my teenage juuls

I remember the way cotton candy Juul hung in the air while I sat in the girls' locker room. One of the girls recognized and identified that scent right away, said it was fresh, and had to be someone in the grade younger than us because of that. 

Some of us are amateurs compared to her nose, apparently.

"Talia," she said. This was day one of the new scent. "It's definitely Talia."

So that was what I smelled back in Vegas - Thick, suffocating. And if you went near the right person, it was sickly sweet. No New Friends by LSD was playing on a billboard on one of the airports. It didn't feel safe. Yet it felt safe here at school. 

Some of my friends laughed; not uncomfortably, because all of us knew at least five different people that vaped. Regardless, it was fine. The authorities were powerless over what we did. Reporting it to them would be useless, like drinking one more cup of coffee to push away the calling of sleep. 

But why would I complain? I hadn't gone down that awful basic, lives for attention route, with straight A's, no siblings to influence me, and plenty of extracurriculars to keep me on the edge of my seat. No time for drugs or boyfriends. I drifted back to the locker room.

There was a girl that had been caught vaping last year named Mckenna in a hallway. She switched schools and ended up being no better than she was here. (I saw her friends when she came back to visit our old science teacher. They looked like crackheads.) We joked that she would be coming back  to haunt us all. Screw Tia, or whatever her name was. We all left the locker room.

"Some Juul flavors smell better than they taste. Like watermelon," Allie said. Tentatively, I asked her how she knew. 

"Oh, whenever my aunt comes over, she brings her vape and puffs it in me and my sister's face." 

Alarming? I couldn't be sure. The rest of gym continued regularly as I hung out in a corner, ignoring the assigned physical activity because I had swimming later. (My apathy grew at unalarming levels.) Days whisked by. So apparently, after I listened to the school’s buzz, Sana, the student in high-honors science that was one my closest friends in sixth grade, vaped and even recorded herself doing it saying that she didn't care what the others would say of it. I blamed her friends. So Krisha, the pettiest girl in the grade, Juuled too. We were friends once.

They fell, slowly, like many. I wanted to look at them the same.

I took a deep breath of non-Juul air as I left and wondered if Tatia would come back.