bolted the door, and tried to put his hands down her pants. She escaped his grasp narrowly and un-harmed, but she didn’t feel like waiting on the porch, and she didn’t want to mount the stairs to the studio and disrupt my time alone with Greg. So she went for a walk. She walked along the beach where we had been the night before, and when a group of guys called out to her, she joined them on their deck. She chugged what she thought was a jumbo-sized plastic cup of beer, but when she was halfway finished, it occurred to her that it might have been liquor. She also smoked what she thought was a joint, but the contents were whiter, she said, and it occurred to her that it might have been angel dust.
My stomach does another revolution, and I think I might throw up again. The scenario Natalie has described is even worse than the one I imagined. In my heart of hearts, I had thought we’d both only had a few beers. I thought she had just been “a two-beer queer,” which was a term she always used to describe me when I got drunk off very little. But the truth is laced with liquor, boys, and drugs. There is no way I can relay it to my parents, who, I imagine, wait impatiently by the pool, already burning in the one o’clock sun.
I ask Natalie if she’s okay, and it’s a leading question. I am trying to make her agree so I can stop my own nauseous feeling, the one that tells me this is my fault. I say, “Natalie, nobody did anything to you, did they?”
“I don’t think so,” she says, and her forehead crinkles up, as though she’s considering the possibility for the first time. “But, then, I don’t remember everything.”
It will be years before I know the horror and shame that
74 INITIATION | First Offense
make Natalie cringe. I will have to experience it myself before I can understand that there are two parts of the mind that con-strain memory after nights like this: one that wants to dig it up, and another that wants to push it deeper down. In college, I will learn about boys and blackouts firsthand, about the way the things you can’t remember can terrorize you.
I lean my head over the toilet bowl and passionately ralph.
Around two o’clock I trudge in the direction of the hotel pool, like a dead girl walking, thinking I can’t possibly put it off any longer. I resolve to accept my punishment. I hope my parents’ backlash will be quick and painless, a kind of lethal injection, my social life ended abruptly at the hands of the state.
I spot them sitting at a flimsy poolside patio table. The morning’s clouds have blown off, and behind them the day is flaw-lessly blue. In the pool, children buoy to the surface on red foam boards. Teenage girls, who look exactly like me, stretch out, cat-like, on lawn chairs, reading fashion magazines, and applying oil to the skin beneath their bikini strings. Waiters are everywhere, carrying piña coladas in sweaty glasses. It is an unlikely location for my first lecture about drinking.
When I get to the table, I look down and see a glass of beer resting in front of chair number three.
“I hope you don’t mind,” my father says. “We went ahead and ordered for you.”
I decide to tell a fraction of the truth. It will become something I will tell my parents for years in times of distress. I like to think of it as the-whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth’s second cousin; they may not share all the same physical characteristics, but there is no denying they’re related.
Years later, it’s hard to remember the precise story that I tell them. But it is exactly that—a story. I shift various facts around like squares on a Rubik’s Cube, in the hope of aligning the details. They only get more jumbled when my parents ask me to repeat them.
The night sounds like a fairy tale by the time I am through reconstructing it. Natalie and I left the house at midnight because we couldn’t fall asleep. We walked along the beach to tire ourselves, enjoying the mist and
My stomach does another revolution, and I think I might throw up again. The scenario Natalie has described is even worse than the one I imagined. In my heart of hearts, I had thought we’d both only had a few beers. I thought she had just been “a two-beer queer,” which was a term she always used to describe me when I got drunk off very little. But the truth is laced with liquor, boys, and drugs. There is no way I can relay it to my parents, who, I imagine, wait impatiently by the pool, already burning in the one o’clock sun.
I ask Natalie if she’s okay, and it’s a leading question. I am trying to make her agree so I can stop my own nauseous feeling, the one that tells me this is my fault. I say, “Natalie, nobody did anything to you, did they?”
“I don’t think so,” she says, and her forehead crinkles up, as though she’s considering the possibility for the first time. “But, then, I don’t remember everything.”
It will be years before I know the horror and shame that
74 INITIATION | First Offense
make Natalie cringe. I will have to experience it myself before I can understand that there are two parts of the mind that con-strain memory after nights like this: one that wants to dig it up, and another that wants to push it deeper down. In college, I will learn about boys and blackouts firsthand, about the way the things you can’t remember can terrorize you.
I lean my head over the toilet bowl and passionately ralph.
Around two o’clock I trudge in the direction of the hotel pool, like a dead girl walking, thinking I can’t possibly put it off any longer. I resolve to accept my punishment. I hope my parents’ backlash will be quick and painless, a kind of lethal injection, my social life ended abruptly at the hands of the state.
I spot them sitting at a flimsy poolside patio table. The morning’s clouds have blown off, and behind them the day is flaw-lessly blue. In the pool, children buoy to the surface on red foam boards. Teenage girls, who look exactly like me, stretch out, cat-like, on lawn chairs, reading fashion magazines, and applying oil to the skin beneath their bikini strings. Waiters are everywhere, carrying piña coladas in sweaty glasses. It is an unlikely location for my first lecture about drinking.
When I get to the table, I look down and see a glass of beer resting in front of chair number three.
“I hope you don’t mind,” my father says. “We went ahead and ordered for you.”
I decide to tell a fraction of the truth. It will become something I will tell my parents for years in times of distress. I like to think of it as the-whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth’s second cousin; they may not share all the same physical characteristics, but there is no denying they’re related.
Years later, it’s hard to remember the precise story that I tell them. But it is exactly that—a story. I shift various facts around like squares on a Rubik’s Cube, in the hope of aligning the details. They only get more jumbled when my parents ask me to repeat them.
The night sounds like a fairy tale by the time I am through reconstructing it. Natalie and I left the house at midnight because we couldn’t fall asleep. We walked along the beach to tire ourselves, enjoying the mist and
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