Read Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood for Free Online

Cooper in the athletics closet, he rose to the status of teen heartthrob, and she was called “Sara Blows Hard” so often her parents had to put her in private school.
    It only makes sense for the sacra to be the bottle. Natalie
    awarded it to me, and I awarded it to Laurel, and it marks our new status as drinkers.

    After we finish both bottles, I rinse them out in the guest bath-room because the birthday girl doesn’t want the garbage to smell like booze.
    The girls who are tipsy go outside to topple down the Slip N’ Slide. The ones who aren’t walk home to raid their refrigerators for beer. Natalie plays video games because she’s decided not to speak to me; I’m not sure what that means for my plans to sleep over later.
    I pull open the sliding glass door and step out into the backyard.
    I’m alone outside. The sky is dark, the steely dark of early summer, not the blind dark of winter. Through it, I can see gnats rising and falling in the porch lights. Crickets sing. Far off, a few girls are chasing each other through the spiny stretch of orchard that spreads off the backyard.
    For once, I don’t mind being all alone in public. Usually, I’d be

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    frightened of what solitude might say about me. I’d worry that someone would trot up the walkway, see me sitting in the crabgrass, and assume that no one likes me enough to want to sit with me. Tonight, though, I don’t care what anyone thinks. I watch the road for girls coming back with cans of beer. When no one comes, I lie on my back and stare at the slab of gray sky.
    I don’t know what being drunk feels like, but I don’t think I am. I can walk straight. I can see straight. And for the first time in a long time, I can think straight. I am not exerting mental en-ergy, trying to decide whether my mother is lying when she tells me I’m pretty. I am not thinking about a conversation I had two days ago, and rolling my eyes because I said something stupid.
    I am not thinking about anything. My knees are bent in such a way that I can make out patterns of freckles on my thighs. My hair is fanned out under me. The air has the smell that fabric softener companies are always trying to capture—the breeze smells like fruit trees.
    The word finally occurs to me: I am comfortable.
    I close my eyes.
    When I open them, Eric Ostrau is tickling my ear with a stray oak leaf.
    Eric’s father runs a snow-removal company that clears our driveway during heavy snowstorms. During blizzards, I medi-tate by my bedroom window, waiting for the groan of the plow against the asphalt and a glimpse of Eric’s red baseball cap in its passenger seat.
    Eric always wears a red baseball cap, although once in a ce-lestial moment, he’ll take it off by the brim and pet his own head as though its blond bristles are the softest things he’s ever felt. There’s no overestimating how badly I want to touch them my-self and confirm it.
    Normally, with Eric standing over me, I’d pop myself up-right and try to dream up something to say. But tonight, I don’t say anything. The act of drinking—and being seen drinking— has renewed my confidence. I look up at him from where I’m lying.
    He asks if I feel all right.
    “Why do you ask?” I know why he asks. In addition to mak-ing sure every girl in the basement knew Natalie and I brought liquor, Casey Schiller ran into a game of three-on-three and made sure the boys knew, too.
    Eric kneels down next to me in the crabgrass.
    “I don’t know. I got drunk at my brother’s wedding in April and I was sick the whole night.”
    I prop my weight up on my elbows in a way that doesn’t just look natural, it is natural, which is a foreign feeling to me. Eric Ostrau is talking to me, and for some odd reason, I’m not hug-ging my own shoulders and curling into myself, like a slug be-ing poked with a stick. I’m not fidgeting or parting the grass. I’m not even stumbling over what I’m trying to say.
    I look at him over one