but i can't help it now
The pre-med kids smoke outside the Pierce Science Building.
I know this because I am pre-med. Because I smoke outside the Pierce Science Building, with a cloud of others, a crowd of cigarette smoke. We sit in stoicism, scuffing our shoes against the pavement. It’s a minute of mournful silence for the bio-chem-phys-math majors we tell people we are, when really we‘re nothing but pre-med.
Sometimes it rains, but we stand out there anyway, stooped together beneath the narrow overhang, small protection Pierce Science provides, because pre-med kids never have the intelligence to bring along an umbrella.
We still smoke.
- - -
What I remember first is it hadn’t begun to rain yet. The overcast sky threatened to, grumbled thunder and winked lightning, but it was all talk.
I sighed, smoke curling faintly from my mouth to hang for a minute in the humid air. The boy standing to my right (no cigarette -- peculiar) tilted his head in my direction and said, “I know the feeling.”
I glanced at him from the side of my eye, and shrugged. It was the heavy sticky pre-storm atmosphere that made me sweep my hair out of eyes and take another drag on my cigarette.
“Anatomy is kicking my ass,” I told him, volunteering information, because pre-med is all we had in common. I didn’t know him, but I knew that.
“Anatomy is kicking everyone’s ass,” he agreed, leaning against the side of Pierce Science, the mother guardian of pre-med.
My hand dug around the gritty bottom of my purse, then found what it was looking for and extended, the half-empty pack of cigarettes held loosely in my fingers and tipped towards him.
He shook his head and his mouth twisted to one side. “I’m good, thanks.”
“Okay.” I stuffed them back in my bag.
“Those things’ll kill you,” he said. “Let me guess. Pulmonology.”
I laughed, but didn’t smile. “You caught me. Diane.”
“Matt. Oncology.”
We didn’t shake hands.
- - -
Way it turned out, Matt was my smoking buddy all the way into our senior year. There were others, there’s always others outside Pierce Science, but Scott and I had made a name for ourselves as ’those kids,’ the ones you always saw together.
- - -
{blah blah blah stuff happens c'est la vie}
- - -
I go back to May, 1988 outside Pierce Science Building, guiding mother of all things pre-med. The bitch. She never tells that pre-med kids grow up to become lung doctors with cancer, who get treatment from oncologists that don't believe in god, who fuck their secretaries and produce offspring who grow up to be pre-med.