Lysergically Yours | Page 4

was that Johnny did in fact know where Lyle could get some acid, but his natural defence mechanisms had convinced him to play dumb. He had been a small time dealer all through his high school years in Peterborough. He would receive a sheet of acid, 200 hits, at an anonymous mailbox from a Russian guy he knew in Kingston in exchange for 500 dollars. He would then break it down and sell it for five bucks a hit. This kept Johnny in steady supply of black hoodies and pocket money throughout his teenage years, it had also been the primary source of the money he had saved for university. When he came to Toronto for school, Johnny figured he had left his acid pushing days behind him. He had assumed that the market was already saturated and he'd be unable to find a niche. But now-- Now he wasn't so sure.
What he was sure of was that he had a good deal going with the U of T physics department. The department was desperate for new students so they pampered their undergrads with free pizza at lunchtime three days a week. Johnny wasn't, technically speaking, a physics undergrad, but he had been tipped off to the existence of the pizza Nirvana by a classmate in Physics 140. The combination of Johnny's brief chat with Haj-Mosawi and his run in with Lyle had rendered him ten minutes late for pizza.
Those were a vital ten minutes in which the vegetarian pizzas had been entirely consumed. Johnny had been a vegetarian for six years, but he wasn't uptight about it; he was perfectly willing to pick pepperoni off of pizza. Besides, he knew that it had not been the other vegetarians in the room who had eaten all the vegetarian pizza. The truth was that those who ate meat would dig into the vegetarian pizza first, leaving the meat pizzas virtually untouched. They did this because they knew that, although they were content to eat either, the vegetarians didn't even see the meat pizzas as food. This meant that those pizzas could be saved for leisurely consumption as much as thirty minutes post-pizza-arrival.
Johnny wasn't one to let others win that easily. He preyed on the false sense of security that the meat-eaters derived from their pizza piracy and managed to find an entire untouched pepperoni pizza still in its box. He closed the lid and took it over to an unoccupied section of the physics student lounge where he sat in a beat up armchair, opened the box onto a coffee table and began to systematically pluck all the pepperoni slices off of the entire pizza and deposit them into the lid of the box. As he de-meated his pizza, Johnny's thoughts returned to his short puzzling conversation with Lyle. Johnny had about fifty hits of quality blotter in his dorm room at this very moment. It was earmarked for personal use, but there was no reason he couldn't sell some of it to Lyle and see what developed from there. If he hadn't already burned his bridges. Johnny could certainly use the cash, at the very least. His bank account was running dangerously low and there were four days every week without free pizza.
Johnny was so caught up in his thoughts that he didn't notice anyone was behind him until an arm reached over his shoulder and claimed a small handful of the unwanted pepperoni. He could feel small breasts against the back of his head. Before he could turn around, the girl had dropped herself into the equally worn armchair opposite him. "Nice shirt," she said with a mouthful of pepperoni.
"People seem to like it," Johnny replied.
"I'm Tinka. You should eat meat, it's good for you."
From the start it was easy to see that Tinka was something of an enigma. Her hair was mostly black, though there were patches of red and blue. It had ribbons and beads knotted randomly into it and, although nearly shoulder length, stood up improbably and stuck out in every direction as though straining with all its will to escape her scalp. She wore a tank top onto which she had marked red "X"s across her breasts in paint that was uncomfortably blood-like in colour. She was wearing big black boots, torn fishnet stockings and a plaid flannel mini-skirt which, given the haphazard way she sat with one leg up on the coffee table, did absolutely nothing to hide her red silk underwear. She played with her hair for a moment before staring directly at Johnny with eyes that blazed from under epicanthic folds, indicating his turn to speak.
"Johnny. And no, it's not."
"Whatever, it's free," Tinka shrugged as she crammed another fistful of pepperoni into her lipsticked mouth.
"You're a physics student?" Johnny asked out loud