Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

orrowed. She couldn’t miss the silver glint of contraband in the dim light.
I couldn’t predict how my parents were going to react to this discovery. They were so different
than other parents. Half my friends’ folks had divorced by then. Jennifer’s father lived in an
undecorated apartment across town. Stephanie’s mother moved the girls into a duplex, while her dad
began a slow drift that would take him out of her life completely. All those shiny, happy families,
splintered into custody arrangements and second marriages. And yet, somehow, my parents stayed
together. My mom was happier, less volatile now—a result of her intensive therapy, four times a
week. We used to joke that for the price of a new home, we got a healthy mother. My parents may
have argued their way through my elementary school years, but by the time they sat me down in the
living room that night, they were united.
“Your father and I would like to know where you got this beer,” my mother said.
I wasn’t sure how to spin this episode. How much reality could they handle? I’d been drinking for
years at this point with such assurance that playing dumb would be an insult to my pride. At the same
time, my folks were on the naive end, and most of what they knew about underage drinking came from
60 Minutes–style segments where teenagers wound up in hospitals. Of course, things really did spin
out of control at some of our parties, and even I was uncomfortable with the level of oblivion. A
friend had recently crashed his car while driving drunk. I was worried about him—but it gave me an
idea.
“I know it’s upsetting to find something like this,” I told my parents. “But what you don’t realize is
that I’m holding the beer for a friend, who has a drinking problem.”
I hated lying to them. They were so earnest. I felt like I was kicking a cocker spaniel in the teeth.
But the lie was necessary, the same way I had to tell them Miles and I were “just talking” during all
those late nights we drove around in his 1972 Chevy Nova. The lies allowed me to continue doing
what I wanted, but they also shielded my folks from guilt and fear. Kids lie to their parents for the
same reason their parents lie to them. We’re all trying to protect each other.
My dad wasn’t quite convinced. “Look me in the eye, and tell me that’s not your beer.”
I leveled my gaze with his. “That’s not my beer,” I said, without a tic of doubt in my voice. And I
thought: Holy shit. Is it really going to be this easy?
It was. I wasn’t displaying any of the classic distress signals. I was on the honor roll. I had a
boyfriend everyone liked. I beat out Stephanie for the lead in the senior play. On Sundays, I ran the
nursery at my parents’ progressive, gay-friendly church, and I even landed my first job, at a center for
Children of Alcoholics, because I was the sort of kid who helped other kids—whether they were
toddlers I’d never see again or baseball stars vomiting in the bushes and crying about the mother who
never loved them.
By senior year, a bunch of us would gather on Friday nights in a parking lot behind an apartment
complex. Not just drama kids, but drill team dancers, band nerds, jocks, Bible bangers. We’d all gone
to the devil’s side now.
And the more I drank with them, the more I realized my mother was right. We really were all the
same. We’d all struggled, we’d all hurt. And nothing made me feel connected to the kids I once hated
like sharing a beer or three. Alcohol is a loneliness drug. It has many powers, but to a teenager like
me, none was more enticing. No one had to be an outsider anymore. Everyone liked everyone else
when we were drinking, as though some fresh powder of belonging had been crop-dusted over the
Commons.