Alice Martin: PERMIT • Cleaver Magazine

Flash Nonfiction by Alice Martin
PERMIT

We had been driving around for hours—past fluorescent-lit Exxons and the Carmike movie theater with the cracked marquee and those apartments where that kid drowned in the pool that one time—when you finally said you were bored, let’s go get high.

I drove us to our old elementary school and parked in the empty lot. I was just taking us to somewhere I knew how to get to, it being my first day with my learner’s permit. We walked around to the playground, your arm linked in mine, your canvas bag clanging against your hip, heavy with all those pins. A purple zebra with sunglasses on. A panda eating ramen. GIR from Invader Zim. A heart with stitches.

We crawled into the plastic tunnel part of the jungle gym. Inside, it smelled like cottony static and feet. The air was hot and dry and charged. The plastic colored our bodies red in the filtered sunlight.

“So,” you said as you packed a bowl. “Should I fuck him?”

I snorted. “Like you’d even know how.”

“I know how,” you said. You set your feet on the side of the tunnel next to my head and popped your hips up, let your butt hit back down. The tunnel mumbled. “You just, you know, open your legs and thrust up.”

“What if he wants you on top?”

You got the bowl started, inhaled, passed it to me. It was the first one either of us ever owned, that small glass pipe with the orange blob inside. I think we’d only gotten it a few weeks before that, picked it out together from a handful of them some friend of your friend was selling. All I remember about that is he’d lived out in the boonies, past that old gun range and the ten-acre graveyard, where most of the roads were dirt. You’d told me it would be an adventure, but in the end, I thought it’d been pretty boring.

“If I’m getting him laid, I’m not going to be the one doing the work.” Your voice was all thick and tight from the smoke.

“So, what am I supposed to do?” I asked. “I mean, while you’re going at it or whatever.”

“I don’t know, he’s probably got a television. I hear it doesn’t take long.”

I didn’t tell you at the time, but I didn’t want to go. I wanted us to go to that weird hippie witch store we loved, the one tucked into the graffiti-stained strip mall, the one that always smelled like incense and had prints of thin-boned fairies and all those crystals hanging from the ceiling making rainbows on the floor, and I wanted us to try on the belly dancer skirts they had, the ones we never would have actually bought or worn in public—God, no—but that we liked to put on anyway and spin around in all that sweet smoke and delicate light and gauzy fabric until the world didn’t feel real anymore, it just felt like us.

But I didn’t tell you that. Because I was pretty sure you already knew.

“Fine,” I said instead and took another hit. Then: “But don’t make me talk to him.”

We finished the bowl in the last blaze of sunlight, and you pressed the side of your leg against mine. Your calves were covered in red mosquito bites and prickly with hairs. You were wearing socks that had little frills on the edges. I thought they were stupid, but I was also kind of thankful for them.

Soon, the sun would set, and the tunnel would lose its red pulse, would transform back into just plain old dead plastic with flies stuck in its resin. We would crawl out on our gritty knees and totter back to my mom’s shit-colored Toyota and drive out to where he lived by the Calvary Baptist Church. You would lose your virginity in his bedroom, and I would sit a wall away with some guy’s brother’s sticky hand on my knee watching South Park.

But remember: before that it was us in that multi-colored tube. You and me in a world that stank but glowed.

Alice Martin is an Assistant Professor of English Studies at Western Carolina University. She received her PhD in American Literature from Rutgers University. Her writing has appeared in the Carolina Quarterly, Appalachian Heritage, Triangle House Review, and elsewhere. Westward Women, published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2026, is her debut novel.