Mark was eleven and had been smoking off and on for two years, never trying to quit but
being careful not to get hooked. He preferred Kools, his ex-father's brand, but his mother
smoked Virginia Slims at the rate of two packs a day, and he could in an average week
pilfer ten or twelve from her. She was a busy woman with many problems, perhaps a
little naive when it came to her boys, and she never dreamed her eldest would be smoking
at the age of eleven.
Occasionally Kevin, the delinquent two streets over, would sell Mark a pack of stolen
Marlboros for a dollar. But for the most part he had to rely on his mother's skinny
cigarettes.
He had four of them in his pocket that afternoon as he led his brother, Ricky, age eight,
down the path into the woods behind their trailer park. Ricky was nervous about this, his
first smoke. He had caught Mark hiding the cigarettes in a shoebox under his bed day
before, and threatened to tell all if his big brother didn't show him how to do it. They
sneaked along the wooded trail, headed for one of Mark's secret spots where he'd spent
many solitary hours trying to inhale and blow smoke rings.
Most of the other kids in the neighborhood were into beer and pot, two vices Mark was
determined to avoid. Their ex-father was an alcoholic who'd beaten both boys and their
mother, and the beatings always followed his nasty bouts with beer. Mark had seen and
felt the effects of alcohol. He was also afraid of drugs.
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