if you could be anyone (writing smoking scenes lately)
“If you could be anyone, anyone at all, who would you be?” I asked Gerald as I gave out a puff of smoke. We were standing outside in the snow in front of my mother’s house. No one was home, and no one would be coming home for a while.
After a long drag, he said, “I’d be God, because then I could control everything. You’d be my little follower, and nothing could stop me from making you do as I pleased.”
“Then I’d be the Devil, because that’s the one person God can’t control.” I said with a sneer.
“You wanna bet?”
I took another drag. “Oh yeah. Race you and the winner is right.”
He laughed, then said, “You serious?”
“Mmhm. From here to the end of the block and back.” I said this fully realizing I would lose, but at least it was something to do other than smoking and talking crap in front of my mom’s house. Gerald tossed his cig in the snow, and I followed suit. We lined ourselves up on the sidewalk tile right in front of the house and on the count of three, we shot forward into the dark.
He ran as fast as a bat outta hell, but then slowed down when he saw that I was lagging behind. I’m not athletic in the slightest. He laughed. “You holdin’ up back there?”
With a heavy breath, I shouted, “Shut up.”
We touched the bushes at the corner and ran back towards my mother’s house, and I began to catch up to him, but when we got onto our mother’s lawn, I tackled him. He fell face down into the snow, and God and the Devil tossed, turned, wrestled, and kissed as cars passed by on the street;
neither won the argument.