Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

sat in Jennifer’s bedroom with a jambox on my lap, sharing details that would haunt me for decades.
“It probably won’t even work anymore,” I said, as Jennifer slotted the tape in the deck of an old
creaky jambox, once so familiar to us and now quaint as an abacus. She pressed rewind, and the tape
chugged backward violently, like an unsteady aircraft preparing to take off.
She pressed the play button, and there was a buzz, followed by a loud clunk. And then, my voice
floating back to me from more than a quarter century ago.
“Hi. I’m over at Jennifer’s house. It’s August 20 -something or the other.” I do not sound two
days away from being 14. My voice sounds more like 17. “There’s really not much to say here. I
can’t wait for my birthday. I got a sweater.”
On the tape, Jennifer says something from across the room I can’t quite make out. It sounds like,
“Tell our friends about your summer.”
“It was the best summer of my life,” I start. “I went down to visit my cousin in Michigan. I met
this guy named Brad. He was wonderful. A wonderful person.”
Brad was a sweet stoner type with feathered blond hair and a nod that was about two beats slower
than everyone else’s. He was 18. The night I met him, he said, “So you’re Kimberley’s older cousin,”
and I laughed and corrected him. Younger. For weeks, whenever I ran into him, he would pantomime
picking his jaw off the floor. “No way you’re 13,” he would say.
I’d smile, blush. Yup, really 13. One afternoon, he kissed me in Kimberley’s room, and I couldn’t
believe it: He had picked me. It was everything the movies had promised.
My last night in town was not. We went to a party, had a few drinks, and things got much more
confusing.
The story that follows is one I’ve thought about countless times over the years. I’ve wrestled with
its meaning, rewrote its nuance, tried to erase it from memory. But this was the first time in 25 years
I’d sat down and listened to myself tell it:
We were in this vacant apartment. There was no furniture whatsoever. There were chairs. A
beanbag. Foldout chairs. We went into this bedroom. I forgot to close the door. I thought we
were just going to talk for a while, but the first thing he did when we got in the room was to
take my shirt off. He got down on the floor to take his shoes off, and I guess he noticed the door
was open, and I thought he was going to leave. And I was like, Oh my god, what did I do? Do
my feet stink? [Jennifer laughs]
So he closes the door, and I go, “Oh I’m sorry,” and he goes, “Oh it’s no problem.” He took
off his shoes. I don’t know how my pants came off. I never figured it out. I was on the ground
somehow. I don’t know how I got there, either. He took my underpants off, and he took his
underpants off. He was on top of me, and he was trying to do it, but it just hurt so much. It was
like a bowling ball stuck up your nostrils. I mean, that is the analogy that I have come to be at
one with. I mean, it really, really hurt. I started breathing really, really drastically. And I
started making noises, and he told me to be quiet. Well, he didn’t tell me to be quiet. He said
“Shhhh.” And I couldn’t exactly be quiet, because when someone’s doing that, you don’t want
to just go, “Oh yes, this is nice, real nice.” I mean, he was like, “Shh, be quiet,” and I go, “It
hurts,” and he goes, “I know, I’m sorry,” and I’m like, “You don’t know. You could never
know.”
But he wasn’t hard enough. I don’t know if that’s a personal insult to me, or to him, whether