Bleeding Pockets Full of Cheap Cigarettes

I look at the world differently than you do. I always have. Your life is fast-paced and your friends are eccentric and over the top in order to get your attention. Nobody's ever fought to grab my attention. My life is slow, so much slower than yours, dear girl, and I've accepted it. I spent every Goddamn minute of my high school career trying to speed it up, but it's slow. I'm slow. It's slowly killing me; life that is. I don't make sense to you. I don't talk to you. I don't even attempt to make sense to your face. But I still address my thoughts to you.

I turned 21 tonight. You didn't come. Everyone was here. Everyone said you're bummed you couldn't make it. You have only spent a fluttering few minutes talking to me since graduation; I wasn't surprised. You're in Vancouver, in LA, in El Salvador. You're saving the world and I can't even save my own ass.

As the beer and hard liquor formed a small river down my reddened sore throat, I looked for you in the crowd. Manny got drunk and Craig took her upstairs. Does it surprise you? I think you might have loved him once. I don't know. You never confided in me. Ellie and Sean came, but I don't know why. I never really talked to either one of them. Sean slapped me on the back, and Ellie placed a small gift a desk set I'd later unwrap on the growing tower. Terri came back. It seems she went to college with Spinner and they hooked up. I'm glad for him. I always had a weird feeling in the pit of my stomach about what Darcy would do to him. She forgives me, anyway, Terri that is, not Darcy. Paige sat on everyone's lap, including Alex's Alex was with a new girl, though she kept eyeing up Ellie, but went home with JT. Everyone was perfectly trashed; everyone was perfectly miserable. You never showed.

I wish you would have come. The drunken masses were entertaining, but I have so much I need to say to you. I wish you would have come. I hate sitting on my porch, drunk and alone. I wonder what city, province, country you're in now. I wonder if you ever wonder about me. I wish I could have seen half of the things you've seen. Your mom says you've seen "every place between Bangkok and Calvary." Computer nerds don't visit exotic places, unless via internet pictures and brochures.

Ashley just brushed past me as she hopped and stumbled down Kate and Jeff's porch steps. She tells me she's going to Jimmy's place, and I don't answer because I don't care what Ashley does. She's always been a free spirit and so much brighter than me. Jack Daniels sits next to me, but I ignore him the best I can and continue to stare at the deadened Toronto city streets.

I'm looking down the street that Ashley just vanished into when your Birkenstocks sink noiselessly into the uncut grass on my front lawn. If you didn't let slip a small sigh right before you reach the concrete of my front walk, I wouldn't have noticed you at all. "Jesus, you scared me," I mumble as I grab the neglected bottle of whiskey to use more as a prop than anything else.

You scare me. Have I ever told you that? It's the same fear that Catholics have for God and pupils for their teachers. It's a fear based in shame and in the thought that I will never be good enough for you. I never have been good enough for you, have I, Emma? I disappeared after awhile and you never thought about me again.

"I'm sorry I missed your party," you say. "I tried to think up a way to get here, around my schedule, but I just couldn't. I've felt awful about it for weeks." I think you're lying but I don't press it because I want it to be the truth. Your truth, dear girl, your truth is so pretty.

"You dyed your hair."

You take an uninvited seat next to me on the cold steps. "Just a week ago. Mom hasn't seen it yet. She won't like it." How could she not? You're beautiful.

"How was, where were you? El Salvador? Cuba? Communist China?"

You give me a half-hearted smile. "Oh Toby, I wish you could see the things that I see. I think you'd understand. I don't know, I just think you'd get it."

Oh, Emma. Oh, dear girl. "What you're doing is great, but I'm much more at home behind a computer screen. You know that. Do you want a drink? The beer isn't all warm yet."

"I probably shouldn't. I have to catch a plane tomorrow, and I'd rather not be jet-lagged and hungover. It's a sickly, sickly - it's a deadly combination."

I slide the bottle away from you. I must respect your dry wishes, Miss Nelson. I should ask you. Right? I should just say it. It can't be that hard. Form the words in a coherent sentence. "Boyfriend?" That is not a coherent sentence. "I mean, do you have a boyfriend?"

You laugh and stretch your long legs out on the step below mine. "Would you believe me if I said 'too many to count'?"

"No. The last I heard, you were with Craig?"

You laugh obnoxiously loud and I wonder if you've already had a few that you're not telling me about. "We were together for, literally here, an hour."

"Oh?" I have nothing to say to that, and you know it.

"Well, after the horrendous Peter fiasco, do you remember that?"

"I have the internet, Em, I saw it."

"Right," you're so nonchalant about it, it kills me, "well, after that, after Manny called me up and told me that I lost my virginity to millions of people on the internet, I came home to sulk and eat tubs and tubs of Ben & Jerry's. Craig was in town, recording with Ellie, and he called me up after thick persuasion from Joey and Caitlin. We hung out a couple times, Joey, Caitlin, Snake and mom hyped it up way more than any Hollywood PR exec could've dreamt, but it was never right for us. All we shared were a few good night kisses and ice cream cones like children. I left a week later for Tanzania, and this is my first time home since. Besides, he's much better off with Manny. They're, like, soulmates or something."

You're beautiful when you talk about things I couldn't care less about. "So that's it, giving up in the love department?"

"I was down there with so many great people, but all of the men were 40 and married. That's life, I guess. But I did make so many great friends. Oh man, Toby, one of the greatest girls I met. She's 18, so young, fresh out of high school, and her name, I'm not even kidding you here, her legal name is Eureka. Can you even begin to believe that? I love it. Love it."

Oh, dear girl, no matter what shade is on top of that Clairol box, you will always be a blonde. "That's pretty awesome." Nothing else really matters enough to say, you understand.

"What about you, Toby? Last I heard - no girlfriends?"

This is my chance to chat you up with a suave line about how I compare every girl to you, and none comes close. But I'm me, and you're you, and at the end of the day, I'm a nervous wreck around you and the word suave means nothing. "Not a girlfriend, no. No girlfriends."

"That's a shame." No it's not. "Toby, I have a serious question."

I love you, too. There's your answer. "Shoot."

"Are you gay?"

"Emma, no. God, no. Jesus. No."

"Sorry, just checking."

That is it. No more sleepovers at JT's. "What, do I give off gay vibes or something?"

You laugh and curl your long fingers up around the corners of your mouth. You shake your head 'no' and I get so frustrated (yes, you, Miss Nelson, you frustrate the shit out of me) that I fumble for my two-day-old pack of cheap cigarettes and pump them wildly against my palm. Damn you, Emma. Goddamn you. Your own sweet voice penetrates through my alcohol stained world but you mutter such unholy words that I go over the sentence three times in my head before I believe the words you've just said. "Can I bum one?"

But Emma, don't you care about the environment? Emma, you're the only one with virtue, and you've lost it? "Smoking kills," I murmur though the cigarette's stuck between my lips and I'm attempting to burn the tip something hideously red and orange.

"I've been smoking since, well, since I got treated for anorexia in grade 11. It's the only thing I have anymore. So, once again, can I bum one?"

I shrug and offer you the pack coolly, but as your fingers grip the cancer stick, I feel as guilty as if I was draining all of your virtue into the starless sky. I hold my shaking hands close to your face as I light your cigarette, and I cringe when a look of bliss, smoker's bliss, comes over your face on the first puff. "Thanks."

"No problem." Anything for you.

"I actually quit in December, right after I got to Africa. The supply isn't huge, and it's one vice I learned to live without."

"What, smoking?" You nod. I turn the pack over and over in my pale hands. "Oh. I've tried a couple of times. I'm not the strongest. And I hate celery. And candy canes. And chewing gum. So, my addiction has stuck."

You shrug. "Smoking kills, you know. A good friend of mine told me that once."

I crack one of the first genuine smiles I have in a long time. "As long as Emma Nelson is going down in flames, so shall Toby Isaacs."

You raise your burning stub to me as you stand to leave. "I better be going. I have to go home and show mom this hair. Not only is she going to flip because her blonde baby is now dark-dark-haired, but she was my first hairdresser, only hairdresser until I turned 19. She'll be mad I didn't let her do it."

I stand and offer my hand for you to shake, but you ignore it and hug me instead. I pat your back tentatively, but I know with each passing second, I have lost my only chance to ever have you.

I watch you walk away and that's that. I just lost the only shot I never got.

"It's gotten late and now I want to be alone.
All of our friends were here, they all have gone home.
And here I sit on the front porch watching,
The drunks stumble forth into the night.

You gave me a heart attack, I did not see you there.
I thought you had disappeared so early away from here.

This is the chance I never got to make a move,
But we just talk about the people we've met in the last five years,
And will we remember them in ten more?

I let you bum a smoke, you quit this winter past.
I've tried twice before, but like this, it just will not last."