She stamps the cigarette onto the outside lip of the window sill then tosses the bud over the edge. She still doesn’t look at me, just continues playing with her toes.

“I think…I told you everything,” and I do. There’s nothing more that I want to say that I haven’t told her already. She immediately darts her head up to me, with the jolting movements of a bird, observing me, examining me, looking me up and down as if she’s searching for something, something specific. I realize my thumbs are still tucked into my bookbag straps at my chest. God, I must look pathetic. I release them as quickly as I can, and they dash to my sides like magnets.

“Why are you still standing there?” she asks. “You don’t want to sit down?”

“No...” I reply, but that’s a lie. “I mean, yes…yes, I do.” I begin walking towards to bed, but I have to pass the window in order to do so, and as I brush past her, she grabs my arm. When I turn my head, I see that she’s looking up at me with a sort of attention I don’t think I’ve ever received before. Her eyes, wide and shining against the light from the window, hold such an innocence, an almost sad innocence, as if she means to tell me that she is in need of me, or of a help that only I can give her.

“Jaime, would you mind getting me another cigarette?”

I can feel my heartbeat through my face, and the heat from the back of my neck returns, faster this time, too fast for me to try to keep it at bay. She lets go of my arm slowly and stays staring up at me, innocence lingering, waiting for me to respond.

I stutter through my words. “Uh…um…w-where are they?”

“Sitting over there on the desk.” I turn to look, and sure enough, there they are on the edge of the table, a little orange stain on the rest of the colorless room. Just past it, I can see that the drawer from which they had come is still opened, just slightly though, a small but non-negligible crack. I walk towards it almost involuntarily, rudely even, as I don't even think about Saxa seeing, pushed forward by my desire to know of the secrets that might hide inside. It’s for naught anyhow. It’s impossibly too dark inside for me to discernably make out any of its contents. I turn to see if Saxa is still looking at me, but she’s back to looking at her toes, trying to scratch off the remainder of a coat of dark red polish from one of the big ones with her fingernails. Swiping the cigarette box, I hand it to her and turn my eyes away, trying to clear the thought of the drawer and any of its hidden contents from my mind.

“Thanks.” She takes the cigarettes from my hand and pulls one out with her mouth. “Do you want one?” she manages to mumble, mouth clenching around the end of the cigarette as she reaches behind her for the matchbox.

I’d never considered smoking before, but now that it’s presented to me, it does seem like something I would like. The taste of smoke on my tongue like burnt coffee in the air, a tantalizing chill of calm, something to press my teeth into to distract them from their constant biting of my inner cheek. Saxa lights the cigarette in her mouth, shakes away the flame from the match, and presents the cigarette box to me. “Take one.”

I stare into the carton. There are three left – they all look the same. I examine them, trying to decide which one I should take, but my vision is clouded by a fog of smoke that Saxa send in my direction, burnt air which crawls up my nostrils and into the sockets of my eyes, conjuring little tears to stick to my eyelashes like the dews that form on blades of grass in the morning. I blink to release them, and they fall down my cheek. I wipe them away with the sleeve of my shirt covering the back of my hand.

“Wh-which one? Should I take?”

Saxa chuckles a little and reaches into the box to pull one out. “Here.” She hands it to me. I bring it to my lips, and Saxa returns her cigarette to her mouth, freeing her hands to be able to strike another match from the matchbox. I draw in closer to her to bring the end of the cigarette to the flame. “Have you ever had one before?”

I shake my head but fail to bite down hard enough on my cigarette while doing so. It flails around between my lips – right, left, then (since my reflexive reaction is to open my mouth to release whatever hold I had on the cigarette in the first place) shooting out the window, falling in slow motion before dropping to the gravel road below.

“I’m so sorry! Jesus, I don’t know how that happened! I’m such an idiot, I’m sorry!”

“Oh my gosh, don’t worry about it!” She begins laughing uncontrollably, and honestly, I don’t know if it’s at me or the cigarette. In some ways, though, it doesn’t matter. When she laughs, it’s like birds singing. And her eyes light up, and there, on her cheeks, a deep dimple appears on either side of her growing smile. I never knew she could be any prettier than I had already seen. There’s a sort of magic to this – this, this, genuine happiness, for which I, me, Jaime Atwood, am the reason. All I can do it smile back. A smile just as genuine as her own. “Here,” she says, taking a second cigarette from the box. “Don’t lose this one,” she jokes.

I nod a little too eagerly and chuckle back. “I pr-promise.”

She gives me another light. “Breathe in as I light it, okay?”

I don’t dare respond this time, afraid to drop the cigarette once more. As I take my first breath in, I expect, very naively I'll admit, to instantly love it. People are addicted to this stuff, right? I expected a choir to sing in my head. A delicious taste of tobacco with little notes of nicotine, tickling your throat, delivering an instant high. The air from the cigarette is as burnt as I expected but also warmer than I imagined. It's complemented by little bits of the flame that flutter around in my mouth, drying up my saliva and settling in the back of my throat to burn the skin there. I immediately cough out the cigarette, and it falls onto the window’s ledge. It starts rolling away, and Saxa immediately grabs it to keep it from getting lost like the first.

“Careful, now,” she tells me. “You promised you’d hold on to this one.” She keeps it with her while I try to calm my coughing, and only once I've recovered my normal breath does she place the cigarette back between my lips.

I take it away, weaving it into my fingers as I've seen so many do in movies and television shows, before attempting another drag. I take a seat next to her on the ledge and hold out the cigarette past the window, hoping the smoke doesn't find its way back in the room. In front of me, Saxa puffs away on her cigarette with ease. “How do you do that so effortlessly?”

“Do what?”

“Smoking. I-it burned me.”

She looks away from me and fills her lungs deeply with the air from her cigarette. There’s a pensive nature to her, I can tell. I respect her for this. I’m tired of people who don’t care about their words, who speak with only their mouths, not considering what their heart or brains have to say. She's just like me, I think.

“It just comes with practice.”

I look down at my cigarette and chuckle. How often must one practice to reach the level of expertise of Saxa Morstad? I imagine her sitting at this window sill, every afternoon and every evening after the sun has set, picking up her pack of cigarettes like the bow of a violin, sitting at this window, practicing her technique. Bring the bow to the violin. Now, hold your fingers steady, and drag slowly. Remember your breathing.

Looking out towards the deep green sea of trees surrounding the property, I begin my first lesson. Bring the cigarette to my lips. Keep it steady. Take a long drag. The smoke hits me a little differently this time. The same taste, the same burns, but without the element of surprise, they are oddly welcomed. There’s a sudden feeling of idleness – as if I had been sitting on a boat in the ocean for all my life, rocking up and down ceaselessly until I had simply trusted the sea sickness as a part of what it means to survive. Here, now, staring out at the trees which, I realize, are the exact same ones I look at myself from my bedroom window, they share with me their stillness.

With each drag of the cigarette, I breathe in more deeply, trying desperately to evacuate from my lungs any of the air that might have existed there before. I feel my heartbeat accelerating, and I ground myself through it, closing my eyes and leaning back on the window frame, pressing the bag on my back awkwardly into it.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Saxa’s voice is even more soothing now than it had ever been.