Nicole lives in the small town of Lockport, NY – a town where everybody knows everybody and there isn’t much that a teenager can get away with – about a half hour outside of Buffalo.
Her parents are both teachers at the public high school, with her dad being a football and track coach at the local Catholic high school of roughly 150 students that she attends.
She also has two older brothers – both standout athletes that competed at the college level – and each sibling was born five years apart.
Athletics were certainly a staple of the family and like every young girl, Nicole dabbled in softball and basketball growing up, but high school sports were not for her. She enjoyed watching her brothers play and she never missed a game with her dad as a coach, but actually playing was not for her.
It was October 2005, Nicole’s sophomore year of high school, and her freshman year was relatively uneventful. Most people have called her Nikki since she was little considering that two girls in her group of friends were named Nicole.
She was thin, not stick-like but still attractive, with brown hair that flowed down to her shoulders. Nikki was nestled in a popular group of girls that were all pretty cheerleaders, but her main focus early in high school was her grades. At 15, she couldn’t remember the last time she had gotten anything but an A.
Needless to say, in a family where academics and athletics ruled, cigarettes and alcohol were not on her radar. Sure she had been to plenty of parties, but she had never consumed more than one drink at a party and had certainly never been drunk.
It’s not that Nikki was unhappy with her life, quite the contrary actually. She was attractive, intelligent, and relatively popular, while her parents trusted her implicitly. She just felt that there was something missing in her life but couldn’t quite pinpoint what that was.
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It was a chilly night in early October and Nikki was set to attend a party with her friends following the homecoming football game.
The party was like any other and after a while Nikki checked her watch that slid down her wrist more like a bracelet. It was around 11 p.m. and she knew that her friends would want to stay a little longer and she was stuck considering she was staying that night at her friend Hannah’s.
Nikki decided to step outside of the crowded house to catch some fresh air. The cool fall air hit her like a brick, causing her to button her black leather coat that hung just below her belt.
Walking around to the side of the house she noticed the smell of cigarette smoke, obviously not uncommon at a high school party.
She had always avoided the prospect of smoking but the clicking of the three-inch heel on her black leather boots on the pavement caught the attention of the group and there was no avoiding a conversation.
She put her hands in her pockets and walked up to the group of four, all older kids. They weren’t bad kids – at a small private school there were never really any bad kids – but they weren’t kids she had ever spent much time with.
One of the older girls, who happened to go to the public school, greeted her kindly.
“Hey Nikki, how are you?” the girl asked.
“I’m pretty good,” she responded. “It was getting a little warm inside so I figured I’d come out for some fresh air.”
“I hear you, but I don’t know how much fresh air you’re gonna get out here,” the
girl laughed as she exhaled a long stream of smoke with a giggle.
“Yeah, I guess not,” Nikki said with a laugh.
“Do you want a smoke?” the girl asked.
Nikki had never been directly asked if she wanted to smoke. She knew that her cousin of the same age smoked but cigarettes were so frowned upon in her household.
She kind of froze, not knowing what to say. She was more curious at the fact that she hadn’t declined the cigarette right away.
As if her brain went blank, Nikki said, “Sure, thanks.”
The girl held out a pack that read Marlboro Red Label on it, and Nikki extracted one from the pack. She looked at it for a moment, almost studying the long white cylinder with an orange-ish filter.
“Need a light?” the girl asked.
“Yes, that’d be probably be helpful,” Nikki said trying to play it cool.
Nikki had seen enough people smoke in her life, especially in movies, to know how to light it so she put the cigarette between her lips for the first time and she flicked the borrowed lighter, moving it to the tip of the cigarette.
She pulled on the cigarette slightly as the flame hit the tip and she could feel the smoke enter her mouth. Nikki quickly blew out the smoke on her first drag without inhaling and she noticed her exhale was not as long as the others.
They didn’t notice, though, and she handed the lighter back -- watching intently without staring -- to see how the others smoked.
Nikki noticed that they were almost swallowing the smoke, so she decided to take a light puff so she didn’t cough.
“The taste is not great,” she thought to herself. “But it’s not so bad.”
The rest of the group went inside when they were done, leaving Nikki to finish by herself, which took longer due to the small puffs. Oddly enough she seemed to be enjoying it towards the end.
Finally she crushed it out on the ground her reached into her purse for perfume and gum so it was not obvious that she had just smoked.
Nikki started walked inside to rejoin the party with a flurry of thoughts in her head.
“I can’t believe I just smoked a whole cigarette!” was the first thought. “What was I thinking?!” was the next. “I think I kind of like it!” was the final thought as she headed inside.
She made no mention of the cigarette to any of her friends because none of them smoked or have even thought about it so smoking went on the backburner for the remainder of the weekend.
Sunday went by and Nikki watched the Buffalo Bills game on TV with her parents before doing her homework. It wasn’t until Wednesday that she thought about smoking again, and the same thoughts that went through her head right after slipped back into her head.
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