It was in the evening a few Mondays ago, and the city center was empty as I walked home from the university. I rounded the corner onto a side street. About half-a-dozen kids huddled in front of a shuttered storefront just outside of the cone of light the streetlamp cast. We were the only people around.
From their height I pegged them at about 12 years old. When they heard my footsteps clonk onto the sidewalk, they shushed, froze, and turned toward me. They sized me up a little too desperately and then turned back toward each other. Their conversation dropped into the register of urgent whispering. The scene had the classic hallmarks of kids doing something they shouldn’t be doing.
I wanted to know what was happening, so I feigned nonchalance and crossed to the opposite side of the street. I heard giggling and more whispering. They stood shoulder to shoulder, forming a tight ring of puffy winter coats.
I heard coughing and more giggling and laser focused my peripheral vision until I saw one of the kids holding a lit cigarette. He held it far away from his face as if it were a rare and delicate object, brought it awkwardly to his mouth, inhaled and doubled over, coughing. Then he passed it to the next kid in the circle. A faint drift of smoke rose above their heads. As I clonked down the street away from them, I heard a cascade of coughs in minor keys and the rise and fall of their laughter.
Smoking for the first time. I remember smoking for the first time. I was 16 and spending a summer as an exchange student in Sao Paulo, Brazil. School was in session when I arrived. Much to my consternation, I did not accompany my host sister, but was instead assigned to a classroom where I knew no one. I spoke no Portuguese, stood out because I was not wearing a uniform and appeared to be the only girl in the entire school who had not shaved her eyebrows into a thin arch. I stood beside the teacher at the front of the room while he introduced me. He said something and the class broke into laughter. A couple of kids pointed at me. My face aflame with adolescent humiliation, I skulked to an empty seat, hating everyone.
The teacher, who sported the kind of white lab coat I had only seen on television doctors, passed out examination sheets and left the room. Turns out, it was an English test. The kid in front of me turned around and asked me for the answer to a question. I gave it. Then another kid asked and another kid. I gave everyone who asked all the answers.
When the bell rang, the alpha girl in a group wearing hot pink knee socks took my hand and pulled me into the bathroom with her tribe. We sat cross legged on the floor in a circle, their pleated, navy blue skirts puddled into their laps. One of the girls took a cigarette out of her purse. She lit it, inhaled an expert puff and passed it to me.
I had never smoked. I had never really wanted to even though my mom and dad did and left their Lucky Strikes well within reach around our house. But sitting there on that floor, all I wanted was to belong. So I took a puff and coughed just like those kids had. The girl circle laughed just as those kids had. I felt big. I felt included. I felt in. The thrill of sharing and belonging outweighed the blast of fiery yuk that had just made its way into my pink and unsuspecting lungs.
I’ve smoked on and off throughout my life. Mostly off. The on part was when I was young. I smoked in college at the campus newspaper when we gathered in the newsroom after putting an issue of our weekly paper to bed. I smoked when I went to Eastern Europe because it seemed that everyone smoked everywhere all of the time. I smoked at parties with friends. That kind of smoking is in the past tense for me. Gladly, willingly.
But from time to time I want one. And from time to time I have one. Shared, always shared, because I am not smoking for the nicotine fix, for the rite of passage or for the foul combustible chemicals burning in that paper cylinder.
I smoke to stand close, to perchance brush hands with someone offering a light. I smoke to be in that small, shared world for those five or six fleeting minutes. Cigarettes have been called a delivery device. What they deliver me is an encounter as contained and nostalgic as a snow globe. It is the most ordinary of intimacies—all in a circle, and then all scattered out into the larger world once again.
