by Sarah Hepola
One day she slipped me a note on a torn piece of paper. Do you want to spend the night on Friday? Later, she told me she spent the entire class holding the tiny scrap of hope in her hands, trying to talk herself into passing it my way.
That Friday night, we sat in her bedroom and ate an entire gallon of Blue Bell ice cream. That’s how nervous and excited we were. We swapped stories of our own personal hells and discovered they weren’t so personal after all. Is there any bonding agent like shared pain? We spent most Friday nights together after that.
I thought I had delicate sensibilities, but Jennifer was the most sensitive girl I’d ever met. We once passed a bird with a broken wing as we walked to NorthPark Mall. He was tipped over on the sidewalk near the highway, claws scrambling for purchase, and she scooped him up in her hands and redirected us back to her house, where she nestled him in a shoe box padded with cotton balls. I just wanted to go to Limited Express.
“You can’t go around rescuing any dumb bird,” I said to her in a tone I’d borrowed from Kimberley. My babysitting money was heavy in my pocket, and I was itching to turn my bounty into a bubble skirt.
I was the dominant in our duo, but in the green-carpeted hallways of middle school, we were equals. Two artsy honors kids, stranded in the vast flyover territory between cheerleader and nerd, and drawn to both coasts. We wrote each other notes every day, which tracked the movements of boys we liked as though we were anthropologists in the bush. (“Claude was wearing a red shirt today. He sat in a seat close to the door.”) We folded the notes into simple origami shapes, and I kept every one she gave me in a Payless ShoeSource box in my closet. I liked to watch those notes pile up, a tangible measure of my value to another human. The notes were creamy with praise, as if self-esteem were a present you could give another person. You are beautiful and sweet. I love you so much. You are the best friend I ever had. So much clinging and drama. We sounded like parting lovers fleeing the Nazis, not two kids bored in American History.
We bought silver best friend rings from James Avery, the equivalent of engagement rings in our junior high. Flashing that ring meant you belonged to someone. And if we couldn’t belong to the boys we liked, then at least we could belong to each other. The ring was two hands entwined so you couldn’t tell where one hand ended and the other one began, a fitting symbol for our enmeshment. We were BFFs, almost sisters. But then high school came along—and our unraveling began.
I arrived in ninth grade eager to catch the eye of some upperclassman, but it was Jennifer they saw. They scooped her up only to drop her again, but at least they knew she was alive. The baby fat had melted off her round cheeks, and she wore tight miniskirts displaying her long, shapely legs. She developed a scary case of anorexia that year. If she chewed a stick of sugar-free gum, she would run around the block to burn calories. And I knew she was acting crazy, but I was so jealous of how much more successful her eating disorder was than mine.
It was also dawning on me, with horror, that I was short. To some girls, being short meant “petite” and “dainty.” To me, it meant being “squat” and “puny.” Height was authority. Height was glamour. I knew from magazines that supermodels were at least five nine but I flatlined at five two, while Jennifer rose to an attractive five seven, and I grew accustomed to tilting my head upward as I spoke. Jennifer once caught me climbing onto their kitchen countertop to reach a high shelf. “Aww, that’s cute,” she said.
“No, it’s not,” I snapped at her. What was so adorable about a person whose body had been cheated?
On Friday nights, in her bedroom, we didn’t discuss these frictions. We giggled and gossiped. Jennifer stole beer from her father’s stash of Schaefer Light for me. I would drink it while we talked, letting the alcohol work out the kinks in my system, the part of me that couldn’t stop staring at Jennifer’s thighs and hating her for them.
Jennifer didn’t like beer, but she had other vices. She liked to sneak out the back window of the house in the middle of the night and take out her parents’ Oldsmobile. We glided down the streets of her neighborhood in that gray boat, our hearts booming louder than the radio, and then coaxed it back into her driveway. I could not have cared less about driving a car. But I played accomplice to her minor crime, same as she did for me, because we were good girlfriends like that. Always taking care of the other one’s needs.
I WAS A sophomore when the whispers began. Did you know so-and-so drinks? Did you know so-and-so can buy? Nobody needed to explain what the person was drinking and which substance they could buy. It was like the teenage version of the mafia. You just knew.
Ours was a conservative religious community. At pep rallies, a “prayer warrior” spoke before the big game. Youth ministers from the behemoth Presbyterian Church milled around the cafeteria at lunch. Popular girls wore silver cross necklaces and signed their notes “In His Grip.” But these kids were destined for the sanctioned debauch of fraternities and sororities, so high school was a slow seduction from one team to the other. I kept a running list in my head—who had gone to the devil’s side.
For a while, drinking was an underground society. I would show up to a fancy house on the old-money side of town, where the parents had gone on vacation (Aspen? Vail?), and I’d end up in some deep conversation with a stoner from my Racquet Sports class. When people asked later how we’d become friends, I had to remain vague. Oh, you know, some thing. Drinking forged unlikely connections. It dissolved the social hierarchies that had tyrannized us for so long. Like a play-at-home version of The Breakfast Club.
Jennifer had started to drink, too. Grape wine coolers and sugary concoctions. Girlie drinks. She had taken up with an older crowd, the ones who smoked on the corner across from the school. I hung out with the drama kids and slipped my best friend’s ring in a drawer; that was baby stuff now.
Theater was my new love. My energy shifted from academics to performance. I appeared in every play. I joined not one but two choirs. I had to keep my weight down for the stage, which meant at parties, I never allowed myself more than three Coors Lights, 102 calories each. My body obsession was not pretty, but at least it kept my drinking in check.
My new companion was Stephanie, a fellow drama geek. She and I took long aerobic walks after school. Afterward, we smoked Marlboro Lights at the Black-Eyed Pea while picking at our vegetable plates and talking about our future fabulous selves in New York. God, we had to get out of this town.
Stephanie was blond, poised, and gorgeous. She was also five nine. She actually glided down the hallway, her full lips in a pout, the indifferent stare of the runway on her face. I’d known Stephanie since sixth grade, when she was a sweet and bookish beanpole, but in our sophomore year, her body announced its exceptional status: boobs, graceful arms, legs to forever. Guys came up to me in class to ask if I knew her, as though she were already famous.
So much of high school is a competition for resources—attention from boys, praise from peers and teachers, roles in the school play—and it’s a dicey gamble to position yourself alongside one of the most breathtaking girls in the class. I’m not sure if this shows masochism on my part, or grandiosity, or both. I’ve never been devoured by envy like I was with Stephanie. To watch her enter a room in knee-high leather boots, her long, straight hair trailing behind her was to practically taste my peasant status. But I also saw her as my kind. I wrote my notes to her now. They were in the form of Top Ten lists, because we worshipped David Letterman and needed to hone our joke-writing skills. The path seemed obvious. Go to college, then join the cast of Saturday Night Live.
I never meant to leave Jennifer behind. There was never a ceremony in which Jennifer handed a baton to Stephanie for the next leg of the relay, but female friendships can be a swap like this. Only a certain number of runners on the track at once.
I threw a hotel party with my new theater companions and invited Jennifer. By the time I got to the La Quinta, she was already wasted. She began spewing compliments in a dangerously slushy state.
You’re so pretty. I miss you. She stirred up all kinds of drama when she made out with a friend’s boyfriend. The next day I could barely look her in the face.
“What is wrong with you?” I asked her as we drove away from the hotel. “Have you completely lost your mind?”
She didn’t answer, because she couldn’t remember. She had blacked out and—just like we both would in years to come—poured herself into whatever hands wandered her way.
That night fractured our friendship for good. Jennifer graduated a year early. And I got a boyfriend. I belonged to him now.
I WAS A junior in high school when my parents finally busted me. I came home from school to find a half-empty 12-pack of Coors Light sitting in front of my bedroom door, with a note that read: We’ll talk about this when your dad gets home.
The beer was a gift from my boyfriend, Miles, a funny guy with delicate features and an equal fluency in Monty Python and David Bowie. He gave me the Coors Light for my sixteenth birthday, along with a $25 gift certificate to the Gap, a reflection of my hierarchy of needs at the time. I stored the 12-pack in the back of my closet, underneath dirty clothes, and I would sneak a can out of it from time to time. Three were smuggled in my woven bucket purse and slurped with friends before a dance. Another was shoved between my cleavage underneath a mock turtleneck as I paraded past my father in the middle of the day, just to prove I could. I drank one of them on a lazy Saturday, sipping it in my bedroom, because I liked the casualness of the gesture, a high school girl playing college.
But my clever ruse fell apart when my mother dug through my closet to recover a shirt I’d borrowed. She couldn’t miss the silver glint of contraband in the dim light.
I couldn’t predict how my parents were going to react to this discovery. They were so different than other parents. Half my friends’ folks had divorced by then. Jennifer’s father lived in an undecorated apartment across town. Stephanie’s mother moved the girls into a duplex, while her dad began a slow drift that would take him out of her life completely. All those shiny, happy families, splintered into custody arrangements and second marriages. And yet, somehow, my parents stayed together. My mom was happier, less volatile now—a result of her intensive therapy, four times a week. We used to joke that for the price of a new home, we got a healthy mother. My parents may have argued their way through my elementary school years, but by the time they sat me down in the living room that night, they were united.
“Your father and I would like to know where you got this beer,” my mother said.
I wasn’t sure how to spin this episode. How much reality could they handle? I’d been drinking for years at this point with such assurance that playing dumb would be an insult to my pride. At the same time, my folks were on the naive end, and most of what they knew about underage drinking came from 60 Minutes–style segments where teenagers wound up in hospitals. Of course, things really did spin out of control at some of our parties, and even I was uncomfortable with the level of oblivion. A friend had recently crashed his car while driving drunk. I was worried about him—but it gave me an idea.
“I know it’s upsetting to find something like this,” I told my parents. “But what you don’t realize is that I’m holding the beer for a friend, who has a drinking problem.”
I hated lying to them. They were so earnest. I felt like I was kicking a cocker spaniel in the teeth. But the lie was necessary, the same way I had to tell them Miles and I were “just talking” during all those late nights we drove around in his 1972 Chevy Nova. The lies allowed me to continue doing what I wanted, but they also shielded my folks from guilt and fear. Kids lie to their parents for the same reason their parents lie to them. We’re all trying to protect each other.
My dad wasn’t quite convinced. “Look me in the eye, and tell me that’s not your beer.”
I leveled my gaze with his. “That’s not my beer,” I said, without a tic of doubt in my voice. And I thought: Holy shit. Is it really going to be this easy?
It was. I wasn’t displaying any of the classic distress signals. I was on the honor roll. I had a boyfriend everyone liked. I beat out Stephanie for the lead in the senior play. On Sundays, I ran the nursery at my parents’ progressive, gay-friendly church, and I even landed my first job, at a center for Children of Alcoholics, because I was the sort of kid who helped other kids—whether they were toddlers I’d never see again or baseball stars vomiting in the bushes and crying about the mother who never loved them.
By senior year, a bunch of us would gather on Friday nights in a parking lot behind an apartment complex. Not just drama kids, but drill team dancers, band nerds, jocks, Bible bangers. We’d all gone to the devil’s side now.
And the more I drank with them, the more I realized my mother was right. We really were all the same. We’d all struggled, we’d all hurt. And nothing made me feel connected to the kids I once hated like sharing a beer or three. Alcohol is a loneliness drug. It has many powers, but to a teenager like me, none was more enticing. No one had to be an outsider anymore. Everyone liked everyone else when we were drinking, as though some fresh powder of belonging had been crop-dusted over the Commons.
I WENT TO college in Austin. All that big talk of getting the hell out of town, and I only made it 180 miles south on the highway.
For years, people assured me I was a “college girl,” which is what adults tell smart girls who fail to be popular. I assumed the transition would be a cinch. But I lived in a sprawling dorm that was more like a prison. I stood at social events in my halter top and dangly earrings, looking like the preppies my fashionably rumpled classmates abhorred. “You’re so Dallas,” one guy told me, which I understood to be an insult. (My first lesson in college: Hate the place you came from.) Other kids wore torn jeans and baby-doll dresses and clunky Doc Martens. I’d spent four years in a back bend trying to fit in at an upscale high school. Now I was going to have to contort myself all over again.
The first month was a terrible solitude. I took walks around the track behind the dorm, trying to lose those last stubborn pounds. I woke up early to apply makeup before my 8 am German class. Every once in a while, I ran into my high school boyfriend, Miles, on campus. We’d broken up over the summer, but we’d both come to the same state university, which was a bit like attempting a dramatic exit from a room only to discover the door was locked. Some nights, I lay in my prison bed and listened to U2’s “One” on my CD Discman—the same anguished song, over and over, because I liked to curl up inside my own suffering and stay for a while.
Luckily, I found Anna. She was my peer advisor, which meant it was in her actual job description to help me out of my misery. She was a year older, with tastes I recognized as sophisticated. She drank her coffee black. She read Sylvia Plath, required reading for college girls dabbling in darkness, and Anne Sexton, whose very name told me something crazy was going on there. I’d only worshipped male artists—not on purpose so much as default—but Anna was drawn to the women. The secret diary writers, the singer-songwriters who strummed out their heartbreak, the girls splintered by madness. She had an Edward Hopper painting called The Automat over her desk. Nothing was happening in the picture, but it pulled me in anyway: a woman by herself, eyes cast downward, in an empty restaurant at night. Meanwhile, I decorated my work space with snapshots from high school dances where I clutched a gaggle of friends smiling on cue. I don’t think I’d ever realized how beautiful a woman alone could be.
Anna and I became close that fall while acting in a shoestring production of a Chris Durang play. (Neither of us studied drama in college, but our small liberal arts program was the type where kids put on shows for the hell of it.) We were walking home from a rehearsal when she asked if I wanted to smoke a cigarette in her friend’s dorm. He was out of town for a few days, and we would have the whole 100-square-foot cell block to ourselves.
It was one of those nights when a casual conversation unfolds into a fateful conversation. One Marlboro Light turned into a whole pack. Two
Diet Cokes turned into half a dozen and a cheese pizza. We laid out the sad tales of our past like a Shinsu knife collection. And here on the right, please admire my awkward first sexual experiences. Oooh, and have I shown you my bitter regret?
I talked a lot about Miles that night. He and I had an ideal high school romance (except for the part where I cheated on him). He was hilarious and tender, a John Cusack of my very own (except for the part where he broke up with me after I cheated on him). The mature side of my brain knew our relationship had found its natural end. But my girlish heart kept getting tugged back to him. Sometimes I saw him on campus, walking with a girl who wore combat boots and a motorcycle jacket, and I felt like I’d been cattle-prodded. Who the hell is she?
To make it more confounding, Miles wasn’t the same person I once dated. College was like a phone-booth identity swap for him. He wore a rainbow knit beret now and grew his cute floppy bangs into long spiraling curls. His goatee came to a point, like a billy goat, or Satan. As if he were daring me not to love him anymore.
But I couldn’t stop, I explained to Anna as she nudged a box of Kleenex my way. I couldn’t let go of him, even though I didn’t know him anymore. College girls weren’t supposed to be like this. We were supposed to be cool. Unencumbered. Free. Instead, I’d become one of Those Girls—the ones who drag their high school romance across the first year of college like a teddy bear on the ground. As for the actual teddy bear Miles gave me, I still slept with it every night.
Anna didn’t have a boyfriend in high school. She was the valedictorian, and her closest companions had been novels. She knew books the way I knew pop songs, and listening to her sometimes made me wonder what I might have learned if I’d actually tried in my classes.