It’s something that I’m not completely ashamed of – not enough, at least – but I have been smoking cigarettes. Not every day. But some days. After school, Myname and I, and sometimes Siobhan and Pammy and Cammy and Jennifer, we go out to the old abandoned skating rink on the edge of town: there is a dilapidated outbuilding where folks used to sit down and lace their skates, or go in for a thermos of hot chocolate when it was really cold.
Nowadays, when I smoke in there with my friends, I remember what it was like just to be a kid going skating. The steamy-sweaty feeling of being stuffed inside your snowsuit, your scarf damp and frosty against your neck, your toque pulled back from your eyes and your hair all scrambled underneath. Until I was twelve or thirteen, an adult would tie my skates. Sometimes a parent, sometimes a neighbour. Everyone knew you had to get them just so. Very tight and even. And the room was filled with the scent of wool, sweat, hot chocolate, rubber floor mats, melting snow and the cold-warm breath of outdoor-indoor people all talking to each other, and the steaming tears of crying hungry children.
The windows are now busted out and parts of the roof and floor are caving in. Everyone goes to the indoor rink now, or the bigger, better outdoor one, or watches skating on television.
I stand there in a huddle with the other girls; one of us pulls out the pack of cigarettes and a lighter, and we all light our own, one by one. Sometimes Pammy lights one for me and hands it over, which makes me feel special.
I love smoking, it’s fun and smells a bit like chocolate and campfire. I do inhale, I know how. It was Pammy who taught me first; she said, Suck your breath in like “Huhhh! My mother is coming!” So that’s how I learned. Now I do it easy, like Huhhhh, huhhh, huhhh. Blowing out a big cloud around our heads. In the first five puffs, I get a head rush that is really nice. I close the backs of my nostrils when I breathe it in, though – I don’t like the smell very much when it gets right up inside my noggin. I can’t imagine why adults want to do this all day long – even when they wakeup in the morning! But it sure is a strange pleasure to have that smoke all around us after school, wreathing me in a shroud for a few minutes. How gross to have it around all the time, though, like at Pammy’s house where her mom sits in the same chair in the mornings, lighting cigarette after cigarette and watching “I Dream of Jeanie”.
I won’t lie to you, it’s difficult to keep so much from my mother. Sometimes when we’re talking in the evening, or watching TV on the couch, I look over at her with all these thoughts in my head: “I smoked two cigarettes just a few hours ago.” “A boy put his tongue in my mouth yesterday.” And I wonder how she can miss it all, since I thought she knew everything or at least could sense everything.
But at the same time, I enjoy having secrets from her. Now that Charlie is out of the house, and has succeeded in removing himself from her motherly authority, I can finally see that she is not invincible and can’t control just everything. What I do with my body and my personal life is my business, not hers.
Myname doesn’t have to hide her smoking at home because her own mother smokes, and her stepdad too, and the whole house stinks like tobacco. Often I will go over there after we smoke at the skating rink because then I can tell Mom, “I was at Myname’s after school,” if she mentions the smell of cigarettes.
Myname has the smallest room in her house, the size of a closet basically. It holds only a single bed and a sliver of floor. She likes for me to lie down in bed with her and spoon. That’s what she calls it, spooning, like two utensils in a drawer together. She is a bit longer than me, and fits herself behind me with one hand on my hip or my belly and the other one under my neck. I love this feeling very much, and we have done it at my place too.
One time my mother walked in when Myname and I were spooning and all she said was, “You two are so cute, snuggling up like that.” She doesn’t know that occasionally Myname will plant a kiss on my cheek or my mouth that is so much more than just a kiss. I don’t ever do the same to her, or else I’d be a lesbian. But I like it when she does it to me, and I often hope for something more. A forbidden surprise. Maybe some tongue would be nice. I like the shape of her body, and the smell of her skin. Her smile makes me swell up like a balloon. She told me she felt different about me than the way she feels about her old friend Kelly, who makes me so jealous.
“With you, it’s more special,” Myname said. “More sparkly.”
And this is what I’ve hung onto when she’s at Kelly’s table during lunch hour and I’m stuck with old Pammy and Cammy and Jennifer. I still hang around with them, but they smell like hairspray, and they’re always saying crabby things about other girls and trying to get boyfriends. Myname and I don’t have to try very hard to get boyfriends; I think we’re two of the cutest girls in the school. Right now I am faithful to this guy named Collin, but not for long I think! I never last more than three weeks with a boy.
The last time my friends and I smoked at the skating rink was three days ago . . . I haven’t had one since, I guess I’m going to try and quit. That night (it was Wednesday) I was in my bedroom feeling so pent-up and looking out the window. The pack of cigarettes had ended up in my pocket this time, and I was supposed to hold onto them for the next time. Bonnie was nowhere to be found; I think she was out with her friends studying the Bible or something. It was too late to leave my house and visit Myname or any other friends, but it was also too early to head to bed.
I don’t know what got into me, but I had such a hankering for a cigarette! It’s what they call a craving, I suppose. I craved it so badly, I opened up the window, stuck my head out and lit one up. I was barely three minutes in, when there was a knock at my door. I stubbed out the cigarette quickly and threw it on the ground outside. Opened the window wide.
“What?” I said.
“Are you smoking a cigarette, Ellen?” Mom asked through the door.
“No.”
“Open the door and let me in.”
I opened the door and she came in, sniffed. “You have been smoking cigarettes in here.”
My insides sunk into a cesspool of dirty shame. I couldn’t believe (and still can’t believe) that I was stupid enough to try and have a smoke in my own room. As if my mother, with her impossibly keen sense of smell, would not notice.
I must have wanted to get caught. Sometimes we do these things because deep down, we’re tired of carrying the burden of a secret habit or act. Anyway, she started hollering at me and didn’t stop for a couple hours.
“WHERE ARE THE CIGARETTES?”
I mumbled and pointed at my coat pocket. She took them.
“HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN SMOKING?”
“Only a few times so far.”
We were standing on the stairs near my bedroom, by that point. She stopped screaming for long enough to look at me witheringly, like I was disgusting. Then her voice went quiet.
Through her teeth, she said, “I know why you are smoking. You are smoking because you want to have SEX. You want to have sex with boys and you know it’s wrong, but you want it anyway. And so, instead, you’re sucking on cigarettes . . . But really, you want to be sucking on boys’ penises.”
Hearing that come from her mouth, and envisioning my brother’s penis dangling in front of my face, made my stomach wretch. It’s not at all what I’d pictured, while inhaling and exhaling at the skating rink. But now I knew she was right, that I was and am nothing but a complete slut. And smoking is one way that I’m being a slut. I do think about sex, all the time, and I want to know what it’s like. I can’t help thinking about it, even though I know it’s dirty and shameful and people who have sex before they’re married do it because they have no proper morals.
You don’t appreciate people with bad morals, I know that, and you punish us in the end. But often I am sick of how uncreative and boring it is to live with good morals, and I wish you didn’t put me into this super Christian family. They are not loving at all. I’ll bet you a Rastafarian family would be way more loving. And they smoke all the time. Marijuana, at that.
Mom took away the cigarettes, and my friends were impatient with me about it. They looked really exasperated.
“You smoked a cigarette in your room?” they said in that tone designed to make you feel totally stupid.
“Yes,” I said sheepishly.
I know now that it was a ploy of my subconscious to get caught, so that I wouldn’t drift too far away from you. But I have to tell you, and I hope you’ll understand, that when I wanted to smoke so badly, and when I did take those few drags of the cigarette out my open window, it felt so satisfying and wonderful that I could finally understand why people might want to do it all day. And now I have quit, and I’m sad that maybe I’ll never have that feeling again.
It was a close call.