Read Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood for Free Online Page A

shoulder and say, “Maybe you just couldn’t hold your liquor.”
    “You really don’t want to puke?” “No.”
    “Not at all?” “Not a drop.”
    “Well, what if I do this ?”
    In a brief moment he lurches forward and hoists me over one shoulder. He takes off running toward the orchard, stopping every few feet to spin in circles to dizzy me. I’m coughing and he’s laughing, and with every step I can feel his hands on my thighs, clutching tighter, trying to steady me. The blood is fun-

    24 INITIATION | First Taste
    neling to my head. Blades of grass are brushing past me. And then Eric trips on a root, launching us both into the dirt and fallen apples. My flip-flops sail off my feet.
    As payback for the fall, Eric lets me run my hands over every last glorious inch of his head. Sure enough, the soft fleece of his hair is the best thing I’ve ever felt.
    When Eric’s ride home shows up, I steal his hat. I fold it in half and tuck it into the waistband of my jean shorts without his noticing. I don’t even feel bad about it. I think Natalie will be proud of me.

    The ride back to the cottage drags. Natalie still isn’t talking to me, and I am trying hard to conceal a smile when Mrs. Burke glances in the rearview mirror and momentarily lets her eyes fall on me.
    I’m sure I don’t look any different to her. I’m still wearing Natalie’s T-shirt over the holey cut-off jeans my mother likens to Swiss cheese. The humidity is still coiling the hair around my face. I’m just a girl, not even a high school girl yet. I’m someone who comes over to her house to occupy her daughter by baking cookies and playing checkers and staging cannonball contests off the dock.
    She doesn’t know that the thing I found in her liquor cabinet has given me the capacity to be a completely different animal on the inside. Inside, I feel exotic and dangerous. I’m a cobra inside a kitty cat.
    I run my hand under my shirt, over Eric’s worn, cotton cap, and know what Columbus must have felt when he washed up on the American shore. Drinking has always been, but it’s a New World to me. It’s been waiting for me to discover it.

FIRST WASTE ‌

    I think it’s no coincidence that a shot is called a shot. You throw back that little jigger of liquor with the same urgency with which a gun fires ammunition into open space. You feel the same ringing in your ears, the same kickback in your arms and chest. The first time you drink, you don’t aim to get drunk. The thrill of pulling the trigger is itself enough. If you like the crack of the rifle, you’ll be back for a second go, which is when you’ll pay attention to the crosshairs and fire enough shots to hit the mark. After my first drink, I don’t have an opportunity for target practice. The summer before high school is a succession of middle-class time killers: ballet camp for a month, horseback-riding camp for a week, piano lessons every other day, CCD

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    classes every third night. These are the things my mother was never allowed to do in her time, and the things I am never allowed not to do in mine.
    Actually, that’s not entirely fair. In grade school I begged for ballet slippers and jodhpurs. I could have spent whole afternoons at the Gym Nest, turning loops on the uneven bars. But that feels like so long ago. At fourteen, I long for unmitigated free time to spend my summers like normal kids do, watching talk shows and eating Pop-Tarts and complaining that there is nothing to do.
    For now, there is too much to do. Before I know it, I’m in high school. Before I know it, I have a new bus driver and a new locker combination, and I am correcting new teachers who are butchering my name (“No, Zel-kiss ”). And Natalie has convinced her parents to send her to a boarding school for the arts, despite the fact that she doesn’t act or paint or play the cello, despite the fact that she doesn’t do anything that technically qual-ifies as art. And I have no one to drink with, so I