Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

She’d transformed, like Olivia Newton-John in the last scene in Grease, though she wasn’t nearly
as bubbly and fun. I was afraid of that leopard-print shirt. It was a costume change I didn’t request.
But on afternoons when Kimberley was gone, I would slip it off the hanger and onto the frightening
curves of my own body, and I would admire myself in the mirror, enjoying the electricity of high
school before I’d even started fifth grade.
SOMETHING ELSE TERRIBLE happened that year.
A few days into fifth grade, I was on the living room floor with my legs splayed open like any girl
who is young and unencumbered. Mom and I were laughing about something, but she went silent when
she saw it: a dime-size dot of rust on the crotch of my favorite shorts.
There was a rush to the bathroom. And an inspection over the toilet. And my mother’s hands,
smoothed along my ruddy cheeks.
“This is all very natural,” she said, although we both knew that wasn’t true. I’d just turned ten. I
stared at the drain in the bathtub and watched my childhood go down it.
My precocious puberty had been coming on for a while, but the changes had been manageable.
When breasts bubbled up on my chest in fourth grade, I smushed them down again under heavy cableknit
sweaters. When hair began to appear on my privates, unwelcome as the first whiskers of a
werewolf, I ran my mother’s razor along the skin to keep it smooth and untarnished. But bleeding once
a month required a new level of hiding.
My fifth-grade teacher called my mother at home one night after becoming concerned about my
slouch. “Sarah should be proud of her body,” she said. “She’s blessed to have such a shape.” What
the hell? She was supposed to be grading my math quizzes, not my posture. Until that moment, it
hadn’t occurred to me that adults might also have opinions about my body, which meant everyone did,
and I hated feeling so powerless. You could hunch and smother yourself, you could shove all your
shame into unlit places, but somehow, some way, some gray-haired lady could still spot your secrets
from across the room.
My mother came into my room later that night. She thought it might be time to shop for a bra. And I
tried to be patient with her, but didn’t she understand? That was the worst idea in the world. Fifth
grade was a torture chamber for any girl who dared to confirm her development. Boys would sneak
up behind me and snap my bra. Girls would whisper behind my back. I might as well show up to
school wearing a bull’s-eye on each areola. I might as well take a Sharpie and draw an arrow to my
crotch: now bleeding.
So my mother smoothed my hair and kissed my forehead. My mother’s hand is still my favorite
hand.
That was the year I started encouraging girls at sleepovers to sneak sips from the liquor cabinet. I
wanted to make them tough, too. And I liked playing ringleader in our coterie of spelling bee
champions. I taught them dirty jokes and cusswords I’d learned from watching Eddie Murphy films at
my cousins’ house. I got the genius idea to pass notes in class and archive them in a plastic index
cardholder inside our desks, which is such a boneheaded girl thing to do. It’s not enough to break the
rules. Apparently you need to scrapbook the evidence.
We returned from P.E. one afternoon to find our teacher sitting behind a desk piled with a
mountain of our misdeeds. I was a real show-off in the notes. I called her a bitch. I talked about how