I rest my head against the hard tile and light up another cigarette. I take a breath as I bring the paper to my lips, trapping the smoke in my mouth and letting it burn. I turn my head and let out a stream of smoke in her direction. Alice turns to me blinking through the grey. “Toss me that lighter Matty,” she says, letting the words become choked in the air. I pick the lighter up and hand it to her. “I’m thinking of quitting you know,” I say and look at her, lying on the floor of my room next to me.
Her outline is rimmed with the light from the window behind her, her back curving gently off the floor as if she cannot fully lie down. Alice doesn’t say anything just flicks the lighter on and off, cupping the flame in her pale hand. I take a drag of my cigarette and let the afternoon sun slip over us. She makes me think of a fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty with her hair spread around her head, glinting gold as the sun runs across it. My room feels very gray in comparison. Like I’m living in a black and white movie and only her color is flicking gently through it. “Do you think it burned?” She asks, and turns her head slightly toward me. “It was fire, of course it burned,” I reply. She roles her eyes away from the lighter and looks at me. “I mean,” she says, moving her hand slightly closer to the flame, “Does it hurt when the fire is all over you, everything. Burning all those strings that keep you together. Do you feel that?”
I take the cigarette out of my mouth, and hold it in front of my face, watching the paper slowly eroding away. Apparently she is feeling poetic today. “Maybe, but I like to believe he was thinking of us in those last moments. Maybe that comforted him. Fire can’t burn the things we keep secret in our heads.” She laughs, and sits up. Her shoulder hits mine, knocking the ashes from my cigarette on to my white t-shirt. “You really think that in those moments he was thinking of us? That while his body was being eaten away his memories of us were left? Just…” she searches for the word “there?” She pauses, taking a deep breath as if it hurt letting the words spill from her mouth. “No,” she continues, “memories are just paper, they can burn as quickly and brightly as anything else. He wasn’t thinking about us in his last moments. He was thinking of the strangle-hold he had on life, and how his grip was slipping.”
I press my thumb down on the end of my cigarette and feel it burning. “That doesn’t seems very fair,” I say, but don’t look at Alice. “How so?” she replies, her voice steady. I look over as she inches her hand closer to the flame, the fire trembling. “Why should we have to think of him everyday, wasting our moments, when for him it is all over?” She remains silent, just letting her hand shake gently, keeping a beat with the small flame. “S***!” she yells and I hear the lighter clatter to the floor. It slides under my bed.
I hand her the cigarette as I try to grope in the darkness under my bed but the lighter is too far back. I sit up and watch Alice who is shaking her hand vigorously, the thin line of smoke rising from my cigarette cutting her face in half. “Damn,” she murmurs and puts her burned hand to her mouth. “Don’t play with fire Alice, you’re going to get burned,” I say and allow my mouth curve. She smiles too. Laughing used to be something we were good at doing together. “That’s where you are wrong, Matty. You get burned whether you are playing or not. Fire is always eating our memories. And one day the memories of him and me, and who we were to you will have escaped like smoke coming out of your ears.”
I stand up and cross my small room, pulling down the blind to my window. “That would be funny looking, smoke coming out of my ears,” I say and sit back down, leaning my back against my bed. “It would Matty. But the memories will be faded and you won’t really care.” She roles up her shirtsleeve until it is at her shoulder. She puts her fingers slowly on the yellowing pattern printed on her upper arm. She places each finger on his fingers as if she is playing the piano. Matching the larger handprint with a song of her own.
“Yeah Matty, they are fading already.” I try to look away but she locks her eyes with me. “But sometimes memories leave scars, you can’t forget those”, I can’t help the way my voice drops, maybe I do believe in ghosts after all. She roles her sleeve back down and rubs out my still smoking cigarette with her thumb. “Yeah I guess,” she says and throws her hair back over her shoulder. “But we are young, and we can burn down houses. And we won’t be trapped inside them. ” She mocks freedom with her words but her hands tremble against the white tile. “But one day we will be caught in the house while it his burning, like he was,” I say and she scoots closer to me so the sides of our bodies are touching. “Or maybe we never will, I don’t think I can live thinking like that.” She drags her hand over her face and squeezes her eyes shut.
I don’t want to tell her I don’t think there is any other way to live.
I look at the words written on my wall under the window. Scrawled in his big handwriting. Bold sharpie on my clean wall. He wrote them on the first day of high school but it doesn’t really matter what they say anymore, that hasn’t meant anything for a long time. The important part is that I’m not covering them, his ghost can’t make me. “Alice was he ever really our friend?” I ask, my voice getting louder as I became comfortable with it. She squints at the late afternoon sun pouring through the cracks in my blinds. “Matty, I think a friend is someone who when you are with them you have been stripped down to nothing but what is real, and you are ok being like that around them. ”
“Huh,” I say and lie back down, fine with the way my question disappears in the air. “I just remember how he would always take your glasses and put them on himself, and make fun of how blind you were. I always thought it was mean, but he was too fast for me to get them back for you.” Her back shakes with laughter even though her voice is like someone delivering bad news. “Yeah, he always said I looked stupid in them.” I say and watch how her back widens with each breathe she takes. “He was always using that word, ‘stupid’, even though it was always him doing stupid stuff.” She rubs the top of her arm where his fingerprints are fading.
I pull another cigarette out of the pack and roll it between my fingers. “I had my first cigarette with him.” Alice looks back at me. “I guess it made me feel like an adult, chain smoking behind the gym, and being with you two. Although it was always you two and me, never really all of us together. I felt like a child with him.” I look around for the lighter but realize it’s under the bed. I put the cigarette in my mouth any way.
Alice slides around so she is facing me and reaches out, tugging a bit of my hair. “Matty, he was a child, always grabbing what he wanted and hitting when he didn’t get his way. And I was a child for letting him take what he wanted. You were the only adult, the only one who told him that the world wasn’t his playground.”
The room collapses into shadow and I pray that the sun is only behind a cloud and she doesn’t have to leave yet. I don’t want to be left alone with only his handwriting on my wall and in my own head. “It took everything to stand up to him, Alice. But you can only be a coward when it is yourself.” The cigarette I am trying to keep between my lips muffles my words, syllables seeping through the cracks around it.
“When you two got together and I knew what was happening. I only stood up for you, you know that right?” I take my glasses off and rub my eyes, an excuse not to have to look at her. “I know, Matty.” She lets go of my hair and stands up, looking down at me. “You’re a good friend Matty. I don’t think I have any layers around you. I guess you have burned them all away.” I stand up and she picks up my glasses from the floor. She rubs them off on her shirt and puts them on me-her smile comes in to focus.
“Bye Alice,” I say, taking the cigarette out of my mouth. “Bye, Matty,” she says and walks out of the room. I catch the door before it closes. “Alice,” I say as she walks down my hall, the sounds of my little sister watching TV almost drowning my voice. She turns around and for the first time in a while she doesn’t look like she’s thinking about him. “I think I’m going to quit today,” I say as I drop the cigarette to the ground. “I know” she says and walks away.