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

don’t.
    August turns to September, and I realize I didn’t have a sum-mer love. I didn’t meet a boy while I was gathering shells on Cape Cod, or while I was leaning my elbows over the railing of the ferry en route to Nantucket. My eyes never met someone else’s across a pebbled beach or a crowded room. My breath never cut short with immediate desire. The closest thing I found to a summer fling was alcohol: I was introduced to it. I loved it instantly. Then circumstance separated us.
    Tasting alcohol just once is as hopeful and as heartbreaking as kissing a boy just once. It feels like the time I kissed a boy in the coatroom at a wedding where he was on the bride’s side and I was on the groom’s side, and it was a sweet, singular kiss that dizzied my head and made me want to stay there among the

    28 INITIATION | First Waste
    trench coats forever. But then the cake got cut and the bouquet got chucked, and the boy’s father put on his jacket and the boy’s mother swung her purse over her shoulder, and my eyes followed him under the balloon arch and out the door, and I never saw him again.
    I can’t imagine a way to rendezvous with liquor again.

    Once a week, Natalie calls from her dorm’s pay phone to make me feel envious. She’ll tell me about a party she went to in an abandoned house, where boys strummed acoustic guitars, girls read palms, and everyone drank red wine straight from the bot-tle. She’ll say she was too drunk to walk the two miles home be-fore midnight, when the dorm’s doors get locked. It was better that way, she’ll say, because a boy got locked out, too, and they slept in his car.
    I listen for a long time and my cheeks burn. I say nothing.
    Natalie promises to get me drunk when she comes home for winter break. But the interval seems unreasonable, and it doesn’t console me. I think, Even star-crossed Juliet got to marry Romeo and take him to bed in a single day. Likewise, I’ve been through the ceremony of my first drink. Now I am ready to con-summate it by drinking faster, drinking more.
    Nights, before I go to sleep, I try to imagine what being drunk feels like. I’m not sure why, but I decide the sensation must have weight. After the third or fourth drink, the drunken feeling must sneak up and pin you down. It must quiet your mind, like a lover that puts one finger to your lips, saying “Shh, baby.” It must crush you with the force of its embrace. It must bore into you, permeating your whole body, your whole soul.
    I imagine all of this and my chest tightens with yearning. I can’t wait until Christmas.
    • • •
    Everyone at my new high school drinks.
    In the hallway between classes, I hear rumblings about a keg party at an upperclassman’s house, or in the woods near the town quarry. I see girls drawing straws at lunch to choose a designated driver. I see one guy put another in a headlock and say, “Boy, prepare to get drunk tonight.”
    I try to get myself invited.
    I do it during science class, when my lab partner is turned backward in her chair, telling two girls about the cookout she’s throwing on Saturday. The theme is luau, she says. She’s going to decorate the backyard with wading pools and inflatable palm trees. She’s going to serve vodka watermelon.
    I interject to say, “I love that drink.”
    In the space under their desks, I see one girl nudge another with her foot. All three of them stare at me for a stunned mo-ment before they exhale small coughs.
    That night, I find a recipe for vodka watermelon on the In-ternet. The instructions say to cut a hole in the top of the melon, funnel vodka inside, and let it sit for a day before you cut it into pieces so the fruit will absorb the alcohol. I read it over twice be-fore I realize you eat the watermelon chunks, instead of drinking the juice. When I do, I want to walk outside and lie down in the street.

    With no friends and no chance of getting invited to a party, I try to drink alone one night in September. My