“Your father and I would like to know where you got this beer,” my mother said.
I wasn’t sure how to spin this episode. How much reality could they handle? I’d been drinking for years at this point with such assurance that playing dumb would be an insult to my pride. At the same time, my folks were on the naive end, and most of what they knew about underage drinking came from 60 Minutes–style segments where teenagers wound up in hospitals. Of course, things really did spin out of control at some of our parties, and even I was uncomfortable with the level of oblivion. A friend had recently crashed his car while driving drunk. I was worried about him—but it gave me an idea.
“I know it’s upsetting to find something like this,” I told my parents. “But what you don’t realize is that I’m holding the beer for a friend, who has a drinking problem.”
I hated lying to them. They were so earnest. I felt like I was kicking a cocker spaniel in the teeth. But the lie was necessary, the same way I had to tell them Miles and I were “just talking” during all those late nights we drove around in his 1972 Chevy Nova. The lies allowed me to continue doing what I wanted, but they also shielded my folks from guilt and fear. Kids lie to their parents for the same reason their parents lie to them. We’re all trying to protect each other.
My dad wasn’t quite convinced. “Look me in the eye, and tell me that’s not your beer.”
I leveled my gaze with his. “That’s not my beer,” I said, without a tic of doubt in my voice. And I thought: Holy shit. Is it really going to be this easy?
It was. I wasn’t displaying any of the classic distress signals. I was on the honor roll. I had a boyfriend everyone liked. I beat out Stephanie for the lead in the senior play. On Sundays, I ran the nursery at my parents’ progressive, gay-friendly church, and I even landed my first job, at a center for Children of Alcoholics, because I was the sort of kid who helped other kids—whether they were toddlers I’d never see again or baseball stars vomiting in the bushes and crying about the mother who never loved them.
By senior year, a bunch of us would gather on Friday nights in a parking lot behind an apartment complex. Not just drama kids, but drill team dancers, band nerds, jocks, Bible bangers. We’d all gone to the devil’s side now.
And the more I drank with them, the more I realized my mother was right. We really were all the same. We’d all struggled, we’d all hurt. And nothing made me feel connected to the kids I once hated like sharing a beer or three. Alcohol is a loneliness drug. It has many powers, but to a teenager like me, none was more enticing. No one had to be an outsider anymore. Everyone liked everyone else when we were drinking, as though some fresh powder of belonging had been crop-dusted over the Commons.
I WENT TO college in Austin. All that big talk of getting the hell out of town, and I only made it 180 miles south on the highway.
For years, people assured me I was a “college girl,” which is what adults tell smart girls who fail to be popular. I assumed the transition would be a cinch. But I lived in a sprawling dorm that was more like a prison. I stood at social events in my halter top and dangly earrings, looking like the preppies my fashionably rumpled classmates abhorred. “You’re so Dallas,” one guy told me, which I understood to be an insult. (My first lesson in college: Hate the place you came from.) Other kids wore torn jeans and baby-doll dresses and clunky Doc Martens. I’d spent four years in a back bend trying to fit in at an upscale high school. Now I was going to have to contort myself all over again.