The Nicotine Chronicles

by Lee Child

  “I need to use the bathroom,” you say, “it’s an emergency.”

  Vye follows her mom out and you lock the door behind them, because it’s there, like a normal fucking house. You sit back down on the toilet and empty the burning contents of your stomach. Everything in you stinks.

  Outside, Vye’s mom lays you down on the couch with pillows under your feet and head, a cold cloth over your face. She asks if you need anything else and you want to sink your head into her. But you bristle lightly, somehow muttering a no without crying or puking or giving anything away. She tells Vye to come get her if you look funny. Vye salutes her with two fingers, then swings her guitar around. She collapses into an overstuffed armchair next to you, her feet hanging off to one side, and starts picking out chords like the slow drip of a faucet, faintly singing . . . C, E, G, C . . . into warbled and familiar words . . . nothing is real, nothing to get hung about . . . you slip into mysterious strawberry fields and mountains, a seaside bungalow, tall ships and a guy in a sailor suit. When he smiles his teeth are made of coal.

  You wake with a stir. Head throbbing.

  Vye drags over a yellow phone on a long cord, scooches in next to you with a pack of Lights.

  “Oh, thank god.” You sit up slowly as she lights one and hands it over.

  “Blow into the pillow,” she says. “My mom says you can stay, but you need permission. Anyone around your house?”

  You take a long, long drag and hold it, sip-speak, “No one who’ll answer,” then let everything out.

  “Pretend,” she says, so you pick up the receiver, keeping one of the plungers down with your thumb. You dial and the click-click-click back of each number scorches. You say you’re sleeping at Vye’s, adding . . . Yes, mom, I will . . . I love you too. Vye’s forehead ruffles. You slam down the receiver so loud you both lose it.

  “Ow, ow, don’t make me laugh,” you say.

  Vye puts the phone back and returns with her guitar, asks what to play. You’ve each got a corner of the couch, staring straight at each other.

  “‘Strawberry Fields,’” you say.

  “I don’t know all the words.”

  “We can make up some. Sing about poison strawberries.”

  “Dead cats.”

  “Broken noses.”

  “It’s not broken. Remember?”

  You look away.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I fucked up,” you tell her. “Much worse than tonight.”

  “Yeah,” she says, “my mom asked if you took that sticker off the fridge.”

  “Fucking Nazi!” You laugh, softly at first. Vye too. “Ow!”

  * * *

  Michael misses his goodbye dinner. When the little guys ask why, their father tells them he had to report early. Their brother is a soldier, they can be proud.

  Then he flips another burger on the charcoal grill and pulls from a bottle of Michelob. Your mother fills a Donny Osmond Slurpee cup with vodka and a splash of lemonade from the can. No one says a word about the heavy makeup around your nostrils, the dark sunglasses despite the last gasps of daylight.

  When you all finally sit down at the picnic table for dinner your mother raises her glass. “Let’s have a toast! What makes the world go round? A good barbecue!”

  Everyone raises their bottle or can and clinks. Sips.

  “That wasn’t my toast,” she says sharply. You feel your appetite starting to slip. “To our missing soldier, may he find success . . . come on, keep ’em up.”

  You clink once more and your stepfather says, “Can we eat now?”

  “I’m not finished!”

  “Don’t be a dimwit,” he says.

  Your little brothers repeat the word, pretending to toast each other a few final times. You feel the urge to rip off your glasses and show them who’s the real dimwit. But they’d just blame you. Your mother takes a couple bites of her cheeseburger and returns inside. The rest of you finish eating without saying much as the stars blanket down.

  The next day you look over your shoulder when you step outside. Every time you see a rusted station wagon a little bit of your heart falls out. Vye meets you early with a book of her mom’s that talks about having an abortion. You look but can’t focus on the words. Two days later you dress as a medic wounded in battle for the Bicentennial ceremony, Vye’s idea since your nose is still swollen, purplish-yellow half moons under your eyes. Her mom lends you a long white apron and you scratch a red cross in front, fit your arm into a pretend sling.

  She insists on driving you the couple blocks to school in her red Pacer, smoking a long skinny cigarette, looking like a Cosmo ad again. Vye says drop us just before the entrance, and her mom frowns, same as Vye but with added finger-wag.

  “You’re going to smoke, aren’t you?”

  Neither one of you says anything. She slams on the brakes and stubs her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. The smell of charred tobacco turns your stomach. This morning you couldn’t drink coffee.

  “Look at my lips,” she says, staring down Vye then turning to you in the back. “Look at all the little lines. Look at them. And the stains on my teeth.” She opens her mouth wide and taps them. They don’t look so bad. “If I can’t appeal to your health, girls, please, can I appeal to your vanity?”

  “See you inside,” Vye says and opens her door. As you reach for your handle, she says, “Have you talked to your parents?” You’ve been wondering when she’d ask, afraid she might say something herself before you can pull together the 150 you need to get rid of the curse inside you.

  “About what?” you play dumb.

  “About who’s hitting you.”

  “It was an accident!” You slam the door behind you, catching up to Vye near the picnic tables, and take a few deep breaths. She nods as you blend into the smokers dressed for battle, more blue uniforms than red, several in powdery wigs and tinfoil buckles on their black shoes. The few other girls wear prairie dresses and bonnets like on the butter tub. You laugh at each other’s costumes, people paying slightly more attention to you since the minibike jump. One after another you suck your few last drags and head into the building to act out America’s cry for freedom.

  * * *

  You grow boldly into your lies, the boyfriend from another town, that one closer to the beach with the perfect lawns and prettier name. Dress-up dates to the clam bar. You tell Vye’s mom you stole the bumper sticker because you needed the number for birth control. Because you are smart, responsible. When you broke up he became a different person. “Any guy who’d hit you is not your boyfriend,” Vye’s mom says.

  You nod soberly, begging her not to tell. You’re not allowed to date boys, you say, thinking what a mother who gives a shit might prohibit.

  Vye’s mom buys it for a while, letting up on the questions when she’s home on study nights. She cooks you steak sandwiches like at the deli, creamy chicken casserole topped with potato chips. You feel bad eating so well when every time you go home your mother’s stacking bologna slices on crummy bread or pouring bowls of Frosted Flakes for your little brothers when they return from scouting camp. She lets the milk flow over the side, reads them stories from National Geographic. Everything’s a bit easier without Michael. When she finally passes out you skim another twenty from her wallet. A few weeks into July you’re almost at a hundred, you tell Vye, who looks worried.

  “We have to move faster,” she says, citing facts from the book that make you dizzy. By Vye’s haphazard calculations you have only a few more weeks until things get risky. She says she’ll pawn her guitar for the rest.

  “That’s like your third arm.”

  She flips her shoulders, “I’ll get a new one.”

  Your throat swells, you don’t know what to say.

  “It’s just a thing, you’re a person,” she tells you, and it somehow clicks why Michael wants to go off and fight in a war. Vye swears her mom won’t notice when you leave the guitar at the music store and walk away with forty bucks, but
one day after school her mom is sitting at the kitchen table, the instrument a blaring siren.

  “You think I was born yesterday?” she says.

  You drop to your knees and apologize. She says she’s taking you home.

  “No! No! Please!” You pull at her arms until she gives in and the three of you sit back down at the kitchen table. You tell her how your mother drinks, how she got pregnant at sixteen and had to live with her parents who hated her until she met your stepfather, who seemed to like her in the beginning. How she repeatedly curses at the women’s-libbers she sees on TV—she calls them women-fibbers—saying just because something’s legal doesn’t mean it’s moral. Several years ago when she caught you kissing Timothy Clark she sent you to a priest who put you over his knee and slapped your butt with a piece of plywood. All of this is true but sounds made up. You’re terrified of what she’d do now.

  As you speak Vye’s mom twitches in her seat, an eyebrow up every so often. You map a clean line to the front door, then it’s a straight shot across the street to the backyard trail without capture. She walks toward you and your throat clenches.

  “I can’t do it,” you say, “I won’t.”

  “You don’t have to, there are other options,” she says, and you blurt out, “No, I can’t have it, I want it out of me!”

  Tears ransack the three of you.

  “Okay,” she says. “I’ll help.”

  * * *

  The nurse hands you a couple of chalky white pills for pain, one for nerves. Vye peeks her head in, an Instamatic swinging around her neck, guitar strapped to her back where it belongs. She asks if she can take a picture.

  “You’re not even supposed to be in here,” the nurse says, pointing to a black-and-white sign: no companions in exam rooms.

  “Just one. Pleeeease.”

  The nurse gives in, shuffling a few steps sideways to light a cigarette. You want a drag so bad. Vye snaps your craving face, your ghosted legs peeking out of the gown patterned with tiny gray squares, toenails frosted pink. The flashcube pops into what’s already sickly bright space. Vye says move the gown up a little, but you raise your hand. “No way you’re dropping pictures of my hairy legs at the Fotomat!”

  “That’s enough now.” The nurse stubs out her half-smoked cigarette . . . if she leaves long enough you’ll grab it. Vye shrugs, backing up toward the counter lined with cotton balls, metal canisters, syringes, and the half-full ashtray. “Can I have one?” she points to the slim pack. It’s covered with flowers.

  “No!” the nurse says, “Now come on, vamoose!” She jumps up past you and shoves Vye by the arm, clumsily escorting her out to the waiting room, where Vye’s mom had dropped you earlier. You grab the butt from the ashtray and scramble unsuccessfully for matches, thinking how’s Vye got the balls to ask? You’re just a sneak.

  The nurse returns and without a word removes a lighter from her smock. Lights you up.

  “I’m sorry you have to do this,” she says, her cheeks melting, dark rings under her eyes, probably more from managing a string of girls like you than a quick blow to the nose. You were the youngest in the waiting room, maybe the whitest. The clinic is in a black town, your first time there though you’ve heard about it all your life.

  You smoke down to the filter, which also has flowers, though she seems more of a menthol type, a little spicy. When you finish she runs down the details again, like the counselor and doctor already told you . . . it’s much safer now, they don’t need to scrape. “It’ll be over before you know it,” she says, and you wonder if she’s as nice to everyone else.

  She leads you into another room, bright with lots of silver. In the middle is a table covered with white paper, lights hanging close, metal circles down at the end where another nurse gently places your feet, then a couple of sheets over your stomach. You vaguely register a flutter of voices, a guy in white saying you’ll feel a pinch in your hip. The doctor you met earlier, his face both soft and hard, maybe the kind of father who talks to his kids, says relax and you take a deep breath, falling back against the thin pillow under your head. When a woman says hold my hand, you grab. A loud vacuum whirs . . . you should feel pressure down there, if you feel pain squeeze. Then a metallic crank pinches up your spine. You grab tightly without squeezing, just to feel her skin on yours, blocking out the noises, the galvanizing pressure, voices in your head saying you’ll be sorry. The woman looks into your eyes and you see an angel. Sometime after that she lets go. The doctor glazes away, moving to the sink to wash, water running . . . so fast? A pang crushes in, like someone’s kneading your insides with fire. The first nurse returns and helps you up, gliding you across the empty hallway to a third room with multiple beds, all occupied. She pulls a curtain halfway around. They bring you apple juice and sugar cookies.

  You try but it’s like eating chalk. The cramping’s relentless, you see a lion tearing into a deer and you’re the deer. You think you must be dripping blood and call for the nurse. Another woman moans from far off or right next to you, an elegant black lady in street clothes passes, staff muttering in low voices as they shuffle between pods. The nurse returns and checks down there, takes your temperature. She says you’re doing great, and you feel proud.

  At some point you catch Vye’s head peeping around the curtain. She snaps a picture, and you give her the finger.

  “For history,” she says, before the nurse leads her off. You go for the juice again, cradling the paper cup between both hands like it’s the first time you’ve ever seen one.

  * * *

  After, you stay at Vye’s. It’s Friday so you won’t miss too many classes, and something’s clicked recently. You can easily make equations out of squares and rectangles, apprehend the concept of volume, maybe you’re not a total idiot. But those early days all you see is holes. You wonder if you’re going to hell.

  Vye’s mom brings tomato soup and toast, even lets you smoke. The nicer she is the worse you feel. You read old copies of Seventeen, eat pasta with butter, swallowing a Tylenol with codeine every few hours. Vye strums her guitar with Soul Train, trying not to crack you up. You write down more lyrics to your “Strawberry Fields” song. Now it reminds you of the mall near the abortion place. Let me take you down ’cause we’re going to . . . Roosevelt Field . . . You sleep twelve hours straight, the longest you can ever remember, and when you wake up you literally smell bacon. In the kitchen it’s Vye standing at the stove looking like her mom from the back except looser, her hair a mess of jangly knots, jeans fringed.

  She lifts the pieces of bacon with her fingers and drops them on plates already loaded with scrambled eggs. Four pieces of toast pop out of a toaster with wood paneling in front . . . like a station wagon.

  “I have to go home,” you say.

  Vye drops the plate in front of you. “You need your vitamins.”

  “Who are you, your mother?”

  “Just shut up and eat.”

  * * *

  Vye walks you most of the way and before turning around says call her later, you can finish your song. You want to hug her or push her down to the ground. But you say okay, thanks. You hear the Instamatic snap as you head back toward your house and almost make it upstairs before your mother calls you into the living room. Everything’s put away, the TV on low, lots of static. She’s wearing a bathrobe with her hair wrapped in a towel, more makeup than usual. She takes a small sip from the green coffee mug that makes you shiver, lights a cigarette. Kool Milds—always turning the middle one upside down for good luck. Your stepfather sits on the couch aggressively turning the pages of Newsday.

  “Nice of you to grace us,” your mother says.

  You tell her you’ve been studying. Say you’re taking the Regents in a couple of weeks, you’re going to pass this time.

  She eyes you as if you said you’re just back from killing a baby, dragging from her cigarette until the long ash curls off. “You need to watch the boys,” she says. “We’re going out. A celebration.”

&nbs
p; “What for?”

  “What are you, stupid? It’s your father’s birthday. Well, yesterday . . .”

  He has not looked up from the newspaper and he is not your fucking father. A familiar jingle escapes from the TV . . . Who wears short shorts? We wear short shorts! You slip back toward the staircase.

  “By the way,” your mother says, “you seen Michael?”

  You turn back like she’s crazy, fight of the century brewing in your stomach.

  “Seems he never showed up for training,” she says.

  Your breathing stops. But you manage a shrug, pronounce words you forget immediately, and tear upstairs so fast the blood’s dripping again. You’re thankful for the pad in your underwear, everything’s throbbing.

  From Michael’s room comes a brassy light, door wide open, and muffled sounds like someone’s talking on a radio down low. You suck in your stomach to creep by when one of your little brothers calls out your name. Stepping back slightly, you spot the two of them sitting on the floor of Michael’s room building pyramids out of packs of Luckies, eight, ten empty cartons scattered about. Deejay murmuring into a clash of guitar and drums . . . maybe the Stones.

  It’s just them. No Michael.

  You walk in calmly at first, then blow. Kick down a pyramid. Plow your foot into the crackling plastic, stepping on full packs as you swing your arms up and down. You’re oozing blood but you don’t care, dancing like a total spaz. One of the little guys laughs, and springs up with you. Then the other one. You grab both of their hands and the three of you stomp wildly, grinding down every last pack of Luckies into the dirty carpet, some cracking right open, others flattened to death. The whole room smells like tobacco.

  Climax, Oregon

  by Robert Arellano

  Ashland, deep summer. On the ragged edge of town, three Arabian palms stand sentry outside an oasis that’s been open 1,001 nights, multiplied by twenty-five: Omar’s Fresh Seafood and Steaks. That’s the destination driving down 99 after work when someone throws a sack of rocks onto the hood of the car. Engine skips a thousand cycles but somehow the beater Buick keeps running. Through the passenger-side window I catch a glimpse of a white tail and what looks to be a twelve-point rack bouncing away in the trees of the college—not a sack of rocks at all.