Drug Store

Burdened by challenging home lives, teenage co-workers Mia and Marco risk their futures when they use their jobs to supply opioids to a local drug dealer. As what was meant to be a one-time indiscretion spirals out of control, the duo find support and trust from the most unlikely sources including one another. The teens are months away from graduation, but must out run a menacing dealer with mob ties, a watchful pharmacist, family issues, and their own trust issues if they ever want to see their futures.

When Marco is approached by a local drug dealer and pressured to smuggle opioids out of the pharmacy he works at, he is forced to choose between a negative impact in the short-term versus a negative impact on his future. Co-worker Mia becomes a willing sidekick as she struggles to support an addict mother and aspirations of college acceptance. Their lives quickly unravel when a one-time transaction becomes a weekly expectation. The teens are confronted with the criminal aspect of what they are doing while having money in their pockets for the first time. The story examines how each of the characters deal with trust issues and the question of where they are going. Art the Pharmacist keeps a suspicious eye on the teens as he deals with bitterness as a result of losing his wife to cancer. Art represents the authority figure and moral reason the teens question what they are doing, but the pressure from a menacing and increasingly violent Anthony drive the two deeper into the madness. When Anthony is arrested for another violent act, the teens see any hopes of future slip away.

Mark Aliperti is a full time distribution professional, husband, and father with a life long love of writing in various formats. Drug Store is the first published story by the Montclair State University Grad who carried a Minor is Creative Writing while attending from 1995-1999.