Wild Awake

back of my throat. My eyes water. When I open my mouth, a huge cloud of smoke billows out, like I swallowed a burning building. Lukas watches me critically.
    “Try to hold it in longer before exhaling.”
    I shut my mouth again before the rest of the smoke escapes. It’s hard to hold my breath with Lukas watching me like that. I nod, cheeks puffed out, wishing I’d chosen a slightly sexier expression to freeze my face in.
    “And don’t draw so much in at once.”
    I let out my smoke, gasping. “No kidding.”
    I put down the pipe to take a breather. The room seems to sharpen, like I’m looking at it through the lenses of a new and miraculous pair of glasses. I gaze at the Christmas lights. “Lukas, did you ever notice that there’s a pattern in the ceiling that looks like the Big Dipper?”
    Lukas smiles, which inexplicably makes me think of clean-faced Russian peasants singing folk songs, and reaches out to gently pry the pipe from my fingers. “You, my friend, are a little high.”
    “I’m going to go back there and find that guy. I don’t care if he’s Hannibal freaking Lecter.”
    “All right, Nancy Drew. Hand over the piece.” Lukas’s fingers close around mine, trying to extract the pipe, which I have suddenly decided to hang on to.
    “Just a sec, it’s almost cashed.”
    Lukas has been teaching me stoner terminology to go with my smoking lessons: cashed for used up, piece for pipe. I think he’s worried I’ll make us look dumb in front of the older, cooler bands we’ll naturally start hanging around with after we win Battle of the Bands if I don’t learn proper form.
    He tugs at the pipe/piece, rolling his eyes. “You’re impossible.”
    “Come on. One little hoot.”
    “Fine.” Lukas leans back while I take one last puff. When I surrender the pipe, he looks at me with the pseudo-exasperated fondness of a person who has been made, against his better judgment, to laugh.
    “Ready to play now?”
    I nod, beaming. Victory is mine. “Yup.”
    Playing music with Lukas is almost as good as doing Other Things with Lukas. He’s been playing drums since he was ten, and I know my way around a keyboard, and neither of us is interested in playing drippy singer-songwriter covers like some of the other so-called musicians at our school.
    And yes, when I say that jamming with Lukas is almost as good as doing Other Things with Lukas, I mean those Other Things. We have Done Things right here in Lukas’s basement. Steamy things. Things that make my lady-parts glow with heat just thinking about them.
    What Other Things have we done, you ask?
    We kissed. Once. And Lukas put his hand on my leg. And I touched his earlobe with my finger.
    It happened on the blue couch, after we’d each had half a glass of wine on Lukas’s seventeenth birthday. Which was only twenty-seven days ago.
    Since then I have replayed that erotic trifecta—the kiss, the hand on the leg, the finger on the ear—over and over and over again.
    Lukas’s forehead was warm. That’s a weird thing that stayed with me, how warm his forehead was when it brushed mine, as if there was a little fire right inside his skull. I wanted to press against it so it burned me like a branding iron. I wanted a mark, something to prove that this rapture had really happened to me, to us. But when I leaned in to kiss him again, Lukas pulled away with a dazed or possibly dazzled expression, as if his senses were so refined he could only take one hit off the gravity bong of our mutual desire without getting completely fershnickered. So instead I took a safety pin when I got home and very carefully etched a tiny flame on my right ankle, just beside the bone.
    In the slow, dreamlike days that followed, I touched the flame over and over again, thinking about him. The skull-burning intensity of that one kiss, I reasoned, was only a prelude to the intensity of Other Things still to come.
    But the next time I saw Lukas, we didn’t go to Kits Beach and make out on a blanket like I’d more or less planned.
    Instead, we went to Kits Beach and had a three-hour discussion about how we shouldn’t date because we’re in a band together and it would be higher and purer to Focus on Our Art than to give in to undeniable physical attraction. Actually, I think Lukas used the word fleeting . Fleeting physical attraction. He said he was afraid it would get in the way of our music. This all based on some crackpot theory of Lukas’s that love and music are a zero-sum