the pilfered-Tenuate economy
one bottle of Benadryl and one of Seldane, only the Seldane bottle actually contains several Tenuate 75-mg. capsules Troeltsch has incrementally promoted from Pemulis’s part of the room and has, rather ingeniously he thinks, stashed in bold plain sight in a bedside pill bottle where the Peemster would never think to check.
Context
The low-comedy floor of the campus drug economy: everyone medicating something, and the medicine itself pilfered — Tenuate "incrementally promoted" from a roommate's stash and hidden inside a decoy antihistamine bottle in plain sight. The tradecraft of the secret user is already fully formed at seventeen, deployed here over a stimulant nobody would go to war for.