She’s not in a position to be doing all this, financially, but she’s long held that a breakup’s a time for “self care,” by which she basically means “indulgence,” and she’s surrounded by friends who all say the same, take her out and buy her shit and debrief her about What Happened and then, in short order, the secrets she held on his behalf for so long, as partner and confidant, that now – in all her anger and hurt – seems like fair game to disclose. Sex stuff, mainly.
So in her grief she feels this distant swell of excitement and so she splurges on some fancy champagne (store clerks’ choice, and she was crying while she bought it so she got a discount) and then, for the first time in four years, she bought weed. Or what she thought was weed. Cuz she gave it up to appease her ex – a corrections officer who’d been a pothead himself until stories about a prisoner’s drug empire and the labor of children soured him toward even the mildest shit in a high school locker – and when she goes to a friend of a friend to buy some now she leanrs that marijuana’s apparently sold as like a gel inside of a pen now, which at first she’s all wary about cuz she thinks it’s a prank, but then she sits with the dealer in his apartment, on his living room couch, they’re alone together because her best friend vouched for his product and manners, and he shows her how to use this pen thing, of which he’s got maybe two dozen in a kitchen drawer, and together, on opposite ends of the three-seat sofa, they get high.