Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget by Sarah Hepola Read Free Book Online

cheeks.
    “This is all very natural,” she said, although we both knew that wasn’t true. I’d just turned ten. I stared at the drain in the bathtub and watched my childhood go down it.
    My precocious puberty had been coming on for a while, but the changes had been manageable. When breasts bubbled up on my chest in fourth grade, I smushed them down again under heavy cable-knit sweaters. When hair began to appear on my privates, unwelcome as the first whiskers of a werewolf, I ran mymother’s razor along the skin to keep it smooth and untarnished. But bleeding once a month required a new level of hiding.
    My fifth-grade teacher called my mother at home one night after becoming concerned about my slouch. “Sarah should be proud of her body,” she said. “She’s blessed to have such a shape.” What the hell? She was supposed to be grading my math quizzes, not my posture. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that adults might also have opinions about my body, which meant everyone did, and I hated feeling so powerless. You could hunch and smother yourself, you could shove all your shame into unlit places, but somehow, some way, some gray-haired lady could still spot your secrets from across the room.
    My mother came into my room later that night. She thought it might be time to shop for a bra. And I tried to be patient with her, but didn’t she understand? That was the worst idea in the world. Fifth grade was a torture chamber for any girl who dared to confirm her development. Boys would sneak up behind me and snap my bra. Girls would whisper behind my back. I might as well show up to school wearing a bull’s-eye on each areola. I might as well take a Sharpie and draw an arrow to my crotch:
now bleeding.
    So my mother smoothed my hair and kissed my forehead. My mother’s hand is still my favorite hand.
    That was the year I started encouraging girls at sleepovers to sneak sips from the liquor cabinet. I wanted to make them tough, too. And I liked playing ringleader in our coterie of spelling bee champions. I taught them dirty jokes and cusswords I’d learned from watching Eddie Murphy films at my cousins’ house. I got the genius idea to pass notes in class and archive them in a plastic index cardholder inside our desks, which issuch a boneheaded girl thing to do. It’s not enough to break the rules. Apparently you need to scrapbook the evidence.
    We returned from P.E. one afternoon to find our teacher sitting behind a desk piled with a mountain of our misdeeds. I was a real show-off in the notes. I called her a bitch. I talked about how goddamn nosy she was. It was a grudge I’d nursed since she had called my house.
    “I really thought you liked me,” she said.
    “I
do
like you,” I said, because what was I going to say? She was the one who started it?
    Every one of those girls got grounded except me. My parents didn’t believe in grounding.
    I was in bed when my mom came into my room. She had one of the notes in her hand, and I hated that she was seeing me like that.
    “Help me understand why you’re so angry,” she said.
    But I wasn’t the one smashing dishes and arguing with my father after the kids went to bed. My parents’ fights were bad that year. I turned up the radio to drown out the sound. I listened to the Top 10 countdown every night, and I tracked the movements of songs by Madonna, and Michael Jackson, and Prince the way other children might count sheep.
    “I’m not angry,” I told her.
    “Then what are you?” she asked.
    I thought maybe I was bad. A lot of crazy things were building up inside me, and the more they accumulated, the stronger the suspicion that I was messed up and wrong. I shrugged my shoulders. Tears dripped down my cheeks.
    “I’m sorry,” my mother said, pulling me into her, and I was so confused. My family made no sense to me. I had screwed up, but somehow she was apologizing.

    I GOT DRUNK for the first time in the summer of my sixth-grade year. Kimberley