Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
“That’s not my responsibility to ask; it’s not up to me to decide why someone does something,”<br />
he remarked, annoyed that Julia didn’t share his excitement. “It’s the people’s choice.”<br />
“Yes, but—” she began, but he cut her off.<br />
“So the government can have guns, but the people can’t?” Ross said. (He would echo this on the<br />
Silk Road, privately telling his new employees, “I’ve always been pro gun. It is a power equalizer<br />
against tyrannical governments.”)<br />
Julia intuitively knew her conscience was right. But even when she offered clever, cogent retorts,<br />
Ross would shut the conversation down by simply saying, “Well, we will just have to disagree on<br />
this.”<br />
For Julia, the guns were an enough-is-enough moment. Light drugs? Absolutely. Hard drugs?<br />
Fine. Maybe Ross was right; maybe we all did have the right to put whatever we wanted in our own<br />
bodies. How could the government say that we could drink alcohol, which killed ninety thousand<br />
Americans a year; or that people could smoke cigarettes, which killed forty thousand people a month<br />
in the United States; or even red meat, which caused hundreds of heart attacks a day; and it wasn’t<br />
okay to smoke weed, which killed no one? But buying illegal guns anonymously? This Julia couldn’t<br />
agree with. A few weeks later she boarded a plane to New York City.<br />
She figured that fall in the Northeast would help clear her head. Erica greeted her with a big hug.<br />
Then they sprawled out on the living room floor and talked. In the distance, through the window, she<br />
could see the soft white and blue lights of Yankee Stadium radiating into the night sky. The setting<br />
couldn’t have been more different from the chaos of the past few months, and as the sounds of the<br />
Bronx hummed outside, Julia made a decision. She sat up from the floor and turned to Erica. “I have<br />
to tell you something,” Julia said.<br />
“What?” Erica replied.<br />
“You have to promise me you will never tell anyone,” Julia pleaded. “Never! Ross would kill<br />
me.”<br />
“I swear!” Erica said, now curious about the secret that loomed between them. “I promise.”<br />
Julia took one more deep drag of the joint and held the smoke in her lungs for a few seconds. She<br />
blew out, watching the cloudy whiteness dissipate into the air, and then she told Erica everything.
Change language