Free 1503951200 by Camille Griep

dream behind and headed straight into the reality, for better or worse.
    Though it’s possible I’d taken a few steps toward adulthood back then. I stumble over to the white desk in the far corner and open the center drawer. Turning my palm up, it only takes me two or three pats to find the pack of cigarettes I taped there after Cas and Len and I tried smoking them out behind their barn.
    Some of the girls at the dance school had promised cigarettes would help me stay thin. I was desperate to fit in back then, to succeed, to drag Cas and Len with me through the door of rebellion, but the coughing didn’t seem worth it the way it did after I hit puberty. Now cigarettes are nearly impossible to find.
    “Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” I say to a dancer’s shiny poster face.
    The matches are dry and the cigarettes even drier, but the burn feels good in my lungs, appropriately punishing, and smoking in my room—this fuchsia-plastered dream of an earlier me—feels appropriately rebellious.
    It occurs to me that there is no one left in my life to care. I sink into the pink pile carpet and cry.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Syd
    Something is pounding in my head and at first I think it’s a hangover and then I’m sure it is and then I’m sure it’s something else, too. It takes me a few seconds to remember where the hell I am. I’m in a bed and there’s light streaming through a window. The room is very brown, very boring, very guest room-y, which is when I recognize the stupid dogs-playing-cards picture on the wall, and the night before comes flooding back along with the adrenaline that accompanies the sound of the front door opening, and footsteps bounding up the stairs. Someone is knocking at the door of my old bedroom, where I decamped last night for someplace less nostalgic. Because the person is knocking out the rhythm to “shave and a haircut,” my reptile brain relaxes. It is—it can only be—Cas.
    “In here,” I croak. But she’s yelling my name too loudly to hear me. I trip my way out of bed, having alligator-rolled myself up in an infernal beige comforter. I crash into a dresser trying to get untangled, my inner thighs and back muscles screaming as I try to right myself. Cas lets out a squeal. “Syd, is that you?”
    I want to say something smart, but I’m mostly focusing on not strangling her. “Who did you think it would be?”
    Her torso cranes around the doorframe into the guest room. “You nearly scared me half to death.”
    “And yet you are the one breaking and entering.”
    She shrugs apologetically. “I just figured since the hide-a-key was still there . . .”
    That damned key. I didn’t rehide it because I hadn’t remembered its existence, let alone its location. “In the crook of the big rock?”
    “In the elbow of the little aspen,” she says, as if I’ve forgotten her birthday. Which, coincidentally, I have. “What are you doing in here?”
    “Did you see in there?” I point toward my old room. Then I cross my arms over my chest, glad I’m at least wearing a T-shirt and the superhero underwear I wrestled Danny for inside the discarded detritus of a discount mart.
    Cas turns back to my bedroom across the hall. “You might have a point.” She wanders through the door and drops onto the floor where I’d left an old photo album open the night before. “But Syd. So many memories. I kind of love it.”
    “I’m thinking of charging admission, calling it The Cave of TuTu Much.” I follow her in and relocate the cigarettes. It’s funny how quickly habits can be taken back up. “Want one?”
    Cas coughs and waves her hand in front of her face. “No. Gross.”
    “Aren’t you going to ask me where I found them?” I can’t believe she’s not shocked to see a cigarette.
    “The Wagners have a tobacco farm. The mercantile sells their stuff these days, anyway.”
    And here I’d lived years thinking I’d never smoke again. I blow a smoke ring at her. “You don’t remember this box?