You're Not Special

by Meghan Rienks

  Friday nights were spent huddled in a circle with your closest friends as you flipped through the yearbook, ranking your potential options with as much thought and insight as a fantasy football draft. From there you’d devise a plan, assigning one of your friends who happened to be lab partners with your target to subtly but forcefully drop the hint that you two would be “oh so adorable together in formal wear.” Once that seed was planted, your potential date would ask your friend to feel out the situation on your end, to which they would happily agree. Despite their feigned “discovery” of the perfect match, in reality this elaborate plan has been in the works for months. So while you play dumb and practice the surprised face you’ll make when the moment comes, it’s your friends who are the true masterminds behind the night that seventeen-year-old you has deemed the most important of her life.

  Prom season at Drake was like Christmastime for Buddy the elf. It was like the administration slipped the potion Puck used in A Midsummer Night’s Dream into the drinking fountains. Everywhere you’d turn, another potential couple would pop up. The student body arranged itself into pairs at the utmost convenient time. While in some instances this sparked jealousy between classmates, more often than not, the prom spirit got into all of us.

  “What about her?” I said, pointing to an underclassman practicing tai chi in the courtyard. That suggestion earned me a swift elbow to the shoulder and a “Fuck you” from Jasper. We were perched on the steps where we ate lunch. While Jasper started on his fourth sandwich of the hour, I surveyed the pool of potential dates within eyesight. Prom was more than three months away, and I liked to remind him that with his lack of urgency he’d be forced to take a fourth-corridor pariah (the students who hung out in the farthest hallway were notorious for wearing cloaks, playing World of Warcraft, and hexing you if you stared too long), the point of no return for his social standing. I’d then remind him that if he started playing World of Warcraft again, I’d be forced to fake amnesia with regard to our friendship.

  “You’ve vetoed nearly every girl you’ve ever talked to. You’re fucked,” I said.

  “I just don’t see what the big fuss is over me finding a date right now. Who knows what’ll happen between now and spring,” Jasper responded, brushing off my impatience.

  “Okay, okay, I’ll put a pin in it till February. But then you have to pick someone before your only option is that girl in my PE class who groped me to find my chakras, because that’s a deal breaker for our friendship. She weirds me out,” I warned him, shaking my head.

  “Meghan, she hasn’t gone to school here for the last two years,” Jasper replied, staring blankly at me.

  “And that’s the last time I went to PE,” I said, and shrugged.

  By the time February rolled around, Jasper had decided to ask a senior from our drama class. I was on my third round of pro-con lists, deciding which of my ex-boyfriends’ new girlfriends would be the least likely to kill me if I took their current significant other to prom. Thinking back on it, I have no idea why I remained so calm at this point about my own plan. For some reason the worry and wide range of what-ifs didn’t faze me one bit. Then again, I was also convinced a casting director was going to discover me at the Westfield mall for a new Disney Channel show so I’d never have to go to college. Delusional thoughts were pretty much my forte. I somehow felt that my situation would work itself out, so I set my sights on helping Jasper orchestrate his prom plans.

  Her name was Aurora. She was a senior, hilarious, and the poster child of the unique brand of popularity Drake High fostered. She was one of those cool girls with that cool group of friends who at any other school would be deemed complete and total freaks. But at a school that celebrated the abnormal and scoffed at anything that could be considered mainstream, she was the crème de la crème. I was terrified of her. She was far cooler than I’d ever be, and she and I both knew it. I had tossed her name out as a suggestion to Jasper back in December. While he wasn’t sure in the moment, when we regrouped in spring he agreed that she’d be a fun date. “I think I’m gonna ask Aurora,” he told me as we rounded the corner from the theater after drama class one day. After months of pestering him and feeling frustrated by his indifference, I waited for that feeling of excitement and wingwomanship to kick in. It didn’t. Instead, I felt a tug at my stomach that made it a little harder to pull off the smile I gave him.

  Let me make this really clear: I had no idea that this meant I had feelings for Jasper—which probably sounds like a complete load of bullshit, because now it’s completely obvious. But in that moment I had no fucking clue. It was so far off my radar that I didn’t even have feelings to put aside, because I didn’t register that I had any sort of feelings at all. It was my assumed duty as the best female friend to help him plan it all, so I began to put feelers out to Aurora about her feelings toward Jasper. I dropped subtle hints that she saw right through. She was completely for it, and I gave Jasper the green light to go ahead. The only thing left to do was wait.

  I spent that Friday night at my friend Alexis’s house, and that morning I woke to the sounds of Lauren and Heidi’s latest blowout as the TV blared the ’09 MTV hit we forgot to turn off the previous night. After I sleepily fumbled through the sheets, attempting to find the remote and slip back into a few more minutes of slumber, the TV went black. Alexis tossed the remote back on her bedside table and rolled over.

  “What time is it?” she mumbled to me as I reached across her for my bedazzled LG Xenon flip phone.

  “Ten,” I read aloud to her. “Molly drunk dialed last night,” I continued with a laugh as I slid my phone open to listen to the three a.m. voice mail my friend Molly had left.

  “Put it on speaker,” Alexis replied.

  “Shmmeeeeeeggg!!!” It started with a high-pitched slur barely audible over the party sounds behind Molly. “Iiiiiiiiii diiiid sumafhinggggg…” She trailed off. “Yoooooooou pretttayyy were naaahht my numero unooooo drunkie cawl tooonight… I mighhhht haff towlldd Jaspper that you lufffffff heeeeem.” With this slurred statement Alexis and I both sat straight up. Molly wrapped up the voice mail with “Shhhhhh, don’t tell!!!!!” The message clicked off and a robotic voice recited, “If you’d like to listen to this message again, press 1.” I pressed 1. And when that one ended with the same earth-shattering words, I pressed 1 again. And again. No matter how many times I pressed 1, the message never changed. And no matter how many times I heard her say it, I still couldn’t believe it.

  It took Molly five voice mails, eighteen missed calls, twenty-three unread text messages, and three full episodes of Life of Ryan to resurface. She answered my call on the final ring with an annoyed grunt. “What. The. Fuck. Do. You. Want,” she growled, her voice raspy.

  “Do you have any idea what the fuck you did last night?” I snapped as I paced around Alexis’s living room.

  “I literally do not want to know. I’ll call you la—”

  I cut her off with a snarl. “You called Jasper and told him I was in fucking LOVE WITH HIM, MOLLY!” I screamed into the phone. I clenched my hand into a fist and waited for her to respond. She said nothing. I attempted to steady my breathing, but with each passing second of silence, I clenched my jaw tighter and tighter. “Molly, did you hear me?” More silence. “Molly, are you even going to fucking say ANYTHING?!” I yelled. I heard her exhale on the other end of the line. “MOLLY!” I screamed again, my frustration building into some other emotion I didn’t recognize.

  She cleared her throat and finally spoke. “But, Meghan…” she started, “you are in love with him.” And that’s when the world stopped spinning.

  It wasn’t as if the moment she said it everything suddenly clicked. It wasn’t like I hung up the phone with the realization and acceptance of these feelings I was completely unaware of. I turned to Alexis to deny it all, and I was met with a look that confirmed Molly’s words on the phone. I opened my mouth to protest, but Alexis shook her head and said, “Meghan, we all know.” I stared back at her bl
ankly as my chest began to tighten and my eyes welled up with tears. I felt that wall I had built up around myself start to crumble. Logically it made sense; I could see that. It would explain why my face involuntarily lit up like a goddamn Christmas tree every time he texted me or laughed at one of my jokes. It would explain why in the past six months I had traded in my uniform of leggings and oversized hoodies for sundresses and winged eyeliner. It would explain why I couldn’t muster up that same excitement my classmates had for prom, why I didn’t have a preference for which ex-fling would be my date for the evening, and why the idea of Jasper slow-dancing to Train with Aurora made me want to throw up. Suddenly the insinuations of our classmates, teachers, and that one guy who worked at that boba place all seemed justified. The pieces were all there, like a giant jigsaw puzzle of my life that everybody else around me had solved months ago, and only now was I finally seeing the finished product. In that moment it hit me bigger than a double-decker London bus. It hit me bigger than any metaphor involving any mode of transportation. It hit me like a girl who missed every episode of her own show and tuned in for the season finale. It hit me like a girl who fell head over heels in love with her best friend and had no fucking idea until she was in way too deep.

  The rest of the day was a blur. If I remember correctly, Jasper had called Molly to inquire if the contents of her message were the lies born of too many mixed drinks or the truth spilled by liquid courage. Unbeknownst to me, she confirmed the latter. I was in a complete and total fog. My feelings toward him had been public domain and I was the only one out of the loop. When you’re so used to burying your feelings and sweeping those sparks of emotion under the rug, the second they’ve been placed in front of you, you don’t even recognize them as your own. I felt like I was in this Freaky Friday moment, trapped in a body flooded with foreign thoughts and feelings. What the fuck do you do when you’re the last one to know that you accidentally fell in love for the very first time in your life? Answer: you drink. Or at least that’s what I did.

  It was a Saturday night, so a craving for lukewarm flavored vodka from a Camelbak backpack wasn’t out of the ordinary. My best friend Sydney was my usual voice of reason (and sobriety) in the times I tried to solve my problems with blacking out. But Sydney happened to be out of town. I commanded that Alexis and our friend Emily join me that night in getting belligerently drunk. I told them to invite whoever they wanted and not to ask any questions. We’d begin on the hill behind our friend Claire’s house and we wouldn’t stop until I forgot all about that day. The moment the sun dipped below Mount Tam and no one could claim it was too early for cheap vodka, I attempted to drown my feelings. They wouldn’t fit back into whatever Pandora’s box I had locked them in before.

  By the time 5:30 p.m. rolled around and everyone’s parents bought the lies they were told about our not-so-wholesome plans for the evening, I was already, like, four shots in. My parents were never home on the weekends and had far too big of a booze cabinet to keep track of the levels. Out of the three of us, Alexis was the only one with a license, and she offered to pick me up and take us to Emily’s house, where we’d pregame before we went to meet everyone at the field at seven o’clock. Now, while this isn’t something I’m proud of now, at the time one of my party tricks was my ability to be excessively inebriated without anybody noticing. So as I popped a piece of mint gum into my mouth and locked the door to the empty house behind me, I made my way down the driveway and into Alexis’s car. Deceptively, there was nothing but the pungent smell of spearmint on my breath.

  If pregaming were an Olympic sport, high school Meghan would be the most decorated medalist the USA has ever seen. With the latest DJ Earworm remix blasting on Emily’s not-so-portable speakers, we crowded into her bathroom. We had the kind of enthusiasm exclusively reserved for tipsy sixteen-year-olds getting ready to go out. Alexis was behind me, flat ironing the pieces of hair I missed as Emily sat on the counter, eyes wide as she blinked on yet another coat of mascara. It was the routine we had gotten down to a science in our years of friendship. “Okay, you’re good,” Alexis said, smoothing my hair down as she shut off the straightener. “We ready?” Emily nodded and hopped off the counter, and they made their way downstairs to slip on their shoes. I promised I’d be right behind them. I turned to my reflection in the mirror, bent over, and shimmied my C minuses past cleavage to the brink of nip slippage. I straightened up, flipped my hair to one side, and gave myself a final once-over. My eye caught Emily’s and Alexis’s abandoned half-empty drinks. Alexis yelled up the stairs for me to hurry up. “I’m coming!!!” I shouted back, and chugged them.

  Now, if you’ve been keeping track of the amount of alcohol I had consumed (stop judging), you’d probably assume that this is the point in the night where my memory starts to fade out. You’d assume right. I’m not quite sure how long it took us to get up the hill, though it’s safe to say that my “party trick” of fake sobriety was still effective. My pace of drinking once we got to the field continued steadily, and nobody cut me off. I’m not going to lie and pretend that I had no idea Jasper would show up. I think it’s pretty clear that this night of drinking was influenced by that inevitable outcome. While I never directly suggested to Alexis or Emily to invite him, our circle was tight-knit, and the options for a night of underage drinking in Marin County were pretty slim. The idea of facing Jasper for the first time since “the revelation” was terrifying. If I could drink enough to dissipate that gnawing feeling in my stomach and simultaneously spare myself from an awkward (and sober) encounter on Monday morning, I was all for it. That being said, I had no master plan. Truthfully, I had no plans or intentions of addressing it at all. I just knew I couldn’t do it sober.

  Do you remember how in high school every party ended coupled up? Like New Year’s Eve, but without the countdown or disco glasses? We were at that point in the evening. One of the last clear memories I have of the night was right before everyone began to break into twos and fade into their respective corners. I remember sensing the impending divide, panicking, and crawling (yes, literally army crawling) to the backpack full of alcohol. I remember looking over my shoulder to make sure nobody saw me and I chugged the remainder of a bottle of Captain Morgan.

  That’s when it went dark.

  Let me make a quick segue here for a second. I feel the need to state the fact that I most certainly had a problem with alcohol in my younger years. It took me quite a while to recognize it, and writing this book has made it even more abundantly clear to me. So while, yes, I tell funny stories about getting drunk and the hilarity that ensued, I also don’t want to suggest that I think my heavy reliance on alcohol growing up was normal or healthy at all. There are tons of excuses I could throw out there, like Marin County has the highest binge-drinking rate in California, latchkey kids have distant parents who don’t put locks on the liquor cabinets, and my parents drank a lot and I grew up with the notion that drinking hard alcohol daily was nothing noteworthy. Or that I used booze as a crutch to help with my social anxiety and deep-rooted insecurities. I could sit here all day long and play the blame game. In the end, it doesn’t matter why I was that way; it just matters that I was. There’s no glamorous way to spin it other than I had an unhealthy and dependent relationship with alcohol. That’s it. So as you continue to read this chapter about my attempt to piece together one of my regularly occurring blackouts, please keep in mind that it’s not cool to lose control. It’s dangerous and it’s a slippery slope.

  I woke up the next morning in Emily’s bed with no memory of how I got there. As I attempted to sit up, I was met with a surging pain on the back of my head and a full-body ache. When I reached for my head with my hand, I felt blood. My hair was in a French braid and matted with blood, dirt, vomit, and gravel. I slowly peeled the covers off to inspect the rest of my body for damage. I was still wearing the jeans I had gone out in, but they were stained with the same sediments as my hair. The buttons weren’t aligned, and my belt was missing. My tank top wa
s on backward, my bra was only clasped at one hook, and the lining of the right side of my bra was gone. I wasn’t wearing shoes, but my once-white peds were a greenish-brown and wet. I wish I could say that in this moment I was shocked. I can’t say that, because it’s not entirely true. I mean, I wouldn’t say this was my regularly scheduled programming, but it was in that vein. As I went through the post-blackout morning routine (YouTube video request, anyone? Kidding…) I patted my pockets in search of my phone, so I could see the call log and text chain of whatever damage I had caused the night before. My phone was nowhere to be found. At least, nowhere within arm’s reach, because I was most definitely still lying in bed. I was waiting until the last possible second to move the lower half of my body and potentially discover something as equally gruesome as the gash on my head. The rustling of my sheets woke up Alexis and Emily, who were in much better states than me. Emily offered to go get me some water, and Alexis volunteered to rifle through the house in search of my phone. I was instructed to sit tight and remember as much as I could, which wasn’t a lot.

  With a cup of water in hand and still no cell phone to speak of, Emily and Alexis told me the story of my night. They confirmed that my last memory of the group breaking off into pairs had happened at about eight p.m., and that our night didn’t wrap up until far past midnight, a couple of hours past the time we promised Emily’s mom we’d be home. There were more than four hours that I couldn’t account for. At sixteen I was already pretty well settled into my party girl reputation, so my antics weren’t surprising to Alexis or Emily. They also confirmed that Jasper and I were among those who trickled off into couples. They had absolutely no idea what happened or what was said between the two of us.

  At about eleven p.m. everyone rounded up to head home, and that’s when it became abundantly clear to my friends that I was far drunker than they anticipated. It took over an hour to get me from the field where we were drinking to the paved road, which is about a six- to seven-minute walk sober. Alexis explained that once we had gotten to the road, we were far past the town curfew, and the best solution seven drunk sixteen-year-olds could come up with was having one of the boys carry me piggyback. It took less than five minutes for me to lean a little too far back, fall more than six feet onto the asphalt, and hit my head. They said I was knocked out unconscious for what felt like forever. They all had no idea what to do, so they just stood there in silence waiting for me to come to. I woke up vomiting on myself, and they were pretty confident that I had a concussion. Emily said that they were afraid that I’d fall again, so instead of carrying me, two of the boys acted as crutches on either side of my body. It took us three times as long to get down the hill and into town. As we approached civilization, we came across a classmate who offered us a ride. He was a senior, he was popular, and he was stupid hot. I told him this right before I barfed in his passenger seat.