing: his mother's career, his mother's knowledge, his mother's illness happening right around the time the special Thursday deliveries started, and he's thinking about the question she asked him, "What did you do?" and wondering if it was accusatory or if it was something else, if it was a mother recognizing her own methodology in her son.

He sits on the concrete floor of the storage room and pulls out his phone, opens the text thread with his mother, scrolls up through months of his lies about extra shifts and savings, and he sees her responses in a new light, the way she never quite believed him but also never quite pushed back, the way she accepted his explanation with a resignation that might have been gratitude but also might have been recognition, might have been someone understanding that survival doesn't care about morality, that cancer costs more than honesty can afford.

The clock jumps to four-thirty and Peter's mind races through possibilities: he could quit, he could go to the police, he could tell his mother the truth, he could refuse the woman's offer, but each option leads to a cascade of consequences that end with his

mother dying sooner rather than later, with her last memory of him being disappointment, and isn't that the real horror, that love can make you complicit in things you'd never do for yourself.

At five in the morning a car pulls up, black sedan different from before, and a man gets out and walks to the back entrance like he's done this a hundred times, and he knocks three times, and Peter understands this is the pattern, this is how it works, this is what Thursday nights will look like for the next six months or longer or what forever must mean.

Peter opens the door for the man, the tallest and fittest man Peter has seen in months, broad-shouldered and solid in a way that makes Peter feel thin and breakable and wrong, and the man hands him a list without making eye contact, and Peter goes to the storage room with hands that shake from more than just the weed, gathering the marked boxes while thinking about how this man moves through the world with such certainty, such uncomplicated masculinity, and Peter carries the boxes out one by one, bending and lifting under the man's gaze, feeling exposed in the fluorescent light of the loading area where two security cameras capture everything, and when Peter finishes loading the trunk the man lights a cigarette with the kind of casual ominance that makes Peter's chest tight, makes him aware of his own body in ways he usually suppresses, makes him think thoughts he's trained himself not to think about men who look like they could break him or save him or both.

The man finishes his cigarette with deliberate slowness, watching Peter in a way that feels like evaluation or judgment or something else Peter can't name, and then he pulls out an envelope thick with cash and hands it to Peter, and their fingers touch for a split second, and Peter's entire nervous system fires at once, arousal and shame and fear tangling into something that feels dangerous and inevitable and wrong, and the man smirks, not cruelly but knowingly, as if he can see exactly what's happening in Peter's head, exactly what Peter wants and hates himself for wanting, and then he gets in his car and drives away, leaving Peter standing in the loading area holding money that feels wet and sticky somehow even though it isn't, holding evidence of a transaction that felt like something else entirely.

Peter stands there trying to steady his breathing, trying to understand why the hand that isn't holding the envelope has moved to his zipper unconsciously, the one no woman or man has touched in longer than he wants to remember, and he realizes with brutal clarity that he's not crazy, that nothing was ever wrong with him exactly, that they all made him this way, his mother who taught him survival has no gender and no morality, the absent father who left him with no model for what men are supposed to be, the culture that taught him to suppress any attraction to masculine authority even as he craves it, craves the humiliation of being small and weak and useful to men who could destroy him, and Peter understands that the paranoia isn't paranoia at all, it's just accurate perception of himself, of what he wants, of what he's willing to do.

The truth doesn't damage Peter the way he thought it would, which is its own kind of damage, the way knowing you're complicit feels less like revelation and more like recognition of something that was always there, waiting to be named, and now it's too late but such nows are always too late, and Peter knows this so completely he jokes about it without once failing to look himself dead in the mirror, dead being the operative word, and he prefers not to dwell on any of it because dwelling would require change and change would mean he couldn't call himself a victim anymore.

Fire spreads through his hands where he holds the envelope, not metaphorical fire but the actual heat of guilt made physical, the way shame metabolizes into temperature, and fire isn't Peter, isn't capable of carelessness or mistakes the way Peter is, fire is consequence made visible, a fatally clear opium that never blinds you enough, which is good because the ones who don't deserve to burn always call it mercy when the burning stops, always love the ones who burn and burn again until they understand that light born from darkness so pitch and deep it comforts the eye could never be mistaken for mercy, only for what it actually is, which is punishment that looks like warmth.

The sun rises painting the parking lot in shades of pink and gold that seem obscene in their beauty, and Peter counts the money and it's more than he makes in two weeks of legitimate work, and he thinks about how easy it would be to keep doing this, how six months could become a year could become a career, how the line between son trying to save his mother and someone trying to save himself through submission to stronger men is thinner than he ever imagined, is possibly the same line his mother crossed years ago.

Peter clocks out at eight and walks to his car with the envelope in his jacket pocket, and he doesn't call his dealer, doesn't plan his next escape, but he also doesn't call the police, doesn't confess, doesn't choose the clear moral path because the clear moral path leads to his mother dying with the knowledge that her son could have saved her but chose not to, and Peter understands now that the real trap isn't the graveyard shift or the addiction or even the criminal enterprise, the real trap is love, is the way caring about someone gives them the power to make you complicit in your own corruption.

He drives to the hospice facility because he needs to see her, needs to understand what she knew and when she knew it, and when he arrives his mother is awake, propped up in bed, looking smaller than she did yesterday, and when she sees him her face does something complicated, something that might be relief or might be recognition or might be the expression of someone who's been waiting for this conversation.

Peter sits in the chair beside her bed without taking out his phone, without distraction, and before anything can crack open in his chest he puts the envelope on the blanket between them, and his mother looks at it and then at him, and she doesn't ask what it is because she knows, and Peter says, "You knew. About Hopetown. About what it actually is," and it's not a question.

His mother's hand reaches out and touches the envelope with fingers that shake from more than just illness, and when she speaks her voice is clear: "I helped set it up. Five years ago. Before I got sick. Trevor needed someone who understood pharmaceutical distribution. I thought I'd do it for a year, get out clean. Then I got diagnosed. Then the insurance denied coverage. Then I understood that the money I'd made helping poison other people wasn't enough to save myself."

Peter feels something in his chest that isn't breaking because breaking implies it was whole before, and what's happening is more like recognition, more like understanding that it was never whole, that he was raised in a house where survival meant flexibility, where love meant teaching your child how to navigate systems both legal and illegal, where the greatest gift a parent could give was the knowledge that morality is contextual and survival is absolute.

"I'm sorry I taught you this," she says, her hand covering his. "I'm not sorry you learned it. Does that make sense?"

Peter thinks about the next six months of Thursday nights and the man with the cigarette who will return week after week, thinks about becoming someone he can't disapprove of because his mother can't disapprove from beyond death, thinks about how the German treatment might give her another year but won't give him back the person he was before he understood what love actually costs, and he realizes the high has worn off completely, that he's experiencing this moment with brutal unmedicated clarity, that his paranoia was never paranoia at all but accurate perception of a reality that most people have the luxury of not seeing.

"No," Peter tells her. "It doesn't make sense at all." She smiles, and it's the saddest smile Peter has ever seen. "Good. When it starts making sense, that's when you've lost something you can't get back."

Peter stays until visiting hours end, and when he leaves he drives not home but back to Hopetown Gas & Go, and he parks in the lot and thinks about the woman's card in his pocket, about the phone number he hasn't called yet, about the decision he still has to make even though he knows the decision has already been made, was made the moment he opened that first Thursday box, was made when his mother taught him to see systems instead of rules, was made before he was born in the choices his mother made that created the circumstances that created him, and Peter understands with pharmaceutical clarity that this is inheritance, this is legacy, this is what it means to love someone enough to become complicit in their survival and your own corruption.

The clock on his dashboard reads 2:17, which is impossible because it's afternoon, but Peter looks again and it still says 2:17, and he realizes the clock has been broken for weeks and he never noticed because time stopped meaning anything the night he decided to steal from people who kill thieves, and broken time seems appropriate somehow, seems like the perfect metaphor for a life that doesn't move forward or backward but just exists in this perpetual moment of decision and consequence, of love and corruption, of mother and son and the drug that doesn't keep them apart at all but binds them together in a complicity so complete that saving her means losing himself.

Peter pulls out his phone and dials the number on the card and when the woman answers he says, "I'm in," and she says, "I know," and Peter understands that she always knew, that his mother always knew, that the only person who didn't know was him, and now he does, and the knowledge doesn't set him free, it just makes him complicit, makes him conscious, makes him exactly what the graveyard shift was always designed to produce: someone awake enough to see the truth and broken enough to live with it.

THE END