I've lived in a upper-middle class suburb of Detroit my entire life. Throughout middle school and high school, drug use was really rampant among the student body. When you get a bunch of bored kids whose parents give them a long leash and spending money close to an urban area with a high rate of drug use, it's easy to fall into it. The drug culture at my high school was insane; there were people smoking weed in the bathrooms regularly, buying drugs in the hallway in plain view, and people overdosing in class or in the hallways or being dragged out by hall guards for being high was a weekly occurrence- if not more frequent. Couple that with the fact that my older sister had previously been selling my parents' Hydrocodone to her friends, it lead me toward that path, too.

It started with a guy in one of my classes my freshman year. He was one of the "cooler" guys in school and we got along really well. He mentioned drugs a few times around me in our bio class and for whatever reason- whether it was a desire to fit in or just to rebel against something- I offered to sell him Hydrocodone at a pretty low rate. He was excited about it and we made the arrangements. He even bought extra for his friends, which, in retrospect, should have been a red flag about how quickly this could all go wrong. We were pretty sneaky about the whole thing, so I wasn't worried at the time. My friends and I agonized over hidden ways to transport the pills into school. Finally, we came up with the perfect way; we removed the tube of ink from the inside of a highlighter, rinsed the tip so that all of the color left it, let it dry, and stored the pills in the highlighter, surrounded by cotton to soften the rattling. It still rattled a little, but if I was just rummaging through a pencil case, it wouldn't be anything noticeable. We were really proud of this invention and really felt that it was a fool-proof way to make sure I never got busted.

I only sold Hydrocodone for about a week. After just the first sale, I started getting texts from people I didn't know who knew that I was selling and it quickly got way too big for me to be remotely interested in. The scale was an issue, but so was the risk that I was taking. I was aware that I could get in a lot of trouble and that it could get bad really quickly, so I bowed out. I managed to sell all but a few of the Hydrocodone; at one point, the highlighter that I had hollowed out open in my purse and three pills with a hint of pink highlight on them spilled into the bottom of my school tote bag. I didn't really think anything of it and planned to throw them out eventually, but never really got around to it. Honestly, I completely forgot they were there. Fast forward to about a month after I've stopped selling. My good friend J's father is our head hall guard at school. The hall guards are more or less security guards, although really what they do is write you up for being in the halls without a hall pass. J's dad knows me well from hanging around J and likes me a lot- so imagine my surprise when he pulls me out of class along with our assistant principal and asks me to come down to his office. He explains to me that my bio teacher overheard a student saying that I was selling Hydrocodone and that someone could buy from me, and while he doesn't think there's anything to it, he ask to check anyway. I'm filled with a sense of dread when he opens my pencil case and shakes my highlighters- "kids find the craziest ways to hide drugs"- and I am silently praying that I haven't forgotten about any in my highlighters. And that's when it hits me. There, in the bottom of the very shallow tote bag that he is searching are three bright yellow pills. I'm panicking.

But he doesn't find them. He looks through my bag, hands it back to me, and tells me he's sorry he had to do that. I'm silently thanking myself for throwing those pills out- I must have just forgotten that I did it- and I'm so grateful that he's sending me on my way. Class has just ended so I head to my next class, open my bag to take out my text book, and there, plain as day, are three bright yellow pills with a tinge of pink to them. I'm convinced to this day that he must have seen the pills and the fear in my eyes and given me a pass; I've never done it again.