Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

goddamn nosy she was. It was a grudge I’d nursed since she had called my house.
“I really thought you liked me,” she said.
“I do like you,” I said, because what was I going to say? She was the one who started it?
Every one of those girls got grounded except me. My parents didn’t believe in grounding.
I was in bed when my mom came into my room. She had one of the notes in her hand, and I hated
that she was seeing me like that.
“Help me understand why you’re so angry,” she said.
But I wasn’t the one smashing dishes and arguing with my father after the kids went to bed. My
parents’ fights were bad that year. I turned up the radio to drown out the sound. I listened to the Top
10 countdown every night, and I tracked the movements of songs by Madonna, and Michael Jackson,
and Prince the way other children might count sheep.
“I’m not angry,” I told her.
“Then what are you?” she asked.
I thought maybe I was bad. A lot of crazy things were building up inside me, and the more they
accumulated, the stronger the suspicion that I was messed up and wrong. I shrugged my shoulders.
Tears dripped down my cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” my mother said, pulling me into her, and I was so confused. My family made no sense
to me. I had screwed up, but somehow she was apologizing.
I GOT DRUNK for the first time in the summer of my sixth-grade year. Kimberley was 16 and working
at an arcade so epic it was called Star World. Dark rooms lit by neon, full of clinking machines and
25-cent shots at redemption. A bar for people who can’t drink yet.
My self-consciousness had become overpowering by then. I couldn’t stop dreaming about those
shaggy-haired boys playing Galaga, but words were staple-gunned to the back of my throat. I hung
around the arcade all day, but I never said a word. Someone actually asked Kimberley, “Is your
cousin mute?”
The staff of Star World threw an end-of-summer party in a house by the lake. For the first two
hours, I stayed in my usual spot on the sidelines. Teenagers played quarters on the table and drank
potions I understood to be off-limits: peach schnapps and orange juice, rum and Coke.
But then the pudgy assistant manager handed me a beer. He must have felt sorry for me:
Kimberley’s little cousin, watching from the benches again. Or maybe he had reached the euphoric
point in your buzz when stupid ideas seem brilliant. Let’s pee our names in the snow. Let’s get the
dog drunk. He grabbed a Budweiser out of the fridge and handed it to me, like he was sliding me a
winning lottery ticket. Hey, you’re cool, right?
I was two weeks shy of my twelfth birthday, but I had been practicing for this moment for years. I
knew how to pop open the can with a gratifying pfffffft that sprayed like the lightest afternoon shower
on my face. I knew how to tolerate the zap on my tongue and the way my glands squeezed like a fist. I
knew how to sip, and I knew how to glug. Yes, sir. I was cool.
I drank the beer. Then I drank another. And the evening began to glow in my veins. Words rolled
out to me on red carpets. The perfect comeback. The fastest burn. And I kept drinking: a syrupy mixed
drink, a shot of clear liquor like a grenade down my gullet. That shit tasted awful, but who cared? I
was transformed. Pierced by divine light. Filled by a happiness I’d longed for all my life.