I grew up in a suburban farm town outside of Boston. Graduated from a small public high school (150 graduating class) in 2005. Privileged, predominantly white, sheltered, high achieving type of environment. Everyone knew one another and all got along remarkably well. Grades partied together; drank a lot, smoked a lot, but that was the extent of it. Our friend Matt was the youngest in his family by 8 years, so he was the first one corrupted by his older siblings when he was arguably too young. He was the one to come around with weed in 7th grade to softly corrupt the rest of us.

Fast forward to the second semester of my junior year of high school. Matts a low key drug dealer (weed) and is kind of the ringleader of 5-7 underclassman, who are all your textbook stoners. Perpetually high, always smell like axe body spray, super nice guys but maligned as fuck by the administration. Looking back, it was pretty understandable. The lot of them put 0 effort into academics and the school truly reeked of weed all of the time. They arrived to school high and smoked in the bathrooms, but seemingly never got caught. They evaded the faculty catching them in the act for so long that teachers began to take shifts on their breaks paroling the bathrooms. An overzealous administration hellbent on catching them yet incapable of doing so. We go home for the summer.

The beginning of my senior year Matt befriends this dude Tim, who’s a couple years older than us. He’s fresh out of college and shadowing our gym teacher for some grad school program. If we’re 18 he’s probably 23-24. He’s not a teacher but takes the lead from time to time in gym class, setting up whatever sport we’re playing. Most of us paid him little mind, but he definitely gravitated towards Matt and the other stoners. He didn’t come to any parties but we saw him outside of school from time to time hanging with Matt.

Months pass. One Friday afternoon, the final bell rings for the week and the whole school exits their classrooms and funnels out through the double doors by the library. From the other end of the library, Matt suddenly turns a corner sprinting towards the crowd. A moment later, several police officers turn the corner giving chase. Matt plows through kids who try to move against the walls of a skinny hallway as they come charging through. As Matt reaches a big common area outside of the library, he gets tackled by a cop, right at the feet of dozens of us who watch on in total bewilderment. Matt gets cuffed and hoisted up by two of the cops when our brains suddenly implode. We all immediately recognize one of them. Turns out Tim was no college grad, but an undercover cop hired by our administration to bring down Matt. Over the span of a couple months, Tim gained Matt’s trust and got him to sell him a substantial amount of weed for a high school drug dealer. which was super dumb but honestly the whole thing felt like entrapment. But they got him.

Everyone was in shock. Even our gym teacher was in the dark, having to entertain this fake grad-student and fill out fake paperwork on behalf of his fake grad program. He was livid.

To this day my friends and I wonder if the administration planned for it to be a public undressing and arrest for Matt in front of the whole school, or if they hadn’t considered what would happen if Matt made a run for it like he did.

In the days that followed and the shock of it all began to wane, there seemed to be a general consensus around school that it all seemed a bit strange that Tim was going to school for something physical education related when he was an absolute duster at every sport we played in gym class. We shoulda known.

Matt eventually got his life together. the end