Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

My new companion was Stephanie, a fellow drama geek. She and I took long aerobic walks after
school. Afterward, we smoked Marlboro Lights at the Black-Eyed Pea while picking at our vegetable
plates and talking about our future fabulous selves in New York. God, we had to get out of this town.
Stephanie was blond, poised, and gorgeous. She was also five nine. She actually glided down the
hallway, her full lips in a pout, the indifferent stare of the runway on her face. I’d known Stephanie
since sixth grade, when she was a sweet and bookish beanpole, but in our sophomore year, her body
announced its exceptional status: boobs, graceful arms, legs to forever. Guys came up to me in class
to ask if I knew her, as though she were already famous.
So much of high school is a competition for resources—attention from boys, praise from peers and
teachers, roles in the school play—and it’s a dicey gamble to position yourself alongside one of the
most breathtaking girls in the class. I’m not sure if this shows masochism on my part, or grandiosity,
or both. I’ve never been devoured by envy like I was with Stephanie. To watch her enter a room in
knee-high leather boots, her long, straight hair trailing behind her was to practically taste my peasant
status. But I also saw her as my kind. I wrote my notes to her now. They were in the form of Top Ten
lists, because we worshipped David Letterman and needed to hone our joke-writing skills. The path
seemed obvious. Go to college, then join the cast of Saturday Night Live.
I never meant to leave Jennifer behind. There was never a ceremony in which Jennifer handed a
baton to Stephanie for the next leg of the relay, but female friendships can be a swap like this. Only a
certain number of runners on the track at once.
I threw a hotel party with my new theater companions and invited Jennifer. By the time I got to the
La Quinta, she was already wasted. She began spewing compliments in a dangerously slushy state.
You’re so pretty. I miss you. She stirred up all kinds of drama when she made out with a friend’s
boyfriend. The next day I could barely look her in the face.
“What is wrong with you?” I asked her as we drove away from the hotel. “Have you completely
lost your mind?”
She didn’t answer, because she couldn’t remember. She had blacked out and—just like we both
would in years to come—poured herself into whatever hands wandered her way.
That night fractured our friendship for good. Jennifer graduated a year early. And I got a
boyfriend. I belonged to him now.
I WAS A junior in high school when my parents finally busted me. I came home from school to find a
half-empty 12-pack of Coors Light sitting in front of my bedroom door, with a note that read: We’ll
talk about this when your dad gets home.
The beer was a gift from my boyfriend, Miles, a funny guy with delicate features and an equal
fluency in Monty Python and David Bowie. He gave me the Coors Light for my sixteenth birthday,
along with a $25 gift certificate to the Gap, a reflection of my hierarchy of needs at the time. I stored
the 12-pack in the back of my closet, underneath dirty clothes, and I would sneak a can out of it from
time to time. Three were smuggled in my woven bucket purse and slurped with friends before a
dance. Another was shoved between my cleavage underneath a mock turtleneck as I paraded past my
father in the middle of the day, just to prove I could. I drank one of them on a lazy Saturday, sipping it
in my bedroom, because I liked the casualness of the gesture, a high school girl playing college.
But my clever ruse fell apart when my mother dug through my closet to recover a shirt I’d