Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood Read Online Free PDF

from the girls’ section. And even as we shoot them smiles and slow glances from the girls’ side, we don’t dare cross the border without a good excuse. In junior high, a wayward Frisbee is fine justification; some girls toss them into the boys’ camp and blame poor depth perception. In high
    school, being drunk will be reason enough; girls will pitch themselves onto the boys’ side under the guise of looking for a keg, and when they brush up against the school quarterback, they’ll still blame bad aim.
    Tonight, all the boys at the party are outside on the driveway, charging the basketball hoop with the wholehearted thrill of competition, half of them stripped of their shirts, mouths hinged open in concentration. I hate the boys the same way I hate them in algebra class, when they practically crawl out of their skins if they think they know the answer to whatever problem the teacher scrawls on the blackboard. They understand competition and anger in a way that girls don’t. They take pleasure in fouling one another. They get to enjoy the rush of air on their naked chests.
    More than that, they seem to understand who they are and who they’re supposed to be. The only commandment that boys seem to live by is “Thou shalt be strong to the point of being cocky.” That means pedaling their bikes toward three-foot-tall ramps without fearing broken ribs. It means taking a sucker punch without squealing. It means knowing how to change tires, drive nails, throw spirals, and unhook girls’ bras without looking.
    And while I don’t think I’d be any good at being a boy, given the fact that I am constantly afraid, constantly crying, and char-acteristically weak, I envy the fact that boyhood’s rules are con-sistent. Being male is not a mess of contradictions, the way being female is. It is not trying to resolve how to be both desirable and smart, soft and sturdy, emotional and capable.
    It seems boys come off the assembly line finished, and we’re the ones left wanting. We are huddling in the basement’s dank impasse, alternately sipping So-Co and applying berry lip gloss.

    18 INITIATION | First Taste
    We are passing the bottle at the same time and for the same rea-son that we pass compact mirrors. We are trying to master what our mothers have taught us about looking “put together.”

    Each girl swoops in eagerly when it is her turn, “drinking it in” by locking her pink nails around the bottleneck and jacking it to her lips. I get the impression that most of them have done it before, which is probably an accurate observation, as experts say half of all eighth graders have tried alcohol.* Many times, when the bottle is passed from girl to girl, there are multiple hands on it at once, the way women at weddings claw to catch the bride’s bouquet.
    But there are a few girls who hold back, ones who ask what the bottle is filled with and where we got it.
    There is one in particular, Laurel. When we were ten, she formed a club to save the Florida manatees, and I passed many Sunday afternoons at her house with the other fourth-grade girls, covering my eyes while we watched videos of blubbery, gray beasts being chopped up by motorboats.
    Laurel’s older sister died when we were in the sixth grade. The newspaper said she fell into a ravine near her liberal-arts college, but we all knew she jumped. That was when we stopped writing letters to the Florida Coast Guard. Her house was filled with the white noise of sadness, and the Manatee Club stopped going there because we didn’t know what to say.
    Today, she creeps toward the bottle slowly and asks what it tastes like.
    After a dozen girls’ gulps the bottle is nearly empty. There is

    *The 2003 National Youth and Anti-Drug Media Campaign.
    less than one brown inch of liquid left, but I hand it over to her anyway.
    “Try it,” I say. “If you want, you can hold your nose.” I pinch my nostrils closed between my thumb and my pointer finger, the way Natalie had showed