Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

I WENT TO college in Austin. All that big talk of getting the hell out of town, and I only made it 180
miles south on the highway.
For years, people assured me I was a “college girl,” which is what adults tell smart girls who fail
to be popular. I assumed the transition would be a cinch. But I lived in a sprawling dorm that was
more like a prison. I stood at social events in my halter top and dangly earrings, looking like the
preppies my fashionably rumpled classmates abhorred. “You’re so Dallas,” one guy told me, which I
understood to be an insult. (My first lesson in college: Hate the place you came from.) Other kids
wore torn jeans and baby-doll dresses and clunky Doc Martens. I’d spent four years in a back bend
trying to fit in at an upscale high school. Now I was going to have to contort myself all over again.
The first month was a terrible solitude. I took walks around the track behind the dorm, trying to
lose those last stubborn pounds. I woke up early to apply makeup before my 8 am German class.
Every once in a while, I ran into my high school boyfriend, Miles, on campus. We’d broken up over
the summer, but we’d both come to the same state university, which was a bit like attempting a
dramatic exit from a room only to discover the door was locked. Some nights, I lay in my prison bed
and listened to U2’s “One” on my CD Discman—the same anguished song, over and over, because I
liked to curl up inside my own suffering and stay for a while.
Luckily, I found Anna. She was my peer advisor, which meant it was in her actual job description
to help me out of my misery. She was a year older, with tastes I recognized as sophisticated. She
drank her coffee black. She read Sylvia Plath, required reading for college girls dabbling in darkness,
and Anne Sexton, whose very name told me something crazy was going on there. I’d only worshipped
male artists—not on purpose so much as default—but Anna was drawn to the women. The secret
diary writers, the singer-songwriters who strummed out their heartbreak, the girls splintered by
madness. She had an Edward Hopper painting called The Automat over her desk. Nothing was
happening in the picture, but it pulled me in anyway: a woman by herself, eyes cast downward, in an
empty restaurant at night. Meanwhile, I decorated my work space with snapshots from high school
dances where I clutched a gaggle of friends smiling on cue. I don’t think I’d ever realized how
beautiful a woman alone could be.
Anna and I became close that fall while acting in a shoestring production of a Chris Durang play.
(Neither of us studied drama in college, but our small liberal arts program was the type where kids
put on shows for the hell of it.) We were walking home from a rehearsal when she asked if I wanted
to smoke a cigarette in her friend’s dorm. He was out of town for a few days, and we would have the
whole 100-square-foot cell block to ourselves.
It was one of those nights when a casual conversation unfolds into a fateful conversation. One
Marlboro Light turned into a whole pack. Two Diet Cokes turned into half a dozen and a cheese
pizza. We laid out the sad tales of our past like a Shinsu knife collection. And here on the right,
please admire my awkward first sexual experiences. Oooh, and have I shown you my bitter regret?
I talked a lot about Miles that night. He and I had an ideal high school romance (except for the part
where I cheated on him). He was hilarious and tender, a John Cusack of my very own (except for the
part where he broke up with me after I cheated on him). The mature side of my brain knew our
relationship had found its natural end. But my girlish heart kept getting tugged back to him. Sometimes
I saw him on campus, walking with a girl who wore combat boots and a motorcycle jacket, and I felt
like I’d been cattle-prodded. Who the hell is she?