The days scuttle by, and I keep myself occupied. I divide my closet into a stack of sweaters to keep, and dresses to bag up for Goodwill. I play GameBoy, drop balls of cookie dough onto aluminum sheets, and watch reruns of The Real World: Miami, which is the equivalent of a frontal lobotomy. I go to my math tutor nightly and try to twig the cosine rule for hyperbolic triangles.
I never find the file in the birthday cake, that secret escape through the doggy door or out the guest-room window. I never slither breathless through my father’s tomato plants, like Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption, to emerge at the neighbors’ swing set, rain soaked, jovial, free! I never give my parents the opportunity to search every doghouse, whorehouse, or crack-house. I pay my debt to society because I’m guilty.
I feel confident I could escape if I wanted to; I could shoulder out a bathroom window and walk the two miles it would take to meet so-and-so at such-and-such a party. The most high-tech safeguards are no match for the sixteen-year-old mind.
But in the end, it is my friends themselves who have the authority to keep me at home. My trip to the hospital doesn’t exactly cause our falling out; we still meet at one another’s lockers between classes. In study hall, we still paint our fingernails with a black Magic Marker. They still call me on Saturday afternoons to disclose the details of their Friday nights, filling me in on the party that took place in an abandoned barn or someone’s unfinished basement. I am always alerted to who threw up, who was felt up, and how long it took the police chief to show up. But no one is willing to aid and abet my escape. Never comes that call to throw down thy hair.
I don’t blame them. The only A I was ever afforded in biology was in the chapter on evolution. The idea of the able-bodied predator was the only concept that made sense to me. In nature, everyone roots for the marauder. That’s why we’ll glue ourselves to Animal Planet for hours, stoned or straight, to watch a pair of African lions descend on a gazelle as though we aren’t sure how it will end. Everyone would rather be a lion. If we feel sorry for the lesser species it is only because they were sorry enough to get caught.
That night at the dock, I proved I was the weedy one. And because I couldn’t handle my liquor, because that weakness endangered everyone else’s drinking with the threat of getting caught, I was temporarily cast aside.
I’d managed to get Abby in trouble. Her parents had stumbled to the door when my dad turned up at her house. Since she hadn’t been drunk herself, they only grounded her for a weekend, but it was enough to make Allen and Kat temporarily turn on me. They made me apologize to Abby that Monday during lunch period, and I did, because I felt sorry at the time.
But the more I think about Abby during my house arrest, the less apologetic I feel. I can’t be sorry for her or her parents, who ban me from their house afterward on the basis that I’m bad company. I decide her parents are either the world’s heaviest sleepers, or they’ve known the score all along. They’ve slept through infinite Saturday nights where we mixed drinks in their kitchen, or smoked a joint in their backyard, or passed out dead drunk in their basement in a group of twenty, looking like victims of a cult mass suicide. I think they look the other way and justify it to themselves by saying that as long as Abby drinks in their house, she is under their control.
A month later, Allen will carry Kat, dead drunk, into Abby’s parents’ New Year’s Eve dinner party. And as much as I’ll be able to empathize, the irony will be almost poetic. After it happens, I’ll think her parents will retract their harsh judgment of me, realizing that this kind of thing can happen to anybody. But it won’t happen that way. In the end, her parents will blame me for Kat’s near overdose, even though I wasn’t there when it happened. They’ll tell the other neighborhood parents, “This kind of thing is contagious,” like teenage pregnancy or suicide. They will refer to me as though I were the carrier drunk that had infected their children.
For all these reasons, a month of being grounded is a blessing. It allows time to pass, and people to forget about me. I imagine myself like the junkie bound for inpatient rehab, or somebody’s pregnant daughter gone to Utah to give up the baby for adoption. I can emerge sometime in December in good health. I can come back from “visiting relatives” or that “much-needed break.” One month is enough time for somebody else to replace me as the scapegoat for underage drinking. Surely someone else will do something stupid, and they will be strung up as a reminder to everyone else.
It doesn’t take long. I rejoin the pack when an eleventh-grade girl, drunk on whiskey, puts a cigarette out on her ex-boyfriend’s face. It allows me to sneak back into the game like someone who has been tossed out of dodgeball, in spite of being pronounced officially “out.” I do it while the world is distracted, hurling its ammunition at somebody else.
THE USUAL
ALL YOU CAN DRINK
THERE COULDN’T BE a better name for freshman year of college. Every year, 2.5 million Americans sally forth for their first semester, an experience that isn’t just foreign, it’s unsullied, like a brand-new T-shirt to push their heads through.
Four years later, when graduation impels us into some obliged nostalgia, many of us will say our first year was our favorite year of college because the fabric of experience was still vivid. Freshman year has a freshness that will be absent later, when campus life feels thick with impurities and the novelty of self-sufficiency has faded. The small acts of sovereignty that exhilarated us during those beginning months, like wearing slippers to class or eating Lucky Charms for dinner, will be old hat by graduation. Like the desktop computers we bought before we left home, it will be hard to believe there was ever a time these things looked new.
Drinking is particularly fresh at the beginning. Even if you drank every weekend in high school, to the point where you were all but sick of those frothy cups of Bud Light, college will renew your enthusiasm for them—namely because there will be an overwhelming sentiment that underage drinking is now okay. The adult universe may not extol the nights we’ll spend swallowing enough rum to pass out on the tile floor of the dorm bathroom, but they accept it as a part of the college experience, a life-stage behavior as inevitable as bad eating habits and casual sex. Administrators at the University of Colorado have gone so far as to propose “drinking permits,” which would allow students to drink even if they’re not yet twenty-one.
As a freshman, I will quickly discover that even when I’m not drunk or hungover, adults will assume I am anyway. During a particularly silent Friday-morning class, a teacher will say, to the rows of students drooping over the kidney-shaped surfaces of their school desks, “It looks like you all started the weekend early.” When I go to the emergency room with a gut-wrenching stomach virus, the doctor, refusing to believe some natural sickness landed me on his collapsible cot, will repeatedly ask, “Are you sure you’re not drunk?” followed by, “Are you sure you’re not pregnant?”
When Robert Frost said, “College is refuge from hasty judgment,” he was undoubtedly referring to the infinite hours of class time spent debating one topic or another, but the quote can easily be used to describe the way college insulates students in regard to alcohol abuse. Before and after college, drinking oneself into a state of blissful oblivion requires a degree of secrecy. In high school, it needs to be hidden from parents. In the working world, it must be downplayed to bosses, or concerned friends, or lovers. But in college, we can wear our alcohol abuse as proudly as our university sweatshirts; the two concepts are virtually synonymous.
WE ARRIVE at Syracuse University in two cars. My dad and my sister ride in one, and my mom and I take turns driving the other. The backseats are piled high with things that are mine alone: a computer, a desk lamp, bed linens, flip-flops for the shower, hiking boots for the 115 annual inches of snow, a yellow parka that will always look too hopeful to wear. My assets are spanking-new and still creased from the box. Still, when upperclassmen, unloading freshmen luggage for credit, pile my boxes onto the sidewalk, it looks like the Pyramid
of Giza, and I am disturbed by how much of the past I am carting in with me.
I DIDN’T WANT to go to S.U. But, then, I didn’t want to enroll in any of the schools that would have me. Years of academic ambivalence had caught up with me. Of the six schools I applied to, I was waitlisted by three and rejected outright by one. I was accepted to S.U., the school my parents were pushing for, and to a neo-hippie liberal arts school in the Finger Lakes, the one that I preferred. I waited until the night before the deadline to decide between the two. For an hour, I sat at the kitchen table with slick pamphlets spread out in front of me, comparing pictures of grinning students in lab goggles. Later, I’ll suspect the university recycles these coeds; they bear a curious resemblance to the ones pictured on campus flyers that read, MOST S.U. STUDENTS DON’T BINGE DRINK!*
I finally chose S.U. for what my mom calls “the total college experience”: for community darkrooms, club snowboarding, and Big East basketball tickets—things that, in four years, I will never see or do or buy.
Everything about the city of Syracuse is gray: the ancient six-story candle factories, the slate slab of monument in Clinton Square, the fog standing fast over Lake Ontario, the pale asphalt trail of Interstate 81. Even in August, everything has the color and smell of salt, residuum from the tons the city dumps on the streets and sidewalks in a vain attempt to break the ice that will never thaw away. Syracuse’s official motto is “A City for All Seasons,” but during the months that I’m there it will be perpetual winter.
S.U. resides, like Goblin City, above the city’s duplexes and one-way streets, state fairgrounds, a Native American reservation, a metastasizing mall, and a few neighborhoods that you don’t want to get lost in but do anyway. Locals refer to it as “the hill” because its Romanesque halls sit on a slope overlooking the state psychiatric hospital and a stretch of federally funded housing, exerting their out-and-out massiveness. A bird’s-eye view of the city shows the six-and-a-half-acre roof of the Carrier Dome like a giant bleach stain on a gray T-shirt. The sports stadium was named after its benefactor, Carrier Air Conditioning, but we will later joke it is because it “carries” Michelob during games.
Nestled less than one mile away, in the valley below, are thirty-two bars, six liquor stores, and twelve mini-marts that sell beer cans in brown-paper lunch bags.
I HAVE immediate trouble making nice.
My room is on a girls-only floor of Brewster Hall. The floor is an L-shaped configuration of rooms: two corridors of doors, each trimmed with daisies cut from orange construction paper and lettered with each girl’s name and hometown—CAREY W., PARKERSBURG, OR. ROSE F., LAUREL, MD. TANYA C., AVENEL, NJ. I have a roommate named Wendi P., a snarl-mouthed theater major who has already traveled the length of the L, knocking on doors and shaking hands with just about everybody.
I, on the other hand, sit on the extra-long bed that my mother fussily made just a few hours ago, shielding my face behind a paperback and reading the same paragraph over and over because I can’t seem to concentrate. The door to the room is open, so I won’t seem overtly antisocial, and through it, I can hear half a dozen stereos clamoring in a way that strikes me as territorial. In the hallway, I can also hear acquaintances being made. Girls are speaking in the chirping tones of false enthusiasm, and I hold my breath for a moment of closer listening, to see if I can match the voices to the names I’ve read on the doors. I know I could, and maybe should, poke my head into the hallway and introduce myself, but I haven’t the faintest idea what I’d say beyond giving my name.
Within a few hours of our arrival, our resident adviser, Jana A., calls the floor’s thirty residents to the lounge for an orientation meeting. I sit on the charcoal-colored carpet, cuddling my knees and trying to figure out how the twenty-nine other girls appear to be good friends already. They have paired off into cliques of five or six, based on the proximity of their dorm rooms. While Jana reviews the rules about quiet hours, fire drills, and how to handle roommate disputes, the lounge hums with the undertones of girls joking among themselves.
But by the time she gets to the drug and alcohol policy, the room is mum. The girls stop murmuring and sit upright in a solemn moment of silence. Jana says, “Oh, now I have your full attention.” She reads aloud from the student handbook. It’s the full deal about how the university is “deeply committed to providing a safe and healthy learning environment,” and how “abusing alcohol interferes with one’s ability to fully participate in the academic community.” The doctrine is roughly as follows:
Do not buy, drink, or hide alcohol in your desk drawers, if you are under 21.
Do not be publicly shit-faced.
Do not drink and drive.
Do not make, use, or sell fake IDs.
If you are caught in the act of any of the aforementioned sins, you will be subject to extreme brutality, also known as weekly meetings with an addiction counselor.
When Jana finishes reading, she closes the handbook and hugs it to her chest. Her arms are tan and sturdy. She is the type of girl I expect to find at S.U., but in the end will meet very few of. She has a comic, honest face that looks wholly practical. Everyone watches her with the distinct feeling that she will say more.
“Look,” she says, lowering her voice and leaning down the way people do when they speak to children. “I know what goes on. I was in your shoes just one year ago. Believe me, I’m not going to go out of my way to get you into trouble. I don’t want to report you any more than you want to be reported. If you drink, keep your voices down and your doors closed. What goes on behind closed doors is your business.”
Someone in the back of the room makes a crowing noise that turns into a war cry. More girls clap. Jana’s eyes go as big as quarters, and she looks over both her shoulders like she’s checking to make sure the resident director hasn’t crept up behind her. She presses her index finger to her lips and breathes a fierce Shhh.
With that, we establish our own understanding of the university alcohol policy. The guiding principle is Out of sight, out of mind. That is to say, as long as we keep our drinking out of sight, the administration won’t mind if we do it.
I GO TO my first party two days after I go to my first class, which feels deviant but statistically isn’t, since half of all freshmen find their first binge-drinking opportunity within the first week of college, often before they’ve even purchased any textbooks.*
In truth, I don’t even care to go. Sometime after I had my stomach pumped, alcohol, the powers of which I once held as supernatural, was pushed to my mind’s periphery when puppy love materialized in the form of a boyfriend named Reed. Reed nearly repulsed me at first, with his wool sweaters, unwashed hair, and the scent of sweat and pot he wore like eau de cologne. But he came into my life like a bowling ball tossed into a birdbath, which is to say, my adoration for him displaced my passion for everything else. When Reed appeared, my desire to drink—along with my desire to spend time with family and friends—sloshed out of my consciousness in one swell.
Of course, the appearance of Reed seems unrelated to the abrupt disappearance of alcohol. It will take more accidents and more men before I can discern the pattern. Only then will I be able to see that every time the consequences of drinking leave me too shaken, I break from it and bury myself in the safety of some schoolboy’s arms.
For now, I am rapt with Reed, and he is six hours away at the University of New Hampshire. Instead of going to a party, I’d rather be in my dorm room, draining a calling card of untold minutes during one of our nightly talks.
I only agree to go because when Wendi and a girl named Tess invite me to go along with them, it is the first bit of dialogue I’ve had in three days. I go because I am already a week ahead in my class reading. I have already eaten five meals alone in the cafeteria. I have already called two other universities to inquire about transferring. I go because I have been pulled from sleep the past three nights by girls’ laughter, which sang through the cinderblock walls of my room like notes played in so
ft repetition. I go because already I feel isolation I swear I could die from, loneliness and panic so stifling they might asphyxiate me as I sleep.
I go because a party is the only way I can think of to make friends.
The party is in the basement of a house at the far end of Euclid Avenue, which is a residential street west of campus where upperclassmen rent time-ravaged duplexes, a good three miles from my new address.
Tess got the street number from junior boys distributing flyers in the freshmen dorms, which is a weekly occurrence we will come to look forward to. The weekly barrage of pamphlets advertising off-campus parties will arrive more often than takeout menus, and in the beginning months, we will spend much of our time comparing their bills of fare, debating the merits of Jell-O shots versus mixed drinks, kegs versus all the cans you can drink.
En route to the party, we amble up the sloped sidewalks of North Campus, past the domed roof of the chapel, the university bookstore, and the alumni center, which was once a frat house. Tess shares her cigarettes with me. Wendi doesn’t smoke and, I’ll find out later, hardly drinks. The stroll through campus reminds me of the time I walked through a carnival after all the rides had shut down; everything looks just that ghoulish, just that sealed off, but open.
As we walk, we compare life stories. Adult strangers do this by giving an inventory of their careers, their spouses, their children’s schools; by trading names of decorators and personal trainers, recipes, and favorite brands of driveway sealant. And as girls, we do it, too, by quantifying experiences. Even as strangers, our conversations drift back to the personal stuff of drinking, sex, and drugs. Within an hour of meeting Tess, I may not be able to tell you the last book she read, what she does for exercise, or if she eats or skips breakfast; I may not even know her last name (in college, I’ll end up knowing almost everyone by first name only), but I know how many boys she’s slept with, whether she prefers beer or liquor, and if she does speed to study.
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