Cigarettes - a vignette

A short story about youth and cigarettes

Cigarettes - a vignette 

She kissed him hard on the mouth. He tried to struggle but suddenly his conscience sort of melted away. The traffic above them had no idea what was going on under the bridge, thinking about their destination or where they'd been. How much dust was on that dashboard. Not in the Now like the two underneath. Lost in hormones and bad decisions. They stopped long enough to take a last drag on their cigarettes and after a final kiss and a piece of chewing gum each, headed back.  

He spotted the the man marching down the cricket pitch first and took immediate action, grabbing her by the shoulder roughly. The late teenage girl was almost as tall as him and nearer his age then the old boy nearing them, him on his first job after completing his teacher training.  It was probably going to be a short but fairly eventful career path. She reacted exactly as she should and demanded, not very politely, what he thought he was doing, flicking her long maroon hair moodily. He stopped her before she could mention anything incriminating by greeting the headmaster. 

'Just caught one of them now, taking her to my office to tell her what to expect if this behaviour continues.' Just the right amount of balls behind that one he sniggered internally to himself. He kept his chewing gum hidden between his teeth and cheek, hoping it didn't make too obvious a bulge. Hoping the head wouldn't look towards where the other, admittedly now waning, bulge was.   

'Only her? Well we'll find the others soon enough!' The headmaster blustered, a cringingly air-force-commander-tone to his voice and all blazer and kravatte.  He was on a mission to 'clamp down' on smokers in the school.  Where did the board find these cliches? Seriously, who wears a kravatte these days? 

'Make sure you question her thoroughly,' he added conspiratorially as they walked past him.

'Exactly the plan headmaster!' He shouted back over his shoulder, marching Gemma (although, in truth, it could have been the other way around) back towards the school, leaving the head to make his own way. It was a school that had a good reputation and sort of skated on that thin ice for a while now, not being what it once was. The main building was old: old fashioned and parents seemed to have a kind of nostalgic attraction to it, thinking it must be a respectful kind of establishment if it had that much wood panelling. His office was on a second floor corridor, and wasn't part of the ornate old building. Just an ordinary looking room where he kept his things. They weren't even his things really. Temporary.  He locked the door as she jumped up to sit on his desk, crossing her legs and revealing just the right amount of buttock, picking up a pen suggestively. He could have written this: he was a scientist, not an English scholar and his stories tended to have only one theme. 

'On the DESK?!' The girls giggled as he walked into the chirping classroom.

He managed not to blush but act as if he never heard a thing in that 'we-all-know-I heard-that-but-we're-going-to-pretend-I-didn't' way. The eyes just that little bit starey, little bit too slow to move from place to place. As everyone knows who has tried to park a car with loud music on, the eyes are mysteriously connected to the ears. As Gemma lifted her school bag onto the desk, her packet of cigarettes fell onto the wooden surface with the unmistakable sound of...well...a packet of cigarettes. The gold on the box reflected the strip light and couldn't be missed. Apart from that, he was looking in her direction anyway. He couldn't help it.  

'Er! I'll pretend I didn't see that Gemma. And don't let me see you with cigarettes again. Or there'll be trouble.' How he kept a straight face he didn't know. Adrenaline probably. They kept eye contact that little bit too long, not unnoticed by the ladies-in-waiting who exchanged mock-chaste glances, fanning themselves with their homework. They had all read Pride and Prejudice for their English GCSE nearly two years ago and this fanning had become a thing. 

'So last lesson we started looking at kinetics...' He began, opening up the file, hoping that he caught Gemma with cigarettes again.