Smoke Beneath the Ivy

It was a bad habit. Among so many others, she carried the bad habit of smoking cigarettes. She could not know what kept her smoking them. She might have easily tossed her pack of Marlboro 100's into the trashcan, together with her transparent green lighter, and felt no urge to dig back through the crumpled-up homework papers to pull the bad habit out again. She did not exactly like the lingering film of musk they left on her clothes after every smoke session. The bad habit, she felt, seemed to be written across her forehead, obvious to every passing person with a decent sense of smell. French vanilla perfume usually managed to partly mask the scent. She wondered whether the people who knew her thought of her scent as that—French vanilla laced with cigarettes. Everybody had a scent, she thought to herself as the thick smoke filled her lungs until they burned and then hurried from between her chapped lips, nearly as desperate for some sense of freedom as she was. By perfume or by their bad habits, everyone, no matter how much they saw themselves as the least important person alive, still carried a certain kind of significance at the moment they were born: a scent. She remembered that scent as hers. It seemed to make her presence feel undeniably real. Her scent was cherry Coke laced with cigarettes. The latter had been passed on to her, especially after someone had handed her that first cigarette just three months ago. Only three months were enough for her to pick up that bad habit, but it was neither the first nor the only habit she managed to develop in that stretch of time. Now she sprawled on the roof where she had smoked that first cigarette three months ago, and her eyes drifted to the untouched can of cherry Coke sitting on the concrete beside her, almost as though it were mocking her. A dull ache rose in her chest, a hollow, resounding ache that reached her deepest core. A sudden burn in her fingers made her realize the cigarette had burned to its very end, and maybe she had too.