PUFF

A pack of cigarettes costs $6.49 at the Shell station on Route 90. I know this because I’d been buying them every week for the past three months, always with a Gatorade and a bag of Doritos, like the Marlboros were an afterthought and not the entire reason I was there. The guy behind the counter never carded me.

I don’t smoke. I had seen what smoking did to people, specifically, I had seen what it did to Terrie. Terrie from the commercials. Terrie, with the hole in her throat, had to press a machine to her throat just to talk. I’d seen that commercial once during a rerun of SpongeBob, and now I could not look at a cigarette without imagining my own throat with a hole in it.

But I bought them. Every single week. Because Nell Capri smoked, and Nell Capri would only acknowledge my existence on this earth if I had one for her. So I kept buying them. Every week. $6.49 plus tax. Because $6.49 plus tax was the price of Nell Capri knowing I was alive.

Gigi had been getting ready for forty minutes. We were going to the mall, which did not require forty minutes of preparation, but Gigi treated every outing like she might be photographed for a magazine, and I’d very quickly learned that rushing her only made it worse. So, I was outside, on the Capri’s front steps, sitting on the cold concrete with the Marlboros in my jacket pocket, waiting.

Inside, Nell and Gigi were fighting. I could hear them through the screen door, which was not doing much to contain the volume.

“I’m not driving you anywhere if you’re going to be a brat about it, Gigi!”

“I’M NOT BEING A BRAT! You said you’d take us to the mall at four, and it’s three forty five and you’re rushing me like—”

“I’m not rushing—”

“You’ve been in a mood all day, and I’m sick of it!”

“Oh, you’re sick of it? You’re sick of it? I’m sorry my bad mood is inconveniencing you, Gigi. Maybe you should find a new personal chauffeur—”

“You are such a bitch sometimes!”

“And you’re a pain in my ass EVERY time, so I guess we’re even!”

A door slammed. Then another door slammed. Then silence.

This was not unusual. Nell and Gigi fought constantly, and with an intensity that seemed disproportionate to whatever started it. Last week, it was about a shirt Gigi borrowed. The week before that was about who ate the last yogurt. The fights were loud and vicious and always over by dinner. I’d witnessed dozens of them from this exact spot, sitting on these exact steps.

The screen door banged open. Nell came out. She did not look at me. She walked past me like I was a structural feature of the porch, load-bearing maybe, but not worth acknowledging.

She was wearing a tank top and jeans, and her hair was down, and she looked like she’d been crying, or was about to. She had her keys in one hand, the keys to the Honda that she drove everywhere because she had her license, and this was one of approximately four hundred things that made her the coolest person I’d ever met. She drove fast. She drove with one hand on the wheel and the other out the window. She drove with the music so loud you could hear it from inside the house when she pulled into the driveway.

She also has a boyfriend. Kyle. Kyle drives a truck with an aftermarket exhaust that makes it sound like the truck was angry about being a truck. Kyle wore V-neck t-shirts in December. Kyle calls Nell “babe” in a way that makes my skin crawl, and who once, horrifyingly, tried to give me a fist bump.

Kyle did not deserve Nell. This was not an opinion. This was an observable fact, like gravity or the color of the sky. Kyle was an idiot, and Nell was Nell, and the universe had made a cosmic error by putting them together.

Nell was mumbling, mostly to herself. I couldn’t make out most of it. Something about “unbelievable” and “I can’t even” and several F-bombs. Then she turned.

She looked at me. Right at me. Her Reyes were red-rimmed, and her jaw was set, and I thought in that moment that she was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen, which was a thought I’d been having with increasing frequency.

“Hey, Puff.”

My heart skipped a beat.

“Got a smoke?”

I reached into my pocket. My hands were shaking, which they always did around Nell, which was a medical condition I had accepted I would simply live with. My fingers closed around the pack, and I pulled it out and it toward her, but they almost touched, and that almost was enough to short-circuit whatever was left of my nervous system.

She fumbled with her lighter. Tried twice. On the third try, the flame caught, and she lit the cigarette and inhaled, and the smoke came out of her in a long, slow exhale that she aimed at the sky.

“Thanks,” she said. Not to me, exactly. More to the cigarette.

“Yeah,” I said. “No problem.”

She smoked. I sat. The silence between us was usual. It was like a canyon, uncrossable, something I didn’t have the equipment for. She didn’t talk to me. She never talked to me. Our entire relationship consisted of five words and a cigarette, and I had accepted this and built my entire week around it. I had to admit it was pathetic to be in love with my best friend’s older sister and using my allowance to buy Marlboros to sustain a one-sided interaction that lasted less than two minutes. Terrie would be ashamed of me. I was a little ashamed of myself.

But then, Nell said something else. Again, not to me, but to the air, the street, to whoever was listening. She said it around the cigarette, half mumbled.

“Kyle cheated on me.”

I blinked. I turned to look at her. She was staring straight ahead, cigarette between her fingers, lip quivering.

My brain ran a mile a minute. Kyle cheated on Nell. Kyle is no longer Nell’s boyfriend. There was this feeling in my chest, a mix between rage and disbelief and a furious, righteous indignation that made my hands clench at my side.

“That—” my voice came out weird. I cleared my throat. “Who would DO that?” My voice came out louder than intended now. Angrier. “Like, who— when they have— I mean you’re— and he— with a—” I was now waving my hands around frantically. “He’s an IDIOT. He’s— that’s the dumbest— I’m sorry, but that’s genuinely the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Who cheats on—” You. Who cheats on you? Who has you and picks someone else? What is wrong with him?“He’s just. He’s so dumb. He’s really, really dumb.”

I was breathing hard. My face was on fire. I’d said too much. I’d said way too much. She was going to think I was insane, she was going to tell Gigi her weird little friend had a meltdown about her breakup, and she was going to—

Nell was looking at me. Actually looking. Not in my general vicinity, looking. Looking at me like she was seeing me, maybe for the first time, and her mouth was doing something I’d never seen it do in my presence.

She was smiling.

“Thanks, Puff,” she said. And it sounded different this time.

I thought I might die. I thought I might actually, physically die, right there on the steps, and they’d find me and the cause of the death would be Nell Capri, and no one would be surprised because honestly, honestly, it was a miracle she hadn’t killed me sooner.

“No worries,” I managed.

Gigi came out a few minutes later, fully dressed, fully accessorized, and fully unaware of everything that just happened. “Okay, I’m ready, can we GO?”

Nell stubbed out the cigarette on the step, stood up, and walked to the car without looking back. I followed Gigi and climbed into the backseat and put on my seatbelt. Nell did not speak to me for the entire drive to the mall.

$6.49 plus tax.

Worth it.