Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

more successful her eating disorder was than mine.
It was also dawning on me, with horror, that I was short. To some girls, being short meant “petite”
and “dainty.” To me, it meant being “squat” and “puny.” Height was authority. Height was glamour. I
knew from magazines that supermodels were at least five nine but I flatlined at five two, while
Jennifer rose to an attractive five seven, and I grew accustomed to tilting my head upward as I spoke.
Jennifer once caught me climbing onto their kitchen countertop to reach a high shelf. “Aww, that’s
cute,” she said.
“No, it’s not,” I snapped at her. What was so adorable about a person whose body had been
cheated?
On Friday nights, in her bedroom, we didn’t discuss these frictions. We giggled and gossiped.
Jennifer stole beer from her father’s stash of Schaefer Light for me. I would drink it while we talked,
letting the alcohol work out the kinks in my system, the part of me that couldn’t stop staring at
Jennifer’s thighs and hating her for them.
Jennifer didn’t like beer, but she had other vices. She liked to sneak out the back window of the
house in the middle of the night and take out her parents’ Oldsmobile. We glided down the streets of
her neighborhood in that gray boat, our hearts booming louder than the radio, and then coaxed it back
into her driveway. I could not have cared less about driving a car. But I played accomplice to her
minor crime, same as she did for me, because we were good girlfriends like that. Always taking care
of the other one’s needs.
I WAS A sophomore when the whispers began. Did you know so-and-so drinks? Did you know soand-so
can buy? Nobody needed to explain what the person was drinking and which substance they
could buy. It was like the teenage version of the mafia. You just knew.
Ours was a conservative religious community. At pep rallies, a “prayer warrior” spoke before the
big game. Youth ministers from the behemoth Presbyterian Church milled around the cafeteria at
lunch. Popular girls wore silver cross necklaces and signed their notes “In His Grip.” But these kids
were destined for the sanctioned debauch of fraternities and sororities, so high school was a slow
seduction from one team to the other. I kept a running list in my head—who had gone to the devil’s
side.
For a while, drinking was an underground society. I would show up to a fancy house on the oldmoney
side of town, where the parents had gone on vacation (Aspen? Vail?), and I’d end up in some
deep conversation with a stoner from my Racquet Sports class. When people asked later how we’d
become friends, I had to remain vague. Oh, you know, some thing. Drinking forged unlikely
connections. It dissolved the social hierarchies that had tyrannized us for so long. Like a play-at-home
version of The Breakfast Club.
Jennifer had started to drink, too. Grape wine coolers and sugary concoctions. Girlie drinks. She
had taken up with an older crowd, the ones who smoked on the corner across from the school. I hung
out with the drama kids and slipped my best friend’s ring in a drawer; that was baby stuff now.
Theater was my new love. My energy shifted from academics to performance. I appeared in every
play. I joined not one but two choirs. I had to keep my weight down for the stage, which meant at
parties, I never allowed myself more than three Coors Lights, 102 calories each. My body obsession
was not pretty, but at least it kept my drinking in check.