Nonsmoking Section

Perhaps someone had thrown them out a car window. Someone else had flattened them with their tires — there, smack in the middle of the road, residential area. "Whatever," as her best friend from Roosevelt Middle School, Anita, liked to say. Now the smashed cellophane package of cheap cigars was hidden under a game of Clue in her closet. She wouldn't even tell Anita, much less her parents.

The first night she watched until her digital clock clicked to 2:25, then reached for her flashlight and headed for the closet. She found the package quickly, half the length of her notebook ruler, only as wide as an Oreo. There were two cigars, smashed enough that brown curlicues, like pencil shavings, clung to the ends. She tilted the package side to side until they slid, dun confetti, first to one end, then the other. She raised the contraband to her nose and inhaled.

The next night, she awoke at 12:46 and made her way without the flashlight. She had been dreaming of tall towers of flames. Of airplanes. When she raised the tobacco to her teeth, the cellophane broke freely, a pungent smell of stale reaching her nostrils.

She slept with the cigars beneath her pillow. Of course, she had seen the cigarette movies, how smoke clouded the inside of your lungs, leaving large, deadly spots. Of course, she had heard her uncles hacking, had gone to their funerals with her parents. But these were the cigars of young millionaires considering financial deals, of old men in velvet smoking jackets, of Professor Plum deducing who killed whom with what in the library.

After a week, she took a deep breath and chose one, surprised at how naturally the V of her fingers held its shape. Such slight pressure needed to keep it steady. She tried the second cigar with her other hand. Though they looked the same, even in her inexperience, she could feel the difference of texture. She wondered about lighting the tips, taking in the smoke — the seemingly careless control. She practiced. She practiced.