French kids don’t smoke Marlboros, or Gauloises, or Gitanes, or Português Suaves. If you want to be cool you have to hand-roll your cigarettes. This is what the boy with glasses explained to me when he cornered me at the party, reached into his pocket, pulled out a pouch filled with dark powder that looked like he’d just bent down and scraped it from the earth. He asked me if I wanted a cigarette, except I didn’t understand him at first because when the madame gave us vocabulary quizzes in my French classes, the word for cigarette was always cigarette, same as in English, and we all got an easy point. This boy didn’t say cigarette, he said cibiche, though I didn’t find out until later that night, scouring Google for all the new words that now belonged to me. He laughed. Swaddled the moss-brown powder in a clean, crisp white sheet. Pressed his tongue to the edges and sealed it shut with saliva. He lit a match, brought the cig to his lips and inhaled-exhaled mushroom clouds into the night, and even though I knew smoking caused cancer and clogged arteries and tuberculosis, all I could think about was how cool he looked, like he was above everyone else and he knew it, like nobody made fun of his accent or spoke to him with syllables too slooooow and stretched-out or told him to catch catch the next flight back home. I reached out to take the cibiche from him, our fingers touched, and then I put my mouth where his mouth had been, drew in smoke that burned my lungs and made my eyes water. I hacked all the nicotine back up before it ever made it to my bloodstream. Later that night, our friends suggested truth or dare, action vérité in French, and the two of us sat in the circle, waited for our next instructions.When he kissed me, his tongue tasted like tobacco and felt foreign in my mouth.