Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

BY EIGHTH GRADE, I had discovered a surprisingly dependable revenue stream for adulation. I wrote
morbid little tales inspired by Stephen King books. Teachers and classmates cooed over my twisted
imagination and PSAT vocabulary. Writing made school an opportunity instead of a fear parade. Of
course, English was my favorite subject.
I met one of my first great loves in my English class. Jennifer had big brown eyes, long brown
hair, and a bohemian beaded necklace that suggested an older sister who taught her about Pink Floyd.
She sat directly in front of me, and we bonded over our liberal politics and Helter Skelter, required
reading for curious teens dabbling in darkness.
One day she slipped me a note on a torn piece of paper. Do you want to spend the night on
Friday? Later, she told me she spent the entire class holding the tiny scrap of hope in her hands,
trying to talk herself into passing it my way.
That Friday night, we sat in her bedroom and ate an entire gallon of Blue Bell ice cream. That’s
how nervous and excited we were. We swapped stories of our own personal hells and discovered
they weren’t so personal after all. Is there any bonding agent like shared pain? We spent most Friday
nights together after that.
I thought I had delicate sensibilities, but Jennifer was the most sensitive girl I’d ever met. We once
passed a bird with a broken wing as we walked to NorthPark Mall. He was tipped over on the
sidewalk near the highway, claws scrambling for purchase, and she scooped him up in her hands and
redirected us back to her house, where she nestled him in a shoe box padded with cotton balls. I just
wanted to go to Limited Express.
“You can’t go around rescuing any dumb bird,” I said to her in a tone I’d borrowed from
Kimberley. My babysitting money was heavy in my pocket, and I was itching to turn my bounty into a
bubble skirt.
I was the dominant in our duo, but in the green-carpeted hallways of middle school, we were
equals. Two artsy honors kids, stranded in the vast flyover territory between cheerleader and nerd,
and drawn to both coasts. We wrote each other notes every day, which tracked the movements of boys
we liked as though we were anthropologists in the bush. (“Claude was wearing a red shirt today. He
sat in a seat close to the door.”) We folded the notes into simple origami shapes, and I kept every one
she gave me in a Payless ShoeSource box in my closet. I liked to watch those notes pile up, a tangible
measure of my value to another human. The notes were creamy with praise, as if self-esteem were a
present you could give another person. You are beautiful and sweet. I love you so much. You are the
best friend I ever had. So much clinging and drama. We sounded like parting lovers fleeing the
Nazis, not two kids bored in American History.
We bought silver best friend rings from James Avery, the equivalent of engagement rings in our
junior high. Flashing that ring meant you belonged to someone. And if we couldn’t belong to the boys
we liked, then at least we could belong to each other. The ring was two hands entwined so you
couldn’t tell where one hand ended and the other one began, a fitting symbol for our enmeshment. We
were BFFs, almost sisters. But then high school came along—and our unraveling began.
I arrived in ninth grade eager to catch the eye of some upperclassman, but it was Jennifer they
saw. They scooped her up only to drop her again, but at least they knew she was alive. The baby fat
had melted off her round cheeks, and she wore tight miniskirts displaying her long, shapely legs. She
developed a scary case of anorexia that year. If she chewed a stick of sugar-free gum, she would run
around the block to burn calories. And I knew she was acting crazy, but I was so jealous of how much