Betty sticks a Marlboro between her lips. It dangles there like a lollipop.

She holds the lighter with her right hand and cups the space around the cigarette with her left. Her fingernails are cherry red but chipped and peeling. It's getting dark outside, and the lighter flickers shadows on her pale 15-year-old face. Then she's a silhouette in the dusk again. "I don't understand why you want to write about me," she says. "I'm boring."

She inhales, her face angled upward. Then she plucks the cigarette from her mouth and jerks it away like a Hollywood starlet. She knows I'm watching.

She thinks about when she was little and would kneel by her father's chair inhaling his cigarette smoke. She thinks some people were born smokers.

She's been doing this since she was eleven, smoking as many as two packs a day some days. So what if cigarettes might kill her. Everything kills. She doesn't want to grow old anyway. She says she doesn't want to live past 35. That's what she tells me anyway. Later, she says she wants to be a history teacher.

When the cigarette is down to a nub, she flicks it out the window of my car and onto the road. I give her a look.

"What?" she says. "It's only concrete."

Betty's not her real name. It's Nicole. Nicole Anne Colbath. She changed her name about a year ago when her friend Chloe mentioned she'd like to have friend named Betty. Betty is for Bettie Page, the 1950s va-va voom pin-up girl often pictured in black leather with whips and chains. There's a whole culture of Betties out there, cagey young women with dark, straight-across bangs, pale skin and red lipstick. There are skate Betties, ska Betties, indie Betties, glamour Betties and punk Betties.

Betty is a punk Bettie. Sometimes she "charges" her short black-dyed hair, slicking it to points with Elmer's glue. It makes her look like the Statue of Liberty. When she wants to dress up, she wears orangy-red lipstick and blue eye shadow or glitter dust around her baby blue eyes. She wears black most of the time, hooded sweatshirts with pants or skirts, fishnet stockings and tank tops she and her friends call "wifebeaters." She always, always wears her studded, black leather belt. It rests on her hips and sways with them as she walks. The metal studs are rounded on the ends so they wouldn't hurt if you sidled up to her, but they stick out enough to scuff up the white walls in her parents' living room when she leans against them. She's pleased with the scuffs, another sign of damage she's done.

Betty says the belt is her "flag." She wears it to let people know she's not a prep or a goth or a skater. She's part of a culture of "fighting, fucking, drinking and screaming out," she says in an essay she wrote for no particular reason. "Getting kicked in the head in a pit with a steel-toed boot, while hearing music that inspires you to break something ... The divine music and force that shapes my identity."