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Max doesn’t even like the smell. Bitter, acrid curls of smoke sting her nose and make her eyes water when she lifts the cigarette to her face. When Billy was still alive around and lit up on their way to school she’d complain endlessly about smelling like an ashtray, the teacher already thinks I’m a delinquent, Billy, don’t blow smoke in my face…! Nowadays, when she’s sitting in the passenger seat next to her mom listening to talk radio, she thinks she’d give a lot to still be able to bitch about it.
As big of a shitbag as he was, Billy had still been a constant in her life. An obnoxious, mean, spiteful constant who took up the living room with his stupid weights and gross boy-smell and blasted music extra loud when Max was trying to do homework and ate the leftovers out of the fridge even when she’d put her name on the box, Billy! He made fun of her skateboarding (he had no room to talk, he liked to surf. ) He thought it was funny to make her mad, because she cried when she got angry and her face turned all red and blotchy. He was horrible to her friends and took pride in scaring them away.
…Sometimes, though. He could be kind of cool.
Like when mom and Neil had first gotten together and he’d taken her on a joyride in the Camaro along the 405 after she told him how cool his ride was (his driving was insane, she only screamed a little bit though.) And when he caught her messing with his boxing bag after Mariel Pappas started picking on her, he showed her how to throw a punch (he only made fun of her form a little.) And then, when she got grounded after socking Mariel’s ugly face, he snuck her out to see Christine and told her if she was going to hit someone to make sure and do it hard enough they wouldn’t snitch after.
And when Max had messed everything up and he’d started hating her for real he was at least still around . Still filling up the spaces around her, even if it was just with rage and bitterness. (And when she really messed up and didn’t manage to save him from the Mind Flayer he still saved her and everybody else, but Max can’t think about that without falling apart. )
So on nights like this, when her mom and Neil are out of the house and she’s feeling the emptiness of the bedroom next to hers, she’ll pull the crumpled pack of Marlboro Reds from where she’s shoved it between her mattress and the box spring and light one up in the blackness of her room. It’s half-empty now, and Max savors each one like it’s the last because someday soon it will be. She can always get more, she tells herself. It won’t be the same - Billy bought these , it was maybe the last thing he bought ever - and she chokes a little thinking about it.
It’s not something she can talk about with Lucas or the rest of the Party. She tried once, a little - they’re sorry she’s sad, but not really sorry he’s gone , because none of them really knew Billy outside of him being a holy terror to them. Her mom has her hands full with Neil - he’s fallen apart a little after everything, which at first Max thinks she doesn’t get since he always acted like having Billy was such a burden, but then she kind of does get it too. He won’t let anyone clean out Billy’s room but also seems to balk at anyone mentioning it still exists. It’s shut up like some kind of shrine to dirty laundry and heavy metal. The therapist they’re making Max see would probably have some kind of fancy term for it. Max just thinks it’s a tomb.
It’s lucky she even managed to snag the cigs before Neil locked the room up, in between the funeral and the wake. After tonight she’ll be down to seven. It’s been a week since the last time and she can feel herself starting to shake apart from the inside out. It feels like without them she’ll start to forget - not the “big” things, not even the “good” things, but things like how his eyes glittered when he was being truly vicious, or how callused his palms were from working on the Camaro, or how he’d talk back in that lazy drawl that dared people to try and smack him around.
She flicks the cheap plastic lighter (not one of Billy’s, he’d had a shiny silver Zippo that she doesn’t know what happened to) and holds the stick in place until the end catches. It glows a hypnotic red-orange in the dark and Max brings it close to her face and inhales through her nose. She doesn’t smoke them - she tried once and coughed for about ten minutes straight, they were so gross , it was like sucking on a burning newspaper. (He would have laughed at her and goaded her until she either finished it or got mad and stormed off.) Instead, she just lets the smell linger in the air as long as it takes for the cherry to burn out. (Billy’d bitch at her about the waste of money but he’s dead not here, so she lets them burn.)
Here, in the quiet of her room, under the spell of burning tobacco and ash, Max can let go, just a little. Ten minutes out of an infinite number of days where she doesn’t have to be Okay. Her therapist says these things get better with time. Max guesses that’s probably true, or else there’d be a lot more fucked up people wandering around. Or maybe people just get better at hiding it.
It seems like no time at all and her Marlboro is done, burnt down to the filter. She flicks the remains through the bedroom window and leaves it cracked to air out so her mom doesn’t come in and get the wrong idea (she doesn’t really want her to get the right idea either - Max knows this isn’t normal.) It’s not enough, but it has to be. Tomorrow she’ll leave her room, and be Mad Max, a good daughter, a Party member. She’ll go to school and therapy and the arcade, and someday soon she won’t need to cling to the memory of someone that could barely stand her on a good day.
But until then she has seven smokes left.