Welcome To Flavor Country

By Alexander Scordelis

            After weeks of heavy surveillance and covert operations, we discovered that Joe the Janitor keeps his cigarettes in a locker in the maintenance closet. With our objective in mind, Lindsey Buchanan, Jay Crowley, and myself waited and watched like hawks for something that would disrupt Joe the Janitor's daily routine, allowing us to initiate our plan of action. It was during a crisp November morning recess break that our carefully calculated plan was set into motion.  Jay ran up to Lindsey and I outside of our seventh grade classroom.

            "It's on!" he said.  "Joe is busy mopping in Sister Patty's classroom because some second grader yakked all over the place. This is our chance!"

            It was decided. This seemingly humdrum Thursday was to be the highly anticipated day when we would smoke our very first cigarette.

            Out of the three of us, I was nominated for the job of breaking into Joe's maintenance closet and busting out with one of his packs of Marlboro Reds. Lindsey and Jay promised to keep vigilant watch while I did the dirty work.

            I waited for the hallway to clear, and after my two cohorts gave me the go-ahead, I walked into the maintenance closet. Instilled with the Catholic school fear that a nun or a thunderbolt could suddenly strike me at any moment, I was nervous and sweaty as I fumbled through Joe's locker looking for the smokes. I thought about every aspect of my actions, and realized that my theft qualified as a mortal sin.

            As soon as I emerged from the maintenance closet, I was confronted by Lindsey and Jay.

            "Alex," Lindsey asked in a whisper. "Did you get them?"

            I nodded and patted the rectangular bulge in the back pocket of my blue school uniform slacks. They smiled with approval and we parted company. Phase two of our plan would kick in at lunch.

            At lunchtime, we walked out to the picnic tables with our unsuspecting seventh grade peers. We ate our lunches like the normal kids, and waited for the boys to go off to the basketball courts and the girls to sally off to the steps of the church hall. After the other kids were fully occupied with their customary activities, we slipped away to the farthest corner of the bustling playground, to the famous "hole in the chain-link fence."

            Every kid at Sacred Heart School was well aware of the notorious "hole in the chain-link fence" and the forbidden realms it led to: the oak grove and the Saratoga Creek. These were places bad kids went to commit an illicit act like smoking, or a salacious sin like making out.

            We squeezed through the tiny hole, unnoticed by any yard duties, and disappeared into the thick forest of oak trees. We ran all the way to the edge of the creek. Upon arriving at our destination, I produced the pack of cigarettes and distributed them.

            "Anybody got a light?" Jay asked.

            Lindsey bent over, reached into her right sock, and pulled out a book of matches. She lit her cigarette, Jay's, then mine.

            "Um, mine's not working," I said trying to take a puff.

            "That's because you're supposed to suck on it while she's lighting it, numbnuts," Jay explained.

            "OK, lemme try again."

            Lindsey struck another match and lit my cigarette a second time. I inhaled a massive amount of smoke and immediately choked and hacked it right back out in her face. The harsh Marlboro smoke burned my throat. Jay doubled over in laughter.

            "What a pussy!"

            Lindsey thwacked me on the back. "Are you OK?"

            "Yeah, I'm cool."

            I took another drag. I decided not to inhale any smoke this time, just swish it around in my mouth like Listerine, and then spit it out. I didn't want to suffer the embarrassment of another coughing fit.

            Jay was still in hysterics as he wandered off down the creek.

            "So, are you getting a buzz?" I asked Lindsey.

            "Yeah, whatever. It's no big deal," she said, pulling another drag off her cigarette.

            Lindsey leaned against an oak tree and stared aloofly at the sky through the tops of the trees. As I watched her, I was shocked by how comfortable she looked with the cigarette in her hand. She'd slowly put the cigarette to her lips, take a drag, hold it in, close her eyes, and slowly exhale. She looked like a real professional smoker, like she'd been smoking all her life. I wondered where she developed such a skill for smoking (She told me earlier that she had seen Reality Bites three times in the theaters, so I figured movies played a role in her savvy as a smoker). She had the appearance of a Catholic school femme fatale. She looked cool, mysterious, and...sexy.

            Now understand that I had known Lindsey for the majority of my short 13 year-old life. This was a girl who invited me to her sixth birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.  This was a girl who, in the first grade, I avoided because of her reputed cootie infection.  This was a girl who was the first in our class to memorize her times tables.  This was a girl who did her fifth grade state report on Wisconsin. And now, this was a girl who I thought looked...sexy?

            Sure, I'd considered girls in my class to be pretty or cute, but none of them had ever struck me as sexy before.  Maybe that's because I was too young to really understand anything about sex (Sex Ed. wouldn't be taught until the spring).  While I looked at Lindsey, wearing her school uniform white blouse and pleated red plaid skirt, with her blue eyes and blond hair clouded in a haze of smoke, sexy revealed itself to be the more dangerous cousin of cute.

            As I was staring at Lindsey, Jay snuck up behind me and slapped me on the back.

            "Hey, I wanna try something," he blurted out. "Frankie told me that if you take a huge drag off a cigarette, hold it in, and put your head between your legs, and then keep it there for 15 seconds before you exhale, that it'll get you high."

            It sounded like a reasonable enough suggestion.  I said I'd try it, too.

            "What about you?" Jay asked.

            "No thanks," Lindsey replied without even looking at him.

            "What's the matter?" Jay asked with a condescending grin. "You don't wanna get high?"

            "No. I just don't want to look like an idiot."

            "Suit yourself."

            I just shrugged and joined Jay, spreading my legs shoulder width apart. We each took a big drag, bent over, and put our heads between our knees. With my ass aimed directly at her, I looked through my legs and made a goofy face at Lindsey as I tried to hold the smoke in. She started giggling at what was surely a ridiculous sight.

            As I stood by the creek with my head between my legs, I felt a sudden rush; but it wasn't Jay's absurd method of getting stoned that was giving me a warm feeling: It was the sound of Lindsey's laughter. Her giggling sounded like a symphony of tiny tinkling silver bells. The sight of Lindsey leaning against an oak tree with a cigarette between her lips may have made my nether region feel funny, but the sound of her laughter sent a jolt of electricity through my entire body. 

            Brrrrrrring!  The school bell rang faintly in the distance through the oak trees, marking the end of our lunch period.  We quickly flicked our cigarette butts into the creek and listened to them sizzle as they hit the still, murky water.

            I scampered to the top of the creek bank and through the oak grove with Lindsey and Jay close behind me.  I grabbed the edge of the hole in the chain link fence, widened the opening, and stepped aside.

            "After you," I said to Lindsey.

            She crouched down to step through the fence, and while doing so, she looked up at me, with her blue eyes twinkling and her tiny silver bells tinkling.

            "Thank you sir," she giggled.

            I flashed back my most charming devil-may-care facial expression; a debonair expression that proudly proclaimed, I Am Alex: Seventh-grader. Thief. Smoker. Gentleman.

            As I wormed my way through the hole in the fence, Jay looked at his watch.

            "We've got two minutes to get to Algebra.  We'd better run."

            Lindsey and I agreed, so the three of us booked it across the blacktop to the main building of Sacred Heart School.

            One minute and fifty-five seconds later, we burst though the door of our Algebra class, out of breath and just in time.  We collapsed into our desks, with our heads and limbs still buzzing from the nicotine, and our tender pink lungs aching from the smoke.