We sat down on the back porch next to each other in silence as the chill of the night air encouraged me to pull my arms across my chest. Alice pulled the oversized hoodie over her knees as she brought her legs up close to her. Out of the font of her sweatshirt, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She snapped them down violently, and I asked her what she was doing. She smiled and explained that this helped pack the tobacco down. I felt embarrassed for a moment but then she gently closed her eyes and smiled assuring me that she found my question endearing.
I watched her hands move through the ritual of lighting a cigarette. Her fingers moved with a choreographed elegance as the lighter appeared with the sleight of hand of a magician. I watched the fire ignite a deep orange glow as she inhaled gently through the end of the cigarette. There was something knowing and confident about the way that she smoked, but also revealing and vulnerable.
Cigarette ash broke off as she flicked the back of the cigarette with her thumb. It trickled down off the porch and disappeared into the darkness of the backyard. Slowly she raised her chin up, and gently blew up the smoke into the air in commune with the night air.
I first noticed Alice during a basketball game, sitting in the corner of the bleachers reading a book. As a senior, I had learned to love playing in the pep band. So, when I saw her sitting down away from the band cradling a marching band horn and reading a book, my instinct were to try to get her involved.
I walked over and tried to encourage her to cheer with everyone else. She looked up from her book, looked down at the space next to her inviting me to sit down. Completely ignoring my first overture she said, “Hello, my name is Alice.” As I sat down and stumbled through my own introduction, she interrupted calmly, “I know who you are.” She wasn’t like any other freshmen I had met, or any other girl I had met. She was confident, calm, and seemed to have it all figured out even though by most people’s standards, her life was a train wreck.
The most amazing thing about her is that she saw the true me more than I saw myself and she never let me be anything but honest and real with her. At the same time, she challenged my ideas, my assumptions, and my reality.
The dominant narrative of what was right and wrong, bled into my understanding of who was good and bad. The -isms implicit in the DARE program of my middle school years and how different systems of oppression used drugs as a way to maintain a destructive status quo were not understood in my 17 year-old mind. However, this didn’t mean that this influence was not reflective in my world view.
The message was that drugs were bad, drinking was bad, and smoking was the gateway to destructive behavior. Only certain types of people did these things in teenage years, but there was Alice. A freshman soon to become my best friend. She challenged all of this with her grace, her authenticity and a cigarette.
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