remembered. She nodded to Brooke and offered full forgiveness with her eyes. But then her eyes and eyebrows and entire face formed a question mark—Why?
Brooke sighed. How could she offer an answer or explanation she herself didn’t have? Then suddenly she knew. She leaned over and pressed her mouth to Brooke’s near ear and spit out a single violent syllable against Leah’s eardrum. Then she leaned back laughing.
Leah laughed too, puffed out her rosy white cheeks and spat out her own burst of air to the ceiling above. To both of them, heard and unheard, the word was the same—Boys!
Not long after Brooke tried to more fully explain this episode, but the effort required the lubricant of cigarette smoke. That’s how Leah perceived the silver stream flowing forth from Brooke’s barely parted lips, as some kind of greaseless lotion freeing her words on the subject, her thoughts. That is, until the lubricant made Brooke cough, at which point it became acrid gray smoke emerging from Brooke’s mouth in hacking bursts, swirling about her face as Brooke tried to disperse the irritant and catch her breath. The incident left the eyes of both sisters watering, though Leah’s in laughter, Brooke’s in moderate distress eventually merging to laughter.
They’d reactivated the long dormant treehouse for this latest sharing. Though Father smoked a pipe in the evenings while reading the paper and Momma had long been a habitual cigarette smoker who was now trying to wean herself of the habit to serve as a better role model for her children, and the smell of smoke in the house would not have been immediately suspicious, Brooke decided that this latest experiment in being grown up could not occur inside the house. She wasn’t so much worried about what discovery and the resulting punishment might mean for her, but she was concerned about what it might mean for Leah and for their unsupervised time together. So when she snuck a single cigarette from Momma’s open pack in her dresser drawer after school one afternoon, she hid it in the breast pocket of her shirt then found Leah reading in her room and led her out the back door and to the treehouse.
The structure was a little worse for wear and neglect, with mold on the rope ladder and sidewalls, leaves in the corners, spider webs along the eaves and between the rafters. But it creaked and swayed only a little bit as they climbed up there and was dry inside and most importantly secure from prying eyes or sniffing nostrils. Brooke led the way then helped Leah through the hatch. She brushed a thick layer of dust and pollen off the peach-basket seats then gestured for Leah to sit and did likewise, facing her sister from a few feet away in the close space.
She took the cigarette and matches from her pocket and, without pausing to meet Leah’s eyes and the surprise and censure she knew would be there, hung the cigarette between her lips, struck the match, and placed the flame to the cigarette’s tip, her eyes big as she focused on what was a tricky and unfamiliar maneuver—bringing a lit match that close to her face without burning herself or missing the tip of the cigarette. This was not the first time she’d smoked; she’d done so with Billy a couple of times. But this was the first time she’d tried to light her own cigarette, and it was a little more complicated than she’d anticipated. The match burned to her fingertips and she said “Ouch” and the cigarette dropped from her lips to the dirty treehouse floor. She picked it up, blew the dirt off, rubbed it lightly against her jeans leg, then placed the filter between her lips again. She lit another match but it went out before she could raise it to her lips. The third match wouldn’t ignite despite more than a dozen passes over the cover’s lighter strip.
Leah reached across the short distance between them and gently eased the matchbook from her sister’s fingers that were now shaking in frustration and anger. Brooke looked up at her sister. Leah stared back with an expression not of censure but of indulgence. She took a match from the book, lit it with one sure strike, and held the flame to the tip of the cigarette. Brooke’s laugh burst forth around the cigarette and extinguished the match.
Leah looked at her and said with her eyes, “Do you want to light it or not?”
Brooke grabbed the cigarette from her mouth as she doubled over in giggles. After a minute, she sat up straight again, locked her face into a composed and serious mask, returned the cigarette to her lips, and nodded gravely, as if authorizing her launch into outer space or the push that would send her tumbling out the back end of a plane into her first skydiving freefall.
Now it was Leah’s turn to laugh, though more in control. She struck a new match and lit the cigarette.
With Billy she’d only drawn the smoke into her mouth, afraid she’d embarrass herself if she tried to inhale. She’d held the awful tasting stuff in her mouth for a few seconds, trying to keep her cheeks from puffing out, then slowly pushed the smoke out through her lips as if exhaling, the way actresses did on television. But since those faux samplings, Brooke had become determined to experience the real thing, to draw the smoke into her lungs and hold it there. To that end, she’d discreetly tried inhaling the pale steam of Leah’s vaporizer, which disappeared or changed somewhere down in her lungs and didn’t come back out in visible form. Then she tried inhaling the propellant of the whipped cream can, mainly because she’d overheard older girls whispering about the practice one day on the bus. The gas went in invisible and came out invisible but somewhere down there made her dizzy in a giggly way but nothing like the effect she expected, or wanted to create, from smoking. Finally she lit a cone of incense she’d gotten as a gag gift at a Secret Santa party. Hidden Passion it was called. The smoke that rose in a gentle spiral from the ashtray was white and pungent and not entirely unpleasant smelling, with hints of ginger and citrus and something the box called exotica but smelled a lot like burning rope. She positioned her face above the curl of white smoke, drew it into her mouth then, with some hesitation, down into her lungs. She held it there for a few seconds before breathing it back out again. Wonder of wonders, the smoke emerged still white and tasting only mildly repugnant. She inhaled a larger draft of smoke, and exhaled in front of her dresser mirror. She looked so cool. She nodded proudly to her smoke-exuding reflection. Then she stopped that trial. The incense was irritating her throat and filling the whole room. Though the day was frigid, she threw open her window. She tried to snuff out the smoldering cone, but that only made it smoke worse. She thought of throwing it outside but figured that might start a fire. She grabbed the ash tray, ran out her room and down the hall trailing white smoke, and dumped the ashtray’s contents into the toilet. The incense sizzled and sparked before she pulled the handle and flushed it down. Momma asked about the odor when she got home. Brooke told her it was from a scratch and sniff perfume sample in one of her teen magazines. Momma had stared then nodded once, in a well-practiced response to Brooke’s improbable claims, keeping to herself whether she actually believed her eldest daughter or was simply choosing in maternal magnanimity not to challenge her fib this time.
So when Leah lit her cigarette, Brooke thought she was well-prepared to inhale. She pulled a short drag of smoke into her mouth then removed the cigarette and pushed the smoke out without inhaling. Then she returned the cigarette to her lips and took another short drag. This one she pulled down into her lungs, mixing it with some fresh air drawn through her nose. The mix settled in her lungs and didn’t feel too bad. She counted to five then released the smoke in a slow stream. She looked at her sister through the haze and grinned with calculated nonchalance. Then she took a slightly longer draft, inhaled it entirely through her mouth, and counted to ten in her mind before exhaling. But this time she tried to push the smoke out through her nose. That was a mistake. She’d not tested that method in her trials. The first wisps emerged in orderly fashion from her nostrils, but the rest quickly irritated her sinuses and the back of her throat and launched her into a fit of violent and tear-streaked coughing. The smoke probably wouldn’t alert anyone to their naughtiness, but Brooke’s voluble hacking might. Fortunately, their parents weren’t home and Matt was locked in his adolescent daze with headphones on his head and Jethro Tull t
humping in his ears.
When Brooke’s coughing had finally dissipated and her eyes had dried and she snuffed out the barely burned cigarette and dropped it in a soda can left over from some long ago party, she looked up at Leah and said, “With boys I wish I was deaf.”
Leah tilted her head. She never felt sorry for herself, but that was because she had Brooke to do her hearing for her. If Brooke were deaf, they’d both be in trouble.
Brooke smiled. “Not all the time. Just with the boys.”
The way she said “boys”—the lifting of her eyes, her forehead, her whole body—made it clear to Leah just which boys she was talking about: those special boys, the boys of her ardor, the boys of her crush.
Brooke chuckled to herself in soundless mirth tinged with regret, then looked down at the rusty soda can she was absentmindedly cupping in her hands. “Like Billy,” she said, staring at that can.
Leah could easily read Brooke’s lips even when she was looking down or to the side. She could almost read them without seeing them at all, inferring the words from all the other signs in Brooke’s
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