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.