I didn’t say much. I wasn’t sure whether it was very cool. I felt slightly scared of, and overwhelmingly sorry for, the woman. Beth asked me if we were going to sneak out and go back, but in a way that made it clear that she would be very disappointed if we didn’t. She’d also become fixated on the idea of trying liquor for the first time. Drinking liquor had never been suggested to us before. But now that it was a clear possibility, it seemed like it was all she’d ever really wanted to do. Through the entirety of our thus-far lifelong friendship, I somehow had no idea that Beth’s greatest ambition in life was simply to one day get drunk. Apparently the company and context mattered not. I didn’t dare stand in the way of this tween rite of passage.
It was horribly easy to sneak out of her parents’ house. They both worked six days a week in the car parts factory, and woke at five in the morning, even on Saturdays, which meant they went to bed at around ten. When we got back to Beth’s house, we put a frozen pizza in the oven and turned on the TV. An hour later, her parents told us good night and not to stay up too late. Beth packed up the food with all the care of a mother packing her child’s lunch for their first day of school. We took the pizza out of the oven and sliced it up. She wrapped it in tinfoil so that the slices would stay warm, reminding me that Tanya had specifically requested hot food. Then she heated a can of chicken noodle soup in the microwave and poured it into her mother’s thermos. I grabbed some chips and a couple of sodas. We didn’t even have to sneak out the window or anything. We went through the front door, and made it back to the cemetery just before eleven.
It was a strange thing to knock on a mausoleum door, and even more so to do it expecting an answer. Tanya opened the door and let us in. “I didn’t think you’uns would really come back,” she said excitedly.
“We brought you food, hot food, like you asked for,” Beth told her, proudly holding out the thermos. “We brought hot soup and pizza.”
“Oh my gosh, golly. Thank you so much,” Tanya said, waving her hand in the air. She was smoking a cigarette, again. She seemed to be a chain smoker, and the small room was thick with it. She propped the door open to let it air out, then went to her bag and got out five singles. “Here you go, girlies, just like I promised.” Beth started to decline the money, but I took the five dollars, telling her it was no problem. Tanya took the thermos, unscrewed the lid, and started drinking the soup, mmm’ing and aaahhh’ing, and she gulped half of it down. “Damn, that’s good!” she exclaimed, wiping her lips.
There’s something very satisfying about feeding a hungry person. After she had enough soup, she made a spot for us on her makeshift bed and piled some pillows on the floor where she sat at our feet. She asked if we wanted to listen to music, and turned on a small battery-powered radio. It just played the local country station, but it was fine. She asked for the pizza. Beth got out the aluminum-wrapped slices. We each took one. I opened two sodas for us. It was just like any other slumber party I’d ever been to, except it was being hosted by a homeless adult, and we were in a cemetery hiding in a candlelit one-room mausoleum. And also, the menthol smoke that hung in the air.
After Tanya took her third bite of pizza and thanked us for the tenth time, Beth began to get fidgety. I could tell she had her mind on one thing, and one thing only, but was too mannered to ask for it. Tanya, while eating the pizza, kept taking big gulps of what appeared to be a fresh Mountain Dew, which, I guessed from her demeanor, also contained a fair amount of vodka. Beth eyed it longingly. I took notice of the previously half-full bottle of vodka that sat by the box/table. It was now nearly empty. I felt both disappointment and relief at the thought that we were probably not going to be getting drunk for the first time that night. “Damn this pizza is good,” she went on, before taking another bite. “Dang. Pepperoni?”
“Yes. Pepperoni.”
“Dang.”
She finished her slice and asked for another. Beth gave her another. “I don’t usually eat,” she said, “but hot pizza sure is yummy. You start to miss hot food after a few days. That bastard got me out here with nothing real to eat, and all.”
I thought the statement “I don’t usually eat” was odd. Beth finally noticed the mostly empty bottle of vodka and I could see by the look on her face that her heart was completely sunk when she saw it. Without the vodka, I supposed, it wasn’t much of a party for her. We were just sitting in a mausoleum with a homeless woman, feeding her hot food, listening to her talk about her abusive husband, or boyfriend or whatever. Without the vodka, it was more like social work than a secret slumber party, really.
But then Tanya asked, “Hey, girlies, you want a little something extra in your sodas?”
Beth shrugged like she hadn’t thought of it. “Well, you don’t really have much left, do you?”
“What? Sure I do. Just get under the bed there you’re sitting on.” Beth’s eyes lit up. We both leaned over, looking under the stone bench she’d covered in blankets and called a bed, where she’d stashed another full bottle of vodka, as well as a nearly full bottle of whiskey. They were shiny and commanding.
We drank the vodka. It was clear and nearly tasteless, except for the burn that bad vodka has. It made the Mountain Dew sizzle like an electric jolt.
Thirty minutes later, Tanya was dancing. She was shimmying and twirling, and once, she leapt, like a strange, scrawny, drunk ballerina. Beth was laughing at her, and I felt brave and excited and confused. We were loud. We were screaming and howling. The walls were full of the dead and we were drunk children shrieking at them.
Tanya clapped her hands and tried to sing along with the music on the radio, “His shitty little soaped-up four-wheel drive . . . yow!” This suddenly caused her to lose her breath and begin a very serious coughing fit. When it was over, she sat down and gave us a cheers with her soda can. She told us she liked us. Beth said she felt dizzy and lay down, resting her head on my lap. I felt a little dizzy as well, and the vodka burned my throat and stomach every time I took a drink, but I liked that feeling.
Tanya said it was time to take her medicine. She picked something up off the table, then dug around in her bag and walked over to the window ledge. I wasn’t paying her much attention. I was twirling Beth’s hair and she was humming along to the song on the radio, holding her soda-can cocktail so it rested on her chest and she could lift her head and take a swig whenever she got the urge. I heard Tanya snorting loudly. Her back was turned to us. She was sniffing something and wiping her nose.
“What’s that?” Beth asked her.
“It’s my sinus medicine,” Tanya told her. She walked away from the window and sat back down near us. “What do you want to do now?” she asked excitedly.
“What else is there to do?” Beth asked, looking around the tiny room with its close, cold stone walls, the names of the dead etched into its smooth bricks.
“We could play games,” Tanya chirped.
“Like board games?” Beth asked, unimpressed.
“No, like drinking games,” Tanya came back.
“I don’t know what that means.” I shook my head. I was feeling a bit hazy. “Drinking games?”
“Yeah,” Tanya explained. “There’s one where you say something you’ve never done, and whoever has done it, they gotta take a drink. Then you know what they did, and you also get more drunk.”
“Oh, it sounds kinda like skeletons in the closet,” Beth said. “I love that game.”
“You have booze left?” Tanya asked.
Beth held up her can. “It’s half full.”
“That’s mostly soda, though. Here, I’ll give you some more.” Tanya leaned forward and poured a bunch of vodka in Beth’s can, then in mine. “Okay, now we can play. You start,” she pointed to me. “Just say something you’ve never done.”
“Ummm, okay.” I shrugged. “I’ve never cut class.” Beth and Tanya both took a drink.
“Bore-ring!” Beth sang, sitting up and adjusting herself on the “bed.” “I’ve got a good one.” She wiggled
her eyebrows, and smirked evilly, but it was a strange, drunken smirk that seemed to be manifesting through a thick fog. “I’ve never . . .” she looked at both of us, drawing this statement out for dramatic effect, “had sex!?” she squealed, and covered her hand with her mouth, giggling.
Tanya took a big swig of her drink, meaning she’d had sex. Beth giggled harder. It was amazing. We’d never met an adult who didn’t treat us like little kids. They treated us that way, of course, because we were little kids. But with her, we’d found an alternate dimension where being an adult and being a kid didn’t mean what they were supposed to. She would tell us the truth. She was an adult and would tell us the truth about it, and we didn’t have to act a certain way or watch what we said around her, or pretend not to know things we already knew, or pretend not to be curious about things we were curious about. “Did it hurt the first time? How old were you?” Beth was obviously very curious. She looked at me and hiccuped. “Oh my god, did you ever poot it in yer mouth?” She was wavering where she sat and had drunk enough that she was beginning to slur her words. My head felt very heavy, but also, somehow, like it was floating.
“NO! NO! NO!” Tanya screamed, clapping her hands in the air. “That ain’t how you play. You get one turn! One turn.”
“I’m sorry,” Beth said, laying her head back against the wall and taking a deep breath.
“I’ll tell you, though. But don’t go outa turn again, okay?” Tanya was talking very fast and loud. “It hurts like hell. Yeah, girl! But it hurts even worse if it’s your first time and you’re not willing, so if that happens, just try and like it.” Beth scrunched up her forehead and blinked, looking confused. My mouth, once again, fell open as Tanya went on. “And they always, alllll waaays want you to put it in your mouth. Hell, sometimes you can make ’em pay to do that or in your butt, even. They’re crazy about it. Especially the truckers down there.” She motioned in a direction that I understood to mean the truck stop down the road, between the cemetery and my house. “I don’t know why they like it so much, but they do. Ha!” She let out a loud laugh and took a sip of her drink. “I worsh with Listerine after if I can, and,” she pointed at Beth, “don’t ever swallow that shit, no matter what they say.” We stared at her blankly in stunned silence. Beth blinked a few times, trying to take in all the new information she’d just received. “Hey, how old are you, anyway?” Tanya asked Beth.
“I’m . . . eleven,” Beth said meekly.
“I’m twelve,” I said, taking a very small sip of my drink. “She’ll be twelve too, next month. But I’ll be thirteen in four months. We’re in middle school. Sixth grade.” I didn’t know if this was important, but I worried that when Beth said “eleven” it had sounded too young, and we would get in trouble, somehow. Tanya, though, was unfazed.
“You look older than your age,” she told Beth. “You’re a pretty girl, so I’ll tell you something.” She paused to scratch a spot on her arm that looked as if it had been scratched many times before. “If a boy tells you size don’t matter, it means he’s got a little dinker. And it does matter.”
“What?!” Beth let out, spitting her drink out of her mouth and across the floor. She covered her mouth with her hands and snorted, then buried her head in my shoulder, having a laughing fit. Tanya started laughing too, in a loud, booming “Ha, ha, ha!” and slapped her thigh. I patted Beth’s head. Tears were running down her eyes from her laughter. It was a drunk, hysterical laughter that almost wouldn’t stop. Tanya got up and went to the window and took more of her sinus medicine. Beth finally sat upright, took some deep breaths, and calmed herself down. “My stomach hurts from laughing,” she told me, sighing exhaustedly. “Ohhhh wow.”
Tanya sat back down on the floor. “It’s my turn,” she hollered, then sniffed loudly and tilted her head back and sniffed again. “Hey,” she looked around, “where’s my drink?” She looked at Beth. “Did you take my drink?” she shouted in a sudden outburst. “You don’t gotta do that. I done give you your own. What the hell?” Beth meekly pointed to the small cement ledge below the stained-glass window where Tanya’s Mountain Dew can sat. “Awww, damn.” She stood and went back to the ledge to get her drink and immediately took a big gulp of it. “Oookay,” she said, calming down. “My turn. Hmmm.” She sucked on her bottom lip and looked from me to Beth, and back again. “I’ve never . . .” she eyed me weirdly and took a few steps toward us, “I’ve never . . . kissed a girl,” she leaned down for effect, “with tongue!” She shouted, and stared at me pointedly. I shrugged and shook my head, narrowing my eyes. I didn’t take a drink. Neither did Beth. But Tanya took a big drink of her “cocktail.”
“Wait,” I asked, “does that mean you have done it?”
“Hell yeah, honey,” she said, wiping her mouth with her arm.
“But aren’t you supposed to say things you haven’t done?” Beth asked.
“It don’t matter. You say whatever, and if you’re lying, you have to drink. That way you can drink even when it’s your turn,” Tanya explained.
“But we’ve all been drinking anyway. It’s just, when someone says something you’ve done, you also have to drink then, right?” I asked, incredulously.
“Who cares!” Tanya shouted and started laughing at me. “You are so uptight.”
“Yeah, Gillian, don’t be so uptight,” Beth said, shoving me, playfully. She took a swig of her drink. I was feeling very drunk already, and Beth was drinking even more than me.
“I’m not uptight,” I said, my expression sour. “I just want to know what the rules are.” I let out a frustrated sigh and took a big drink of my cocktail. They were getting on my nerves. I felt a strange, burning anger rise suddenly from my burning stomach.
Beth rested her head in her hands and mumbled, “Is the room spinning?” Then she did her best to sit upright and giggled at nothing.
“I thought for sure you’d take a drink on that one,” Tanya told me.
I didn’t like this statement. I furrowed my eyebrows in her direction. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, you know,” Tanya said. “You just look like you would’ve, that’s all.”
Beth laughed at that.
I shoved her lightly with my hand. “Shut up,” I told her.
“I’m sorry, Gillian,” Beth said, snorting and trying not to laugh. “I’m sorry.”
“You never even done it for practice?” Tanya asked, her eyes wide with excitement. She crossed over to us and sat back down. “I dare you’uns to.”
“Dare us to what?” I asked.
“Kiss!” Tanya shouted. “Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!” She clapped her hands in rhythm to the words.
“Kiss who?” I squealed.
“Each other.”
Beth looked at me, and laughed harder. She’d been on a drunk, long roller coaster of laughter for five straight minutes now. Sometimes it subsided, but was never fully gone, it was just a dip, where her laughter came to a brief rest, only to prepare for the next mounting crescendo of something that would push her over the edge, and she’d be sent rolling along the track of another outburst. She laughed and laughed and squealed, “Kiss me, Gillian!” and fell over.
“We’re not playing truth or dare,” I snapped at Tanya. “What the hell is wrong with you two?” This night foretold our drinking to come in years ahead. I was obviously an irritable, easily angered drunk, and Beth was the kind of drunk who might end up on a Girls Gone Wild video, constantly squealing and laughing at the absurd hilarity of, and game for, everything.
“Why not? Let’s play truth or dare!” Tanya boomed excitedly. She smacked her thigh. “Come on. I dare you to kiss her. With tongue.”
Beth lay on her side, giggling, “Kiss me, Gillian. Pucker up!” she said, pawing at the air. “Kissy kissy. Hahaha.” She was drunker than I was.
“Why do you get to go first?” I said to Tanya. “It would be our turn to say I never, so we should get the first dare.” I let out a long, annoyed, hissing sigh.
; “Fine,” Tanya said. “Dare me. But if I do your dare, you got to do mine.”
Beth sat back up, unsteadily. “You’ll do a dare?” she asked, happily. She looked up at the ceiling. “Oh, oh I got one.” She held her finger in the air like a cartoon scholar who just had a bright idea, then brought the finger down and pointed it at Tanya. Her words came out in one childishly eager, drunken stream. “I dare you to take off your clothes, down to your underwear, and run all out to the road and . . .” she thought too hard, “spin around, and dance, naked, and then run back.”
“Can I keep my shoes on?” Tanya asked. Beth nodded yes, rubberly, and took another drink.
“You’re not going to do that,” I said.
“Hell yeah I am. We’re having a party,” Tanya retorted, standing and immediately removing her shirt. “But then, you gotta kiss her.” Beth nodded in agreement again, her head falling down slowly, then quickly snapping up, her eyelids heavy and lips pursed in what I think she thought was a smile, but what was beginning to look more like an imitation of a duck gone wrong.
Tanya wasn’t wearing a bra. Her breasts were small and her dark nipples were hard against the chill of early autumn. She struggled to get her tight shorts off over her tennis shoes, but soon enough she was standing before us in her baby blue cotton panties, waving her arms over her head, and enthusiastically hopping in place. “Let’s do it!” she shouted. Beth and I followed her out of the mausoleum. As soon as she’d made it outside, she took off in a strange, wobbling, yet vigorous run down the dark gravel drive, screaming “Yeeehaaaaw!” and “Yow!” as she went. When she hit the road, she ran out to the middle and, topless, in her underwear and tennis shoes, began doing an erratic Twist and Mashed Potato, shining, pale and white, visible by the light of the nearly full moon.
The dancing in the road took longer than I believe Beth had intended, and I very much hoped a car wouldn’t happen to pass as she was dancing her weird jig in the night, but finally, she deemed the deed done, and she ran back to us, stopping before us and panting, bent over with her hands on her knees like a woman who’d just finished a triathlon. “I did it,” she panted, and held her hand up for a high five. I high-fived her.
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