I’m rather unsure as to what my train of thought was before it was interrupted by the taste of blood in my mouth, but whatever it was was quickly changed to the familiar “I really need to find a more efficient way to rid myself of anxiety”. I dismissed it as excusable, seeing as my Xanax prescription had run out and it being the last two weeks of my senior year. I sucked the bloody saliva mixture off my bottom lip and immediately decided that was the most vile action I had partaken in that day.
I let out a sigh, and saved the document I had saved as “Frustrating economics project I don’t want to do.doc” then, shut off the outdated school computer that was stationed in the corner of the old library that really needed to be reserviced, seeing as there was a newer one on the campus. I shoved my economics composition notebook back into my bag, which was falling apart at the seams, put it on and made my way out of the oldest building of Garrison High School.
The school was so big, it took me about ten minutes to get all the way over to the senior parking lot. Once I got there, and got into my car, it was 5:30. Just when I was about to go back to taking out my anxiety and self-loathing on my lip again, I remembered it was Thursday, and I didn’t have to go to work on Thursdays. Which means that I could have continued to work on that project I barely started on that was due on Monday, but didn’t because I don’t have the mental capacity to remember the day of the week. Which also means I could go back into the library and at least finish outlining this project, or I could go home and do it. OR I could go to the gas station down the street and blow a portion of my paycheck on over-taxed tobacco products. I decided the last option would be the easiest on my bottom lip, plus would make my lungs a nice gray-ish hue to match my unwashed 2000 Nissan Maxima.
My engine revved a little more than I was comfortable with, and kicked as it slowly pushed the car around rows of other old cars that were on a high schooler’s budget. The gas station was really close to the school, so I didn’t have much time with my thoughts, which was a good thing, because I don’t think I could’ve stood another minute with them without an ample supply of nicotine. And if that thought had come to mind, needing nicotine that is, I would have gone on a mental rant about how I need to stop being so reliant on mood altering substances, and how pretty soon I’d have to worry about cancer, emphysema, or just not being able to function without a bihourly smoke break.
I stepped out of my car and into the smog of exhaust and gasoline fumes and tried not to breathe until I reached the not-much-safer-haven of the beat down family owned gas station that bordered the school campus. The inside looked a lot like every other gas station. It consisted of flickering fluorescent lights, theme colored tiled floors, a half-functional automatic door, an old lady behind the counter with a smokers cough that I was sure I would acquire one day, and an abundance of food that anyone’s intestines would punish you for.
“Good afternoon,” I smiled. I was answered with a grunt from the old lady who didn’t even look up for the register. Oh yeah. For a second there I forgot why I was a cynical b****. Thanks for reminding me. “Marlboro 100s...please.” She looked up, then looked me over skeptically. “Can I get an ID?” She always carded me when I came in. I wasn’t quite sure if she actually didn’t remember me each time, or if she was just trying to be as much of an inconvenience to me as possible. Putting my annoyance aside, I showed her my ID, paid for the cigarettes, and left the building.
The humidity in the air significantly intensified the putrid array of engine related smells, so I had to try my hardest not to gag. Instead, I made an unflattering face and opened up my pack of smokes. I put the long, dainty cigarette in my mouth and reached for my bag. About ten feet away from me, there was a girl I was sure was in my freshman English class. I didn’t remember much about her, except that she used to draw pictures on all her papers that made me smile. I was pretty sure that she was the same girl with the beautiful poetry, but I may have just been trying to flatter her in my mind. She was very much worthy of flattery.
She had long rusty hair, that fell lightly over her slim and fragile figure, outlining her feminine silhouette. She wore a floral printed tank-top with high-waisted denim shorts and black leggings with some tessellated design I couldn’t figure out and a silver septum ring in the middle of her thin face.She too decided that smoking outside a beat down gas station was the best way to spend her Thursday evening. “Do you have a lighter I can use?”
I was usually too mortified to talk to strangers, but I was bored, fed up, lonely, and in need of a smoke, so I decided approaching her was excusable in my mind.
Without saying anything in reply, she held out the pastel blue lighter that had been lying next to her on the ground, and I took it from her. When I held out my hand to take the lighter, she stared at the forearm of the hand I had used to take it. “What’s the tattoo mean?” she asked.
She was referring to the one that was inscripted on my left arm that read “It’s the ones who’ve cracked that the light shines through”.
It was a really poorly done tattoo. It healed less than perfectly, and it was fading quickly. I got it done when I was sixteen from a friend’s brother’s friend who had just gotten out of jail for the third time that year after I had had a few drinks and in desperation. But, in hindsight, I don’t regret it.
“It’s a sort of memorial for a friend I once had. It was her favorite album. I didn’t know how else to commemorate her,” I kind of smirked.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. She pulled her knees into her body and wrapped her arms around them before exhaling that last bit of smoke in her mouth.
“It’s alright. It’s been awhile since she passed.”
“I see,” she said. She looked over her shoulder as if to think about something that she could relate to the subject. She furrowed her brows before changing the subject. “You’re graduating this year?”
“Yeah,” I said, “and yourself?”
“Yeah. If I don’t die of stress related illness and nicotine poisoning before then.”
“Those go hand in hand sometimes.”
“Yeah? You have any plans for afterwards?”
“Uh...yeah. I’m taking a year off.”
“And after that?”
“I’ll probably go to college?”
“You mean you don’t have these things figured out yet?”
I knew she wasn’t actually being condescending. She probably understood the stress of the situation considering she was two weeks out from graduating and smoking outside a gas station just as I was.
“I just don’t know what I want to do. Profession wise, that is. It’s a big decision to make.”
“It really isn’t,” she said, matter of factly. “Everyone makes this time out to be what decides the rest of you life, but it isn’t. They try to tell you that once you choose a college the deal has been closed and there’s no turning back, when the truth is you don’t have to stick with the major you chose at eighteen years old. You can restart your education at any point. If you think you want to be an architect at eighteen, and get a degree on it, and get into the field, and all is good and well and then at twenty nine you realize you want to become a doctor, there’s nothing stopping you except what other people expect of you. Go out, study, then change your mind. You’ll figure it out before it’s too late, because too late is dead.”
“That sounds like a good idea, but the trouble is, I don’t even know where to begin.”
To that, I don’t think she had anything else to argue, so instead just said,“Tell me about her.”
She nodded to my tattoo she had pointed out. I really wasn’t quite sure what to say, so I just stood there frozen with a half-lit cigarette in my mouth.
She bit her lip and looked into my eyes. “Was she lovely?”
“Well, of course she was. Lovely enough to be worthy of a poorly done stick and poke tattoo of Jeffrey Lewis album that will be stuck on my body forever, that is.”
She smiled at me, and took her lighter back. I wasn’t quite sure if what I had just said sounded like an insult to my deceased best friend, so I added,
“She was definitely lovely. But not the kind of lovely you read about in American literature. She was always someone else’s cigarettes and champagne, but you didn’t realize until she’d already been yours. She’d make you feel nothing, then everything at once. She was the kind of girl that would grow restless of being a road dove. She lived for having nothing to live for, and died for it too. So, yes, she was extraordinarily lovely.”
“Was she more than a friend?”
“Oh, no,” I said. However, I realized that I had been romanticizing her when I spoke of her. I did miss her an awful lot.
“She was just my first best friend.”
“I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry if I offended you.”
She seemed kind of off put at the thought that I may have been put off by her question. Damn it why am I so bad at this?
“No, it’s okay. It’s nice being able to talk about her again,” I smiled.
It hadn’t even occurred to me that implying that she thought we were a couple would have been offensive until she suggested it.
“I guess I did always want to be more than friends with her, though. And I think she knew it, too. But she would humor me. She was lovely enough not to care that I was on the verge on being in love with her.”
She let out a breath of smoke she had been holding in her lungs and regained eye contact with me. “Wow,” she said, “I actually didn’t expect that.”
I felt kind of embarrassed, and I’m not sure why. It was like I outed myself just to defend myself; like I shared too much of myself with a stranger just to impress her. But, I mean, I really did want to impress her. Although I’m sure there was a more graceful way to go about doing so than basically saying “Wait no stop I’m not a bigoted prick, I’m gay too! I’m the oppressed! Don’t think poorly of me, because I’m not what you think I am after ten minutes of knowing me!”
“Well then, it seems you have a great skill for reading people’s thoughts, because I wasn’t expecting that either.”
Her cigarette was just about burnt out, so she smothered it in the pavement next her and put her lighter into the back pocket of her faded denim high waisted shorts. She got up from her perch on the asphalt ground then said to me, “I should probably get going. Hopefully I’ll see you around and I’ll make you tell me some more things that you didn’t know were hiding in the back of your mind.”
I watched her as she made her way to her car, parked right next to mine and equally as poorly kept. As she started driving away, I lit up another cigarette, and was quite embarrassed when I realized she saw me using my own lighter. I wasn’t sure if she’d even put enough thought into it to realize I had used not having a lighter as an excuse to talk to her. But even if she had, she didn’t seem like the person who would care. She may have even been flattered.