“Wow. That’s a shitload of pot.”

It was Ryan that said it, but I couldn’t help but agree. This was so much worse than I expected. Our apartment looked like possession with the intent to distribute.

Overnight, the soggy ceiling had partially collapsed Sasquatch’s living room into our own. A large chunk of it had fallen, like a pizza slice, right on top of ours. Now, for the first time, Trina and I could see what Sasquatch had been up to.

Grow lights, drowned marijuana plants, and what looked like linear miles of drip hoses oozed out from above. It wasn’t the sprinklers that had flooded Sasquatch’s apartment—or at least, it wasn’t only the sprinklers. It looked like our upstairs neighbor had been running an industrial level grow-house out of his twelve hundred square foot apartment. His jungle was now our jungle. Actually, his jungle was now our living room.

No wonder I always had such horrible water pressure! Sasquatch was growing a freakin’ rainforest of pot right above us. It explained so much about him. Or her. I suppose there was a possibility that Sasquatch was a she.

Trina edged forward from the door and into the living room. She picked one of the deeply verdant green, characteristically star shaped leaves and danced back to the safety of the doorway. Carefully, she smashed it between her fingers and gave it a good sniff. Then, she licked it.

“That’s not oregano,” she declared.

Ryan smirked and grabbed a leaf of his own. He snapped a photo of it with his phone, another of the apartment, and fired them off in a text to someone. “Definitely not oregano, no.” He seemed to think this was all somewhat funny.

Although I knew objectively that this situation ought to be somewhat comical, this was also my home. “Now what?” I asked.

With Sasquatch’s living room now inside ours, there was no way to get to our bedrooms and see whether or not they were intact. My homework was in there. I had no Monday classes, but come Tuesday, I needed my music theory book, my math book, and my stupid TI-89 graphing calculator.

“Now we call the police,” Ryan said. He was staring around himself in wonder and disbelief. I knew the feeling. “This is super-duper illegal. Multiple felonies are being committed in your living room at the moment.”

Trina’s boyfriend, Chris, had accompanied her to the apartment this morning. He scooped up one of the better-preserved specimens, still safely enclosed in a little pot. “Before we call the police, I’m taking this baby and a few of its buddies to the car. I wish I knew what strain this was, but I’m not about to walk out of here without a plant or two. It would just be wrong. Wasteful, you know?”

“It’s Indica,” Ryan replied automatically. We all turned to gape at him. He wasn’t wearing a suit on a Sunday morning, but he was wearing a grey blazer over a white t-shirt. Behind his glasses, Ryan still looked like a lawyer to me, even if he was rocking his casual ‘day off’ look. “You can tell because it has seven leaves. Sativa has nine,” He explained. Ryan pointed a short distance away. “That one over there? That’s Sativa.”

Chris’ mouth was hanging open in shock. “Aren’t you, like, a lawyer or something?” He scooped up the second plant and held the two side by side like they were his twin infants.

Ryan seemed unfazed by our collective shock. “I wasn’t always a lawyer.” He shrugged. “Besides, it’s harmless. It might be illegal, but we all know it’s a political decision and not a public health issue.”

Chris extended a fist bump and the two grinned at one another. Trina smirked and looked excited. I rolled my eyes. Yuck.

Smoking pot made me feel sick, paranoid, and out of control. The only thing worse than smoking it, was eating it. At least when you smoked it, the experience ended quickly. If I consumed the drug in food, it was much, much more potent and I never knew when the awful feeling would end. I hated it. I felt pretty much the same way about overdoing alcohol, although at least sometimes alcohol tasted good.

“Well after we, um, harvest this bounty for its supposed medicinal value, and eventually call the cops to report it, then what do we do?” I asked.

No one seemed to have an answer. The sight in front of us was overwhelming. And green. So very green.

“Well, I mean, it’s not like we can live here again,” Trina said after a moment. “Our apartment isn’t even structurally sound. I don’t want to sound all doom and gloom, but all our stuff is probably toast.”

She was right, of course. The ground was soaked through. I’d already warned our downstairs neighbor that she might experience some residual flooding, because the water was everywhere. If you took away all the pot, you might think our apartment had been hit by a hurricane. Our stuff was strewn all over the place from the collapse of the ceiling.

Even if there was some way to get rid of the water now standing a few inches deep in our apartment, the fact that Sasquatch’s space and ours had merged in the middle was not a good sign. All that testing of the floor joists that Sasquatch did in the dead of night—which I now suspected was moving his massive pot plants around—may have weakened them. The four of us were standing at the door because moving any deeper into the apartment seemed dangerous.

“All my books for school are in there,” I said helplessly. “I really should have gotten renter’s insurance.”

The sound of someone clearing his throat forced us all to turn. A confused looking delivery man was standing behind us.

“Does, um, Rosalind Ross live in this apartment?” he asked. “I need a signature.”

“That’s me,” I told him, accepting what I already knew was the credit card my dad had sent. I knew I was going to need it to replace all my books, but I still felt like I was surrendering as I held the slim envelope in my hands. This was just one more way I was going to end up controlled by my dad. And it was all Sasquatch’s fault.

“That’s a lot of a pot in there,” the delivery guy said, looking over our shoulders and into the ruined apartment beyond. He seemed bored. I guess he’d probably seen it all delivering packages in the town.

“It sure is,” I replied despondently.