Hello: It's truly Friday and so I'm posting a free story. Enjoy!
Freda Smokes
Freda had to get a note and she had to do it quick. She was due to smoke her first cigarette in exactly two hours and as part of the smoking experiment at school she needed a note. She was a smart kid, but a little too cool for school and a little too stupid for the rest of the world. As a result, she made it her goal to have as little to do with school as possible. This meant never taking Algebra (why should she when she could take Intro to Algebra I, II and III), and purposely flunking out on spelling tests (English classes were much easier with the low-lifes). This, of course, included participating in the smoking experiment. It was either smoke and do nothing or spend time making a dumb anti-smoking poster.
The smoking experiment. It was in health class and it was famous in the school. Teams were required to do research on smoking, compare the blood pressure and heart rates and demonstrate the difference between non-smokers and smokers. The they created a huge chart, which the whole school got to see. This was supposed to show that smoking was bad. If you were a smoker, the only thing you had to do was smoke. The other students had to do all the research and writing and drawing. And this was right up Freda’s alley. No research, no stupid paper. The only thing she had to do was smoke a stupid ciggy-bud.
The problem was she wasn’t a smoker. In fact, she hated smoking, detested it.
Her parents were a piece of work. Both of them smoked, both had dropped out of college, and although they were middle class due to Freda’s father having a foreman job in construction, they both never followed Freda’s school patterns, nor did they pay much attention to her grades. If they asked for a report card, she always told them it came out next week and then they usually forgot all about it.
She needed a note.
She sat in Intro to Algebra II and looked at the math low-lifes. There was a preppie with a punk twist, there were dead-head rednecks, there were white trash AC/DC/rockers. Typical Texas teens, she thought. These people wore leather boots and smoked a lot of pot. Some had “monkey fists” from a drug-free program called PADAP, or something, they also listened to Rush and while they listened would pretend to play invisible air guitars and then high-five each other. All they talked about were woofers and tweeters on their stereos and this, of course, bored the hell out of Freda. All of them wore concert shirts with bands such as Genesis, and Journey and some even practiced white magic. It was the 1980s.
The other group in the class were K-IKKers. These were students who only listened to the country station K-IKK, which played country western tunes such as I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool or Could I have this Dance For the Rest of My Life. And finally there were just some plain dumb people.
Freda looked around. She figured the dum-dums would be the easiest to target. A blonde dummie was staring off into space. She wore Jordache jeans, a striped shirt and hair that had been sprayed and bleached within an inch of its life. It was high, her head and wide. Freda assumed her major goal in life was to land a man. The girl even told her friend that she liked her hair high and wide. She had glitter, probably fruity lip-gloss and too much eye shadow.
Freda leaned back and looked at the lesson. It was the same one they did last week, which was the same one they did last year. Easy-breezy, just as she liked it. She didn’t really want to talk to the blonde girl, who had a strong Texas accent and was obviously from the wrong side of the tracks. The school was very divided. Wrong and right and the blond dummie was all wrong. Still she had no choice.
Freda glanced up. “Hey..”
The blonde girl looked up and stopped chewing her gum. She had a pencil with a huge Hello Kitty eraser and had root beer scratch and sniff stickers on her notebook. Freda detested such girls. She simply blinked at Freda.
Freda continued, “Hey I need a note that says it’s all right that I smoke. Will you write me one?”
The blonde girl smiled. All she needed was an invitation to talk. She cracked her banana flavored Bubble Yum or at least it smelled like banana. Maybe it was strawberry banana. “You mean for health class?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, yeah No problem.“
The girl was now excited and Freda regretted asking her. Still she needed the damn note.
The girl ripped out a page from her spiral notebook. “Whaddya think it should say?”
Freda looked at the spiral notebook. The girl was too stupid to realize how fake a spiral notebook note would be. Parents never used spiral notebooks. But she bit her lip and held her tongue. She knew if she tried to explain that to this girl, she’d end up talking circles around it.
Freda didn’t really care. She just wanted it to say something. “Just put, ‘my daughter has permission to participate in the smoking experiment.‘”
The blonde girl nodded her head as if such a simple statement hadn’t occurred to her or indeed ever had.
She got out a Popeye pen from her pencil bag and in huge loopy letters, with purple ink, wrote the note. She signed and “thank you” with a flourish and put a big smiley face beside it.
“God,” thought Freda, “does she honestly think that this note looks remotely like any adult did it?”
The blonde girl was proud, probably because she had completed something in class. “If you need anything else let me know. I mean.. What’s your mom’s name?
“Nancy. Miller. I’ll spell it for you.”
“OK. Go for it.” She listened to the spelling and carefully finished the note. The girl held it up. “This should be fine. I mean…”
The conversation was over as far as Freda was concerned. She snatched the note, turned around in the middle of the blonde girl’s sentence and looked at it. It was so obviously a fake. The writing was bubble-headed. It was curly and had huge circles over the “I’s”. The purple ink smelled like grape soda. There’s no way a middle-aged woman would have written this note, Freda thought. Certainly not her mother.
Also, her mother’s name was misspelled as was “participate”. She didn’t care. She hoped the teacher, who was also a coach, wouldn’t notice.
The bell rang and kids of all shapes and sizes wearing every color of clothing entered the carpeted indoor hallways. The high school also served as an emergency shelter in case of hurricanes, so there were no windows. Not even inside of the rooms.
Freda walked to health class and sat down just as the bell had rung. The overweight coach was a stereotypical lud. He was pot-bellied, talked with a huge Texas accent and even wore a whistle around his neck. Freda hated him and every chance she got made him uncomfortable by touching her tits or some other lewd thing while he tried to look away. He had already told her once that he’d kick her out of class if she wrote anymore jokes on the tests about sex education.
The coach waited for the class to quiet down. “Now, as you probably remember, the smoking test is today”
How could anyone forget?
“Smokers, raise your hands.”
Freda did.
“Bring your permission slips up”
Freda along with six other students approached the desk and handed their slips in.
The coach took them all and studied them carefully one by one. He got to Freda’s and paused. He looked it up and down. He then looked up at Freda. He shrugged and continued.
Outside the smokers sat in a circle. One by one they lit their cigarettes. One boy who wore desert boots and Wrangler jeans looked at Freda. “You don’t smoke!”
Freda just shrugged. The boy looked again. “You don’t even inhale.”
Freda looked at the lit cigarette, inhaled and coughed again. It was the first time she had smoked.
She felt nauseous for the rest of the day and when she came home, went straight to her room, slammed the door and laid on the bed.
There was a gentle knock and her mother entered. “Did you smoke today?”
Freda sat upright. “No. Why? God. Will you get outta here?”
“Just wondering. Mrs. McDougal said she thought she saw you. It’s a nasty habit.”
“I know. Can you leave the room now?”
“Sure, I just…”
“What?”
“Well, try and be your best self. OK?”
“OK Mom.”
She rolled over and fell asleep. She slept the rest of the afternoon.
Two years later, after her parents dropped her off at her dorm room in Louisiana, Frieda dug into her purse and pulled out a packet of Kool Ultra Lights 100s. She lit it. Inhaled deeply. God, that nicotine felt good, she thought.
END