How Fiorella Started Smoking and How She Quit

When Fiorella was in the eleventh grade, she, being a nerd of the first order, ran with a crowd of scholarly twelfth graders.  Most of us were in Miss Elor Osborn's advanced Latin class, a mixed eleventh-twelfth grade class which switched off Virgil with Cicero every other year.  After a dance--or was it a party--we stopped by the Lion's Park playground and played on the swings in the dark.  And everyone lit up except Fiorella.  She didn't know how.

But by the end of the evening, Fio could inhale with the best of them, and she felt as sophisticated as hell. Yes, now Fiorella smoked, and when she grew up, she'd drink wine, live in  a New York penthouse, and be famous for her art, her books, and her intellect.

Quitting wasn't as easy as starting was--until Fio had her wisdom teeth extracted.  They were so embedded that the dentist had to quarter them, which meant your poor Fio went home with gaping holes in her gums and a bottle full of pain pills.  For five days, she lay in bed and looked at pretty patterns on the ceiling, at the same time concocting a theory that if she smoked, the tobacco mosaic virus in the tobacco would get into her system through her open wounds and give her cancer.

When Fiorella finally came to, she had kicked her addiction and has never smoked again.  Although she did dream about smoking for years afterwards.