Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood Read Online Free PDF Page B

me earlier. Doing this seems to help stop the sting of the liquor in the walls of my throat. I tell her, “Try to throw it down without even swallowing. Don’t even let it touch your tongue.”
    She does. Good little Laurel pinches her nose and swallows a shot like it’s cherry-flavored cough syrup. For a second, her eyes go watery and her cheeks pucker. I’m almost certain it’s her first drink.
    “That wasn’t bad, right?” I know I’m mimicking Natalie, but I do it anyway.
    Laurel’s shoulders shiver. She says, “Right.”
    It occurs to me that in a matter of hours, I’ve gone from pupil to mentor. I feel a twinge of guilt for robbing Laurel of this last bit of innocence. At fourteen, her face already fringes on expres-sionless. Her ice-blue eyes look still and empty, and her jaw has a locked look about it. Like someone who is accustomed to silence, Laurel startles easily. I think I might have been wrong to teach her how to drink, given that she already seems too knowing.
    But I look at her again, when she is across the room, pink-cheeked and grinning as she passes the bottle off to Liz Bacon, and change my mind. She looks happy nose-pinching and whiskey-sipping. I think, It was only a matter of time until she took her first drink.
    The girls who are clumped in the basement’s concrete corner are deeply involved in the ways in which the others drink. As one girl sips, the rest urge her to drink more or drink faster. Margo Thomas even holds the bottle while Darla Locke takes a

    20 INITIATION | First Taste
    pull from it. Margo tips it into her mouth in a way that looks ritualistic, like a priest doling out Communion wine.
    We’ve been studying rituals in social studies class because our teacher Mr. Booth thinks it will shed some light on our forth-coming graduation ceremony. Mr. Booth says most initiation ceremonies take place in three parts. First, the initiate withdraws. Usually, she’s sent away from her family and her village, which represent her old life, as a child. Next, she lives a life of solitude and confusion, in which she has to fend for herself. Then, after time passes, she is allowed to go home and rejoin her community as a full adult, where she is presented with what he calls the sacra, meaning something sacred that symbolizes her transformation. Mr. Booth says our diplomas, in a way, are our sacra. But I’m not so sure.
    When I think about what Mr. Booth says about initiations, I think drinking might have begun for me long before Natalie handed me the bottle this afternoon. It might have been a rite I embarked on two years ago, when I first started withdrawing from my family, shutting myself in my bedroom in the hours before dinner, cutting pictures from magazines or doing nothing, lettering signs to tape on the door that read do not disturb . Like a girl who lives alone in the woods, haven’t I felt lost since I be—
    gan to withdraw? My CD changer plays only songs about dejec-tion, “Creep” and “Loser” and “Losing My Religion.” Even my outfits look confused: fi thigh-highs under baby-doll dresses or shapeless jeans paired with my dad’s flannel shirts, which I amputate at the sleeves. My closet looks like the place where girlhood comes to battle boyhood, virginity comes to battle sex-uality, youth comes to battle womanhood. Mornings that I dress in the mirror, I can’t decide which virtue, or gender, or level of maturity is winning.
    In a way, I have been waiting for something sacred to present itself. I’ve been expecting some sign to come like a lightning clap and tell me I can stop hating myself because this awkward period is fi over. I didn’t fi it in my monthly period, which has of-ten been so shameful that I have to wear a thermal shirt tied around my waist. And even though I haven’t had sex yet, I know it can’t be the sacred thing I am waiting for, either. For girls sex is seen as a fall, not a triumph. When word got out that Sara Dohart messed around with Trent