Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

of six beers, “I bet you won’t kiss me right now.”
He was leaning against the wall. His forehead rippled as he looked up, all squint and slouch. He
looked at the parking lot, at the dozens of people around us. He looked everywhere but at me. Then he
said, “I don’t think you’re going to win that bet.”
The idea of coming on to men was new. In high school, this would never have occurred to me. I
had waited for Miles to kiss me, for months that felt like years. My coquettish signaling: sit next to
him in class, play with my hair, cross my legs so they looked thinner. I read the tea leaves of his every
gesture. He called me last night. What does it meeaaaan? This was how I understood seduction.
Keep inviting the guy closer, but sit still until he pounces.
College flipped that script. The new imperative: If you want a guy, go after him. What’s stopping
you? We didn’t use words like “feminism”—a fussy term for earlier generations, like
“consciousness-raising” or the ERA—but it was understood that we ran with the boys. Argue with
them. Challenge their ideas about sex and Ernest Hemingway, because they’d been holding the
megaphone for too long, and we needed to wrest it from their grip. I even wore cologne. Calvin
Klein’s Obsession for Men. And slathering my neck in that rich, oaky musk gave me a kinky thrill,
like I’d been rubbing up against some low-rent Johnny Depp.
But my lessons in women and power did not extend to the classroom. I was not a hand raiser of
any kind. I took a C in my Literature After the Holocaust seminar, because I couldn’t force myself to
open my mouth, despite participation being 25 percent of the grade. I ran into the professor on campus
one day. She had dreads and a wry smile. I didn’t even know they made professors this cool. We
chatted for a bit, and she said, “I don’t get it. Why didn’t you ever talk in class?” And I blushed and
said, “I’m shy,” and she said, “Well, you shouldn’t be.”
No, I shouldn’t be. I wasn’t meant to be. And on the balcony of my apartment, I was not. Under
cover of night and Keystone tall boys, I was full of righteous fire and brimstone. How I loved the
taste of conviction in my mouth.
That is bullshit. You’re wrong. Prove it.
I was done sucking up to men. Fluffing their egos. Folding their tightie whities. I was going to
smash my bottles against the wall, and someone could clean up after me, goddammit. I stopped
leaning over makeup mirrors and blow-drying my hair. I wore clothes that stank of hamper and
Marlboro Lights, and it seemed to me that men got off on this new uncorseted persona. That’s what
they said: We like strong women. That’s what they said: Be yourself. So, death to the girl of the
nervous fidgets, behold the woman with a beer in her hand and one endless cigarette. No more hearts
doodled in spiral notebooks. No more falling in love with every boy who looks your way in biology
class. But falling into bed—now, this was another topic entirely.
That’s what Mateo and I did that night. We slinked off into my bedroom while the party rambled
on, and we ripped off each other’s clothes in a blind, snarling rage. For so long, I wondered how it
would feel to sleep with someone other than Miles. To run the tip of my nose along the powdery skin
of his stomach, soft as a puppy’s belly, and into the feral thicket of short, wiry hair leading down
below. But I couldn’t tell you what sex with Mateo was like, because all I had the next day was a
flash of a memory, five seconds of a frame: me, on top of him, my hands digging into his chest and my
hair swishing around madly. I am told that I screamed. The kind of excitement that travels through
flimsy apartment walls.
“I guess I don’t need to ask if you enjoyed yourself,” my roommate Tara said the next day over