Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood by Koren Zailckas Read Free Book Online Page A

whole life? Do you? Do you want boys to ignore you? Teachers to skip over you in class? I used to be like you. Until I forced myself. And believe me, you have to force yourself because, I’m telling you now, the meek sure as hell don’t inherit the world.”
    By now, I’ve accepted the fact that I’m meek. I accept the fact that I’ll never know what to say in a group. In class, I will sit and watch everyone else chatter with great ease. And I’ll think I should say something now because each passing second will only make it harder to speak without everyone turning to look at me with great shock, as though a chair, or a stapler, or some other inanimate object had sprung to life.
    While that meekness won’t help me make friends or get dates, it is favorable in other ways. Adults seem to think it makes me more feminine and, often, a little more grown-up. Teachers praise me for my cooperation. The “comments” portion of my report card always reads: “courteous,” “attentive,” and “well mannered.” But teachers treat the domineering girls differently. Girls like Natalie, who sit with the boys or speak out of turn, are called “disruptive” or “disrespectful,” sometimes “cocksure,” but even that sounds dirty.
    But that’s what my mother wants from me. She wants me to have everything she never had as a girl, which, on top of piano lessons and designer jeans, includes buoyancy. She wants me to rise to the top of the worst situations. She wants to raise a mod-ern woman: someone who is cool and collected, a vixen, a man-eater, hell-on-wheels in heels.
    Unlike Anne Sexton, she cannot accept that she has given me her “booty, her spoils, her Mother & Co. and her ailments.” I
    have swallowed her immunities and her maladies, and now I can’t help feeling skittishness deep in the coils of my DNA, a ge-netic predisposition like cystic acne, something that will not clear up no matter how many times she warns me to keep my hands off my face.
    Years from now, I’ll pick up her copy of Reviving Ophelia and
    notice a paragraph about parents who, “taught their children that only a small range of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors would be tolerated,” who, “because of their own childhood ex-periences, regarded parts of their children’s personalities as un-acceptable.” This section will not be highlighted.

    I think my mother wants me to be like Billie Jankoff.
    Billie is a girl. As far as I can tell, her name isn’t even short for Beverly or Belinda or anything. Later, she will tell me she was named for Billie Holiday, and I’ll insist on calling her Miss Brown.
    Billie and I have assigned seats at the same round table in English class. She sits at twelve o’clock and I sit at three, and every time she flips a page in The Yearling her scent drifts clockwise. She smells like cigarettes and a woody perfume that reminds me of my mother’s cedar chest. Her key lime–colored cowboy boots tap the table legs with a jumpy energy that shakes my notebook.
    I constantly stare at her out of the corners of my eyes.
    Billie is ghostly white, the way only chronically ill people and The Cure are, and her skin darkens the rest of her features by comparison. Her blond hair has a fringe of ebony where it parts, where her unprocessed, natural color is growing in. Her blue eyes are so deep-set they look black, and when she outlines them with a charcoal pencil, her irises look bottomless. I’m compelled

    34 INITIATION | First Waste
    to look deeper into them to find her pupils, the way I’d lean over a wishing well to look for its floor.
    Billie is the type of girl teachers love to hate. For one thing, she writes with a ballpoint pen shaped like a syringe. It is 1994 and Kurt Cobain is four months dead, and the administration is sensitive to heroin innuendo. She also dresses entirely in black, which teachers interpret as a sign of mutiny. Some days, she wears skirts of layered black chiffon, which wave when she walks.