How to Murder Your Life

by Cat Marnell

  I split a car into Boston with the two older girls on Friday evening. I sat up front next to the driver. The seniors were in the backseat wearing their clubbing outfits already, smoking Camel Lights with the windows down. When we got into the city, they asked where they could drop me off.

  “Uh,” I said. “Do you guys want to grab food real quick?” They shrugged.

  My “big sisters” and I were eating salads at the Armani Café on Newbury Street when I broke the news.

  “I don’t have anywhere to go,” I said. “Can I hang with you guys?”

  The girls made eyes at each other.

  After dinner we cabbed it to the Cambridge side of the Charles River to the Royal Sonesta hotel. They marched me through the lobby, which was full of contemporary art, and into the elevator. We got out on the eighth floor and knocked on a door.

  A senior jock from school opened it. There was a hotel party going on inside. It was cigarette-smoky in there, and the music was very loud. “Déjà Vu (Uptown Baby)” was playing.

  There were about ten dudes from the senior class in the room: half of the varsity hockey team (or rather—since it was May—half of the varsity baseball team).

  “Cat needs a place to stay tonight,” one of my big sisters said. “We don’t have room at our hotel.”

  “Okay,” the boy said.

  “We’re gonna stay and drink for a while,” the other senior girl said.

  I wandered over to check out the view. Boston Harbor was twinkly and gold and black. The varsity hockey player was sitting on a chair by the window, “puffing butts” and chilling with a bottle of Goldschläger. He was very manly looking with his beefy physique and sort-of-square head, and his eyes were bluer than a ten-milligram Adderall pill. We were both boarders, so we kind of knew each other.

  “Can I bum a smoke?” I said. So cool.

  “If you take another shot,” he said, flirting with me. I giggled. The gold flakes glimmered in the liquor. I took a Ritalin and gave one to Varsity, who just slipped it in his pocket. Then I drank the gold.

  By the time the senior girls came over to say good-bye, I was sitting on Varsity’s knee like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  “Cat, you’re good?” one big sister asked.

  “Of course,” I slurred.

  “We’ll pick you up tomorrow to go shopping,” the other said. And then: “Take good care of her, [Varsity].”

  “I will,” Varsity said. Then they left, and I was the only girl at the party.

  “Can I have another cigarette?” I asked Varsity.

  “If you take another shot.”

  An hour later, I got up and stumbled over to the bathroom like Keith Moon on animal tranquilizers. I peed and washed my hands—these are the details you need to know—and when I opened the bathroom door to go back into the hotel room, Varsity was standing there smiling—waiting for me. He sort of gently pushed me back inside. I went in and out of consciousness as I had sex for the first time—on a bath mat! And it wasn’t rape or anything. I mean, I’m still going in and out of consciousness during sex today! I always take my sleeping pills too early.

  I woke up fully clothed on Saturday morning at the edge of a bed, next to two snoring hockey players. There were three dudes on the other bed, and four conked out on the floor. Varsity was asleep in his chair by the window. I got up and sort of stepped over their hunky varsity bodies to get to the bathroom. Then I used hotel mouthwash and looked in the mirror. Fifteen is such a funny, in-between age, isn’t it? It felt so weird not to be a virgin anymore.

  I didn’t know where I was going, but I couldn’t stay there. I grabbed my stuff, took the elevator down, and hightailed it past the long wall of Andy Warhol Flowers in the lobby. Pop.

  * * *

  The summer between sophomore and junior years, Lilly Pharmaceuticals took my whole family to Puerto Rico! Emily was there; she was out of lockup and in a more normal boarding school called Linden Hall, which was in Amish Country. We saw the Lilly factory, where pills were made. Then we rode bareback in the rain forest. Even Mimi came along for the ride! She didn’t know there wouldn’t be saddles, and the horse trotted her very hard through that jungle (I was a tad worried about her pelvis). Later that afternoon, a pharmaceutical rep strolled with us through Old San Juan. It was really nice.

  In September, I was thrilled to return to Lawrence, go onstage at the awards assembly, and collect my honor roll certificate for the previous trimester.

  “Outstanding!” the assistant headmaster said, vigorously shaking my hand.

  “I need more Ritalin, please!” I would ring my mom—never my father; I knew better—from my new dorm’s pay phone. “I’m out! It’s an emergency! Please!”

  “Caitlin,” my mom would always say. “Your dad really doesn’t want to be writing these prescriptions any more. You need to find a psychiatrist in Groton.”

  “I will, I will!” I always said. “I’m just so busy with all this schoolwork! Just one last time!” It was never the last time. “Please beg him for me, Mom! Please!”

  “I don’t think he’s going to do it,” my mom would always say.

  “PLEASE!” I’d always get scared. “I need it! My grades are going to slip again!” My mom would sigh.

  And so the FedEx packages kept arriving—month after month. Her handwriting was always on the envelopes; my dad’s name was printed on the little orange bottles inside.

  I loved my room junior year. It was a corner single in a dorm called Dr. Green, with lots of windows and trees right outside. It was great not having a roommate. I didn’t have to turn the lights off and go to bed, like, ever. I took my new medicine and stayed up doing homework late in the night, hyperfocused and erasing and reprinting my math homework. Branches would bang on the glass and scare the shit out of me; there was also a stupid owl out there that was ridiculously loud and hooty. So I was always practically falling out of my desk chair. (Stimulants make the nerves a bit . . . jangly, you know. Especially at three in the morning.)

  I also had a new best friend—right down the hall. Greta T. was from Hamburg. She had dirty-blond hair, light blue-gray feline eyes, huge boobs, and a tiny waist. She wore smudgy gray eye shadow and spritzed on Versace Blue Jeans perfume to cover the smell of the Camel Lights she covertly puffed all over campus like a boss.

  “I’m European,” she’d say with a shrug when a teacher caught a whiff of her.

  What a fox! The usually cocky varsity-athlete guys just gawked at her, and she barely knew their names. She loved house music. Every night after study hall, she’d crank “Music Sounds Better with You” and “Horny” and we’d dance in her room.

  She was the first real party girl I ever knew. Greta T. was also an insulin-dependent diabetic—a sinister combination if ever there was one. Talk about train wrecks! Diabetics risk going into comas every time they get loaded; still, Greta T. spent every weekend in the clubs, downing that sweet sugary booze. Hard-core. On Sunday evenings, I’d find her back in the dorm—pale as death, froggy in the face, and slumped over on her bed.

  “I’m so tired, Cati,” she’d sigh, jabbing herself in the belly with an insulin syringe. What a hot bitch. I fucking loved her!

  I started going into Boston with Greta T. and the international student boys from my school: the Saudis, the South Americans. They were kind of nerdy on campus, but on the weekends—wow! I was very impressed watching them pay off the bouncers at Avalon with hundred-dollar bills. Inside, I mimicked the other girls and kicked off my heels to dance barefoot on a banquette. God, was that fun! I only climbed down to take licorice-flavored shots the boys kept pouring. (And pouring. And pouring . . .)

  I was all good as we left and piled into a taxi. But then . . .

  “Blerrrrgh.” I yakked out the window. “BLERRGGGH!”

  “Hey!” the driver yelled.

  “Cati!” Greta shouted in
her German accent. “Stop doing that!”

  We finally got to the Beacon Hill building where this rich Qatari junior from our school kept an apartment. The foyer of his place was huge, with glossy white floors.

  “BLAAAARRGG,” I . . . well, not said, exactly, right when we walked in. All over the marble! Greta T. marched me to a room with a king-size bed. I capsized on it with my legs splayed open.

  “Stay here,” Greta T. said. She was not impressed.

  I woke up to someone rubbing my inner thighs and my stomach up under my tank top. It was a chubby Brazilian junior from my school—let’s call him Playboy—and he had his dick out.

  “I want to be with you,” he murmured. “Please . . . ”

  “Noo,” I groaned.

  But he wouldn’t go away. He kept touching me and rubbing me.

  “Stoppp,” I kept saying.

  Then I went under again. Then next time I opened my eyes, Playboy was kissing me softly on the forehead like a Disney prince.

  “You are too sick,” Prince Charming whispered. You think? Then he zipped up.

  “Thank you,” I mumbled. I meant it, too. I was genuinely grateful that he walked away.

  Other weekends, I went to New York City with Alistair. I felt so cool walking around Manhattan with him in his North Face fanny pack and Diesel jeans. I tried cocaine for the first time at his family’s Sutton Place penthouse. Alistair loved David Bowie, and “Fame” was playing on the stereo. I went out on the balcony and looked at all the lights. It was all so . . . stimulating: the cities, the music, the sex, the . . . stimulants.

  My dad would have yanked me out of my fancy boarding school in about two seconds if he’d known how unsupervised I was on weekends. Lawrence Academy relied on the ever-reliable medium of carbon triplicate “sign-out” forms. You’d scribble down a “friend’s” name and phone number, then hunt down your faculty advisor on Friday afternoon to sign off on it. (I always nabbed my advisor in the hallway of the schoolhouse in between classes, when she was distracted.) Then, you posted the signed form on your dorm room door, and that was it! You were free to hop into the backseat of a car service sedan with your friends and head into Boston.

  The clubs were fun, but the real scene was the hotel parties. “Prep” schools ostensibly prepare young people for college, but they also prepare them for, like . . . Plato’s Retreat. Sex clubs! The Playboy Mansion grotto. You know—orgy scenarios. Weird stuff goes down when kids jam into little rooms together for days at a time. And that’s what the wildest kids at my boarding school did every weekend. (I’m not going to go into details—writing about teen sex is gross—but . . . trust me.)

  The Lawrence Academy party hotel was the Buckminster in Kenmore Square, practically on top of Fenway Park. Maybe it still is. It wasn’t the Ritz, but the shitty concierge let the dealers up and didn’t call the cops on anything. Greta T. and Alistair practically lived there when they weren’t at school. It’s illegal for minors to rent hotel rooms, so it’s also très possible that the Buck accepted credit cards without asking for ID. I’m just speculating, of course.

  Also legendary was the McDonald’s down the block, where we all convened on Sunday mornings looking like the mutants from The Cremaster Cycle and nibbled on hash browns to calm our stomachs. Hangovers in high school were hangovers, right? I feel like puking just remembering them, actually. Sometimes, on the ride back to Groton, the town car would have to pull over so someone could hurl by the side of the road. Oh, junior year was fun.

  * * *

  So those were the weekends. Back at school, during the week, I had a new friend who wasn’t in the party crowd at all. His name was Nicky, and he was in eleventh grade, too. He’d been at Lawrence his freshman year, so everyone knew him already except for me. Nicky was from New Hampshire, and his eyes underneath his red Boston Bruins hat were brown and twinkly. We went to the student center every afternoon when I didn’t have soccer practice. The “Stud,” as it was called, was built in weird layers like a tree house, so you could hole up and hide out in the nooks into the rafters. Nicky and I spent hours every day up there, crushing up my Ritalin with the end of a Maybelline Great Lash Mascara wand. We’d talk and laugh—Nicky was so funny—and snort my pills and laugh some more. Then the sky would turn pink and lavender and orange, and we would walk to the dining hall for dinner.

  “You guys are obsessed with each other,” Greta T. teased.

  “Nah,” I always said. “We’re just friends.”

  But that would change soon enough. There’s no intimacy like boarding school intimacy. You do literally everything together: laundry, meals. Nicky’s dorm, Spaulding Hall, was only fifty yards away from my dorm, Dr. Green. We’d message back and forth via our school’s e-mail system. Ping. Ping. Ping. Red flags would pop up next to his name in my inbox all night long.

  By Christmas, I’d stopped clubbing with Greta T. and partying at the Buck with Alistair. I just wanted to stay on campus with Nicky. We were having sex, which wasn’t the easiest thing to pull off at boarding school. (Besides, teen lust is so intense and conspicuous. Everyone knew what we were up to!) And safe sex? That was even more difficult to have—well, without half of Groton hearing about it in line at Cumberland Farms, anyway.

  “Can I please get some . . .” Mumble mumble.

  “What?” the cashier would say.

  “Condoms?” I’d whisper. What an operation! Why did they keep them behind the register like that?

  Eventually I went on birth control pills. Which I was never very good at remembering to take.

  Hmm, I’d think, and swallow two at a time. I was starting to take my Ritalin two or three at a time, too. So was Nicky, who by Valentine’s Day was officially my first boyfriend. I was basically sharing my prescription with him, which meant I had to hit up my parents for more and more. They kept it coming, though. Why wouldn’t they? Ritalin was helping, clearly. I’d go on to make high honor roll my entire junior year.

  “I am so proud of you,” my dad said—over and over—when he visited in the spring. He was so happy. I was proud of me, too. It really was incredible, wasn’t it? I’d turned everything around.

  Chapter Four

  IT WAS THE SUMMER THAT JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s plane went down. God, wasn’t that the worst. Anyway, Nicky and I spent six weeks together on a “teen trip” through Europe. Rhiannon, my advisor at Lawrence, was the leader. We traveled in a group, but it might as well have been just Nicky and me. We were crazy for each other—making goo-goo eyes on the Metro, feeling achingly in love in the haunted beauty of the Père Lachaise Cemetery, which overlooked Paris. All that cheesy stuff. We slept in a barn on an organic farm in the south of France and put goat’s milk in our coffees; we visited Salvador Dalí’s tomb in his museum in Figueres; we frolicked on Portuguese beaches surrounded by red rocks and purple water. It was very romantic.

  Then Nicky and I were apart all of August. Agony! When I returned to Groton in September 1999—a week before my seventeenth birthday—I ran across the campus until I found my boyfriend. Then I jumped into his arms.

  Senior year was going to be the best of my life. I could feel it! My new dorm, Loomis House, was slightly off campus, down by the soccer fields. I was rooming with Canadian Wendy, a friend since sophomore year. She was superathletic, healthy, and popular, and her boyfriend, Beau, was a varsity hockey star. Alistair had graduated and Greta T. was back in Germany, but that was okay, because I was all about my boyfriend, all the time. I was so proud of Nicky! He’d been elected to the student council, which meant he would sometimes lead the whole school in morning assemblies in the auditorium. He was so cute up there on the stage; he always winked at me.

  We were full-on Selena and Justin, you know? We talked every night on our dorms’ pay phones after everyone else had gone to sleep. When we hung up, I’d go back to my Ritalin and my homework. By the end of fall term I was tied with
Marcus, the German genius, for the top GPA in the entire class: a 3.87.

  After Thanksgiving, Nicky and I both became very busy with our new class, Directing Seminar. We were two of only three seniors chosen to produce one-act plays. It was a special honor but tons of work: auditions, rehearsals, all that. The showcase was in March. Nicky and I were with our casts two hours a night, four nights a week. So we weren’t seeing as much of each other.

  In December, Nicky took me to his family’s house in the White Mountains and we drank Hawaiian Punch–rum cocktails in front of the fire, and we exchanged gifts. I gave him a DVD box set of Akira Kurosawa films. The next day I went to my parents’ house for the long Christmas break.

  Back at Lawrence in January, it occurred to me . . . that I hadn’t had my period for a while.

  “You’re on the pill, right?” Wendy said.

  “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t tell her that I was always forgetting to take it, though.

  “Then don’t worry,” Wendy said. But I did. I put on my L.L.Bean boots and sloshed through the snow and slush—it was a vicious winter—to the supermarket downtown. It was embarrassing to hand the e.p.t to the old lady cashier. I stuck the bag into my coat and hustled back to Loomis House. Then I peed on the stick.

  I was pregnant.

  Thank God I had my amazing boyfriend of fifteen months to get me through it all. Oh, wait, no I didn’t.

  * * *

  I can’t remember if I realized that Nicky was fucking the hot junior girl he’d cast in his one-act play—who lived across the hall from me—before or after I realized that I was pregnant. I don’t remember how I found out it was happening; I don’t remember Nicky and I “officially” ending our relationship, which was already over, obviously. I think I blocked a lot of this out. All I know for sure is, I melted down faster than a stick of butter in the microwave. I was completely destroyed.