I looked around carefully but as usual, the back lot was deserted. Nothing but old graffiti and broken bottles to tattle on me. I slipped quickly through the back door of the bar. The usual stench of alcohol hit me but I ignored it. I was on a mission, a mission I was pretty good at.

You see, this was the only place in town that still had a working cigarette machine, so far as I knew, and having been put in the back hallway here, near the bathroom, next to the back door that some lazy employee usually left unlocked, it was away from the bartender’s supervision.

I had been here dozens of times but I still shook like a leaf every time, expecting someone to burst around the corner and bust me.

I jammed quarters in and punched the buttons as quickly as I could. My lawn mowing and babysitting this week provided just enough cash for two packs. That ought to do it for a while. Down they dropped, two beautiful boxes of Virginia Slims.

She would be pleased. She liked that brand.

I shoved the packs into my backpack, where they would lodge briefly with more wholesome items, then fled. No one had seen me. Again. My heart soared with happiness.

She was waiting for me in the tree house. My best friend in the whole world. Katie. I’d lie on a railroad track if she told me to. We’d been friends forever, or at least since first grade, when she moved to my town. Back then, she was a scrawny tomboy, tough as nails. Freddy Davis tried to pick on her out on the playground, thought he could make her cry. He said something to tease her and he poked at her. She kicked him. Where it hurt. She called him something that I thought only grownups dared to say, when they were really, really mad. And she spit in his face.

Freddy never messed with her again.

She was amazing. She spit and belched and played as rough as any of the boys, refusing to be kept off the field. Our Little League Coach tried to keep her off the team, because she was a girl. She grabbed a ball from him that day, tossed it in the air and hit it as far as any of us boys.

Now we were teenagers. But she was still tough, even though I wouldn’t call her scrawny anymore. She had to keep up that front, ‘cause her home life sucked and that kept people from asking her any questions.

But with me, she relaxed. I saw the soft side of her and I never, ever, breathed a word of it. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love her, as a friend, and probably as a girl, either. We were tight all the way through elementary school, even when everybody else wouldn’t touch the opposite sex with a ten foot pole. We walked to school together, we took as many classes together as possible, we were angels in class so that the teacher would let us sit together. We ate lunch together, we walked home together, we played together, a few times we’d managed to go off camping together with the aid of some elaborate lies. Once or twice, my parents worried. Thought it was unnatural at our ages to be so close, boy and girl.

When she was thirteen, she took up smoking. At first, she stole cigarettes from her dad. But he found out and he smacked her around pretty hard, so, being the determined soul that she was, she took to stealing her smokes from the five and dime. That worked until she got caught. And beat again.

So one day I was talking to Freddy, who was still a bully and an absolute delinquent, but could be bought for a price. Katie wanted cigarettes; could he get some and sell them to me?

He did it for a little while, until he got caught doing something else and sent to juvie. I did some thinking and finally figured out the bar thing, his secret.

The first day I brought Katie a fresh pack of cigarettes, bought with my hard-earned scanty money, I thought she would kiss me. I was 13 then. I wouldn’t have minded. But we were sort of on a keep-it-platonic thing right about then.

She ran off, towards our tree house, and I followed her up. This was our hideout together. This was where she could unload all her worries to me and even cry. This was where we spent hours just enjoying each other’s company and daydreaming together of a better future.

I watched her little white Nikes and her still thin legs pumping up the ladder ahead of me, then she was inside and I followed.

We sat on the floor together until we caught our breath. Then she giggled. And unwrapped the cigarettes. She had only been smoking a few months but she had the routine down perfect. A quick swipe of a match, a moment of concentration and inhaling, and the cigarette was lit and filling up the close air of the treehouse with sweet smoke.

On the rare occasions when she smoked publicly in those days, usually when we had gone biking far from our neighborhood, she smoked just like some tomboy – quick jabbing puffs from the cigarette gripped in her fist. It was her don’t-mess-with-me persona.

But here in our tree-house, she smoked like a lady. She held the cigarette carefully between two fingers, she pursed her lips into a pretty little “O” before she put the cigarette to them, she sipped deeply and strongly but gracefully of the smoke, she let just a half-ring escape from her lips before she swallowed the rest of her inhale, she exhaled audibly, visibly, beautifully.

“You look like Audrey Hepburn,” I said. ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ came out that year and it was a big hit.

“Do I?” she said. She grinned. The nicotine was hitting her right about now, soothing all the anger she kept inside. I swear, sometimes I think that her stupid dad owed his continued survival to her cigarette habit. If I had been her, I might have clubbed him with a candlestick by now.

She lifted the long cigarette into the air again. A twist of smoke curled and spun from its burning end. She wrapped her lips around it. I could just see her pretty hazel eyes through the mist of smoke. I watched as she clamped down tight around the filter and then drew the smoke into her mouth.

“You’re so cool,” I said. I meant it to be teasing. It came out sounding sincere.

“Screw you,” she said. Then she exhaled in my face, making me cough. I tried to poke at her but she grabbed my finger and twisted it.

“Hey, watch it! You’ll break my finger or burn me with that cigarette,” I protested.

“The surgeon general has determined --” she said, between giggles and continuing to twist my finger --

“ -- that messing with Katie can be hazardous to your health.”

She let go my finger and I rubbed it gingerly. We were both laughing now, sitting close together, the indignities of our daily lives forgotten. She took another drag, so deep that I could hear, it seemed, the smoke being pulled through the cigarette.

She looked me in the eye, grinning, and aimed her exhale directly in my face again. “Stop it,” I said, praying that she wouldn’t.

“You should try smoking,” she said.

“Why should I?” I said. “I get enough from you, you rude puffer person.”

Her cigarette was burning down now, good for only a drag or two more. She leaned her blonde head against me and exhaled at the ceiling this time.

“I wish I could marry you, Tom,” she said suddenly.

It was a startling statement. Marriage was a good decade away from any plans I had for anything. But Katie was always good at startling me.

I could have said anything in that moment. Something childish, with an ewww involved. Something trite and grown-up-ey. Honestly, I don’t know from what part of my soul I summoned the courage to say what I actually did. But I never forgot it and I don’t think she did either.

“Katie, if I could, I’d marry you tomorrow. You are the most beautiful girl in the world and I love you.”

I could feel the flush in my cheeks. I had never said anything like that to her, never intended to say anything like that for a while. We were still so young.

She was silent. Absolutely silent. She ground out her Virginia Slims with her fingers and flicked it away. Then I heard her begin to cry. I held her for the longest time, wishing death and destruction in a million painful ways on all the people who made her life miserable.

Maybe we would have married, in a better world. Maybe I would have bought her cigarettes by the carton and red roses every Friday.

But that summer, her dad got drunk on the highway, taking them home from somewhere. They crashed and I lost the best friend I ever had.

That was long ago and far away. I still think of her every day. I think of her when I pass a grungy bar, wondering if there’s a cigarette machine in back and a kid lurking near it. Think of her when I see a young couple walking along, holding hands. Think of her when someone blows a puff of smoke my way. Think of her when I look at that ground-out cigarette butt I’ve kept all these years, remembering the giggles and the tears and the sight of her, so much like a woman one moment, so much still a girl the next.