A drag

“Don’t be stupid,” Amber murmurs to me in the rasp-breathy voice she adopts around our high school’s gang of wannabe beatniks. Her short fingers, child’s fingers tipped in burgundy acrylic talons, are wrapped around the metal mouthpiece of a hookah, and her pale eyes glare at me beneath her false lashes and cateye. She is not bad, nor is she stupid; we drive around town at night in her 1995 Saab singing Disney songs and declaring ourselves stardust, sharing Big Gulps, makeupless and uninhibited. Her room is a disaster and she fails nearly every standardized test, but she knows a liar by the curve of their tongue against their teeth and that’s more than I can say of the brainless boneheads in most of my AP classes.

I take the hookah and suck in, just barely, careful not to breathe. It is flavored like blueberry, but I know it is tobacco, like I know facts about the solar system, history, Shakespeare. The beatniks debate poetry around us but do not want to hear from me, even though I know many, many facts about poetry. I know rhythms and meters; I charge classmates a dollar or two cookies to write them dirty sonnets in three minutes or less. But when I speak up in a beatnik poetry circle, refute their analogies, criticize their (male, male, male) beatnik gods, they shift in their seats. They cough. They think that I think they are stupid, which is True and Not True; Schrödinger's beatniks.

Hookah, I know, is cool, but it is stupid. Amber knows it is stupid, too, but in the lame way--the way underaged drinking is stupid, and skipping class is stupid, and falling in love with acne-ridden teenaged poets is stupid. She does them all once a week, a religious self-care self-harm routine, with abandon. She is Cool and I am Stupid. She is Stupid, but Smart. Much smarter than me.

“Your pal is a drag,” A beatnik whispers to Amber, his round glasses shining in the porch light, the hair above his upper lip blonde and patchy and embarrassing. ‘A drag’ he says, which is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, but Amber laughs at him and rolls her eyes.

“I know,” she rasp-breathes, like Marilyn Monroe after eight packs of cigarettes. She’ll sound like that for real, eventually, from the hookah, from the cigarettes. She’ll get wrinkly and stained, like an old white t-shirt. I won’t get wrinkled or stained, but in the boring way--the way of a white button-up, the kind you rip off as soon as you get home, that sits in the hamper because it’s dry clean only, the kind that stares at you from the closet as you say, “God, I have nothing to wear.”