by Sarah Hepola
Even my brother was a frustration. “You’re Josh’s sister?” the teachers would say on the first day of class, eyebrows arched with delight. But no matter what high score I made, his had been higher. Don’t even try, kid. Someone already won this race.
I got a crazy idea I’d be rescued from this unspecial life. Surely I was meant for more. In the customer service area of JC Penney, while waiting for my mom to complete some transaction, I watched women file in, hoping each new one in a smart dress suit was a fairy godmother carrying my new fate. I’d catch her glance as she passed, hoping she’d see the star pattern in my eyes. Oh, it’s you. I found you. Does every child have this fantasy—or just the sad ones?
I was very torn about my mother. She never abandoned me, but I felt abandoned in some hyperbolic childhood way, the same way I deemed it a mortal sin I never got a Barbie Dream House. A thing known but never discussed: Your mother needs some time to herself. I learned to tread lightly during the hectic workweek. If you tapped her shoulder at the wrong time, she could snap. She was spending more and more time at the piano, the instrument she yearned to play as a girl, but her mother never allowed it, and now I had to pay the price. I wanted to push the plunky contraption in the nearest lake. I despised having her so near and far away at once. But on the weekends, I would curl up in her big king-size bed and let her read me stories, and I would mold my body alongside hers till we were two interlocking puzzle pieces.
My mother wanted badly to make me an active reader, a lover of literature like her, but I remained weirdly stubborn on this count. Little Women wasn’t doing it for me. I gravitated toward stories of troubled kids. Judy Blume. The Outsiders. But I never fully sparked to imaginary worlds until I found Stephen King.
Everyone knew Stephen King wasn’t for children. But that was perfect, because I no longer wanted to be a child. My older cousins had introduced me to his books, which were like a basement I wasn’t supposed to enter, but I creaked open the door anyway. Whatever you do, do not go inside. So I tiptoed forward, heart like a kick drum. Not much else could grab my attention after I’d felt breath that close to my face. Not the stuffy novels assigned in English class. Not the lions and the witches and the wardrobes the other kids read in their free time. I didn’t need those talking woodland creatures or those magic carpet rides.
Because the magic carpet arrived when I plucked the lime wedge out of the Pearl Light and poured the golden liquid down my throat. That’s when the living room rug levitated, and the world tilted upside down, and I began to convulse with laughter. Why was I laughing anyway? What was so funny? But there is ecstasy in the room you are not supposed to enter, the room no one knows about. Ecstasy when everyone is gone and still you are held.
IT WAS MY aunt Barbara’s idea for Josh and me to spend summers with her family in Kalamazoo. I was eight when she offered to take us while my mom completed her schoolwork, an older sister’s act of generosity and superiority: Part “Let me help you while you’re struggling,” part “Let me show you how it’s done.”
My aunt and uncle Joe lived on a peaceful cul-de-sac with a big sloping hill out front. They had a waterbed. A big puffy couch with footrests that lifted when you turned the wooden crank. A giant console TV that doubled as floor furniture. Their home was like walking into a time capsule branded “1982.”
My mother had strict limits on our television and sugar intake. Debates in the cereal aisle were like trying to get a bill through Congress. But my aunt pooh-poohed that hippie nonsense. At her place, we lived on Cap’n Crunch and Little Debbie snack cakes. I lay around in my nightgown till noon, watching game shows and soap operas. At night, we gathered around the big TV to watch prime-time dramas and R-rated movies.
Josh and I had three cousins—Joey, Kimberley, and Scotty—and I was the youngest in our group. To be the littlest in that gang was a mixed blessing. It was to be hoisted on the shoulders of new adventure at the same time I was blamed for someone else’s farts. We filmed our own version of Star Wars, directed and produced by my brother, and I was dying to be Princess Leia. Instead, he cast me as R2D2. I didn’t even get the dignity of lines to memorize. Just a series of random bleeps and bloops.
The part of Princess Leia went to Kimberley, a cute tomboy with feathered bangs, though production broke down when she failed to show on set. Kimberley wasn’t obedient like me. Her response to boys who thought they ruled the world was a sarcastic eye roll. She was Josh’s age, but she actually preferred my company, which probably felt like having a little sister and a disciple at once. She let me tag along to Crossroads Mall and taught me things about sex never mentioned in my mother’s “when two people love each other” lectures.
She tried to make me tougher. The universe had made me soft, too quick to sniffle, and she saw it as her duty to make me better prepared. We used to play this game.
“I’m going to plant a garden,” she would say, running her fingers along the tender skin of my inner arm. Her nails were like a caress at first, a tickle of sorts, but as the game progressed, the friction intensified. “I’m going to rake my garden,” she would say, digging into my skin and scraping, leaving pink trails. “I’m going to plant seeds in the garden,” she would say, twisting up a corkscrew of flesh between thumb and forefinger. What a strange game, a femmy version of “uncle.” Girls can be so sideways with their aggression. Why not just punch each other and get it over with? Instead, we inch into the bizarre eroticism of inflicting and accepting each other’s pain. I could never beat Kimberley—but I gnashed my teeth, gulped down my tears, and tried.
I wanted to be like her: tough and foxy. I wanted to borrow her brassiness. What are you looking at? Who gave you permission to look at me? How exciting to barge through the world, never apologizing for your place in it but demanding everyone else’s license and registration.
But the summer of 1984 wasn’t like the ones before it. I was nearly 10 years old, and Kimberley was 14. When I arrived, she greeted me in a tight magenta leopard-print tank top. Her eyes were lined with electric blue, and she wore hypnotic pink discs in her ears that swirled when she shifted. Men watched her as she crossed a room. She didn’t smile much anymore.
She’d transformed, like Olivia Newton-John in the last scene in Grease, though she wasn’t nearly as bubbly and fun. I was afraid of that leopard-print shirt. It was a costume change I didn’t request. But on afternoons when Kimberley was gone, I would slip it off the hanger and onto the frightening curves of my own body, and I would admire myself in the mirror, enjoying the electricity of high school before I’d even started fifth grade.
SOMETHING ELSE TERRIBLE happened that year.
A few days into fifth grade, I was on the living room floor with my legs splayed open like any girl who is young and unencumbered. Mom and I were laughing about something, but she went silent when she saw it: a dime-size dot of rust on the crotch of my favorite shorts.
There was a rush to the bathroom. And an inspection over the toilet. And my mother’s hands, smoothed along my ruddy cheeks.
“This is all very natural,” she said, although we both knew that wasn’t true. I’d just turned ten. I stared at the drain in the bathtub and watched my childhood go down it.
My precocious puberty had been coming on for a while, but the changes had been manageable. When breasts bubbled up on my chest in fourth grade, I smushed them down again under heavy cable-knit sweaters. When hair began to appear on my privates, unwelcome as the first whiskers of a werewolf, I ran my mother’s razor along the skin to keep it smooth and untarnished. But bleeding once a month required a new level of hiding.
My fifth-grade teacher called my mother at home one night after becoming concerned about my slouch. “Sarah should be proud of her body,” she said. “She’s blessed to have such a shape.” What the hell? She was supposed to be grading my math quizzes, not my posture. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that adults might also have opinions about my body, which meant everyone did, and I hated feeling so
powerless. You could hunch and smother yourself, you could shove all your shame into unlit places, but somehow, some way, some gray-haired lady could still spot your secrets from across the room.
My mother came into my room later that night. She thought it might be time to shop for a bra. And I tried to be patient with her, but didn’t she understand? That was the worst idea in the world. Fifth grade was a torture chamber for any girl who dared to confirm her development. Boys would sneak up behind me and snap my bra. Girls would whisper behind my back. I might as well show up to school wearing a bull’s-eye on each areola. I might as well take a Sharpie and draw an arrow to my crotch: now bleeding.
So my mother smoothed my hair and kissed my forehead. My mother’s hand is still my favorite hand.
That was the year I started encouraging girls at sleepovers to sneak sips from the liquor cabinet. I wanted to make them tough, too. And I liked playing ringleader in our coterie of spelling bee champions. I taught them dirty jokes and cusswords I’d learned from watching Eddie Murphy films at my cousins’ house. I got the genius idea to pass notes in class and archive them in a plastic index cardholder inside our desks, which is such a boneheaded girl thing to do. It’s not enough to break the rules. Apparently you need to scrapbook the evidence.
We returned from P.E. one afternoon to find our teacher sitting behind a desk piled with a mountain of our misdeeds. I was a real show-off in the notes. I called her a bitch. I talked about how goddamn nosy she was. It was a grudge I’d nursed since she had called my house.
“I really thought you liked me,” she said.
“I do like you,” I said, because what was I going to say? She was the one who started it?
Every one of those girls got grounded except me. My parents didn’t believe in grounding.
I was in bed when my mom came into my room. She had one of the notes in her hand, and I hated that she was seeing me like that.
“Help me understand why you’re so angry,” she said.
But I wasn’t the one smashing dishes and arguing with my father after the kids went to bed. My parents’ fights were bad that year. I turned up the radio to drown out the sound. I listened to the Top 10 countdown every night, and I tracked the movements of songs by Madonna, and Michael Jackson, and Prince the way other children might count sheep.
“I’m not angry,” I told her.
“Then what are you?” she asked.
I thought maybe I was bad. A lot of crazy things were building up inside me, and the more they accumulated, the stronger the suspicion that I was messed up and wrong. I shrugged my shoulders. Tears dripped down my cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” my mother said, pulling me into her, and I was so confused. My family made no sense to me. I had screwed up, but somehow she was apologizing.
I GOT DRUNK for the first time in the summer of my sixth-grade year. Kimberley was 16 and working at an arcade so epic it was called Star World. Dark rooms lit by neon, full of clinking machines and 25-cent shots at redemption. A bar for people who can’t drink yet.
My self-consciousness had become overpowering by then. I couldn’t stop dreaming about those shaggy-haired boys playing Galaga, but words were staple-gunned to the back of my throat. I hung around the arcade all day, but I never said a word. Someone actually asked Kimberley, “Is your cousin mute?”
The staff of Star World threw an end-of-summer party in a house by the lake. For the first two hours, I stayed in my usual spot on the sidelines. Teenagers played quarters on the table and drank potions I understood to be off-limits: peach schnapps and orange juice, rum and Coke.
But then the pudgy assistant manager handed me a beer. He must have felt sorry for me: Kimberley’s little cousin, watching from the benches again. Or maybe he had reached the euphoric point in your buzz when stupid ideas seem brilliant. Let’s pee our names in the snow. Let’s get the dog drunk. He grabbed a Budweiser out of the fridge and handed it to me, like he was sliding me a winning lottery ticket. Hey, you’re cool, right?
I was two weeks shy of my twelfth birthday, but I had been practicing for this moment for years. I knew how to pop open the can with a gratifying pfffffft that sprayed like the lightest afternoon shower on my face. I knew how to tolerate the zap on my tongue and the way my glands squeezed like a fist. I knew how to sip, and I knew how to glug. Yes, sir. I was cool.
I drank the beer. Then I drank another. And the evening began to glow in my veins. Words rolled out to me on red carpets. The perfect comeback. The fastest burn. And I kept drinking: a syrupy mixed drink, a shot of clear liquor like a grenade down my gullet. That shit tasted awful, but who cared? I was transformed. Pierced by divine light. Filled by a happiness I’d longed for all my life.
I threw up seven times. Hunched over the toilet, Kimberley at my side. The Star World manager tucked me into bed in a room upstairs. “You’re too young to be drinking like this,” he said. He was a sweet guy, with a hangdog face, and I nodded in agreement. He was wise and ancient, twice as old as me. He was 22.
The next morning I was so shaky I could barely force blueberry yogurt in my mouth. And Kimberley was asking me weird questions. “Do you remember when you took your pants off last night?” And I laughed, because I knew that couldn’t have happened. I wouldn’t even undress in Kimberley’s room when she was there. I sure as hell didn’t strip off my clothes at a Star World party.
But she had the unsmiling voice of a state’s witness. “You sat at the bottom of the steps, crying, and you said everyone loved me more than you. You don’t remember that?”
I did not.
It’s such a savage thing, to lose your memory, but the crazy part is, it doesn’t hurt one bit. A blackout doesn’t sting, or stab, or leave a scar when it robs you. Close your eyes and open them again. That’s what a blackout feels like.
The blackout scattered whatever pixie dust still remained from the night before, and I was spooked by the lost time. I had no idea this could happen. You could be present and not there at all. Those first few drinks gave me hope for escape. But I knew from Stephen King stories how hope could boomerang on a person and what looked like an exit door turned out to be the mouth of a more dangerous maze.
So I swore I’d never drink like that again. And I kept the promise for many years. I kept drinking, but not like that. Never like that. I assured myself it was a first-time drinker’s mistake. Instead, it was a blueprint.
TWO
STARVED
One of the curious aspects of middle school is how extraordinary the pain feels, even when the affliction is quite mundane. The wrong pair of jeans, your unpronounceable last name, a paper wad thrown by a popular boy that hit your back during an assembly. Has anyone ever suffered like this? My mother used to tell me all kids were struggling. Even the bullies. “It’s such a tough time for everyone,” she would say, and get a tsk-tsk look, like she was talking about Ethiopia. A nice perspective, I suppose. But I was pretty sure my unhappiness was worse than everyone else’s.
In sixth grade, I walked home alone every day. In the quiet hours before my brother returned from football and my parents returned from work, I rooted around our cabinets for new kinds of comfort. Graham crackers. Chunks of cheddar cheese melted in the microwave for exactly seven seconds, the moment the sides began to slump. Sips of occasional beer weren’t enough anymore. I needed the numbing agents of sugar and salt.
Becoming a binge eater in a house like mine wasn’t easy. You had to get creative. My mother bought natural, oily peanut butter, but if you swirled a spoonful with molasses, you had something approaching a Reese’s. Four tubes of cake icing sat on the fourth shelf of the pantry, and I squirted a dollop in my mouth each day.
But my new comfort also brought a new pain. “You’re getting fat,” my brother told me one day, as I watched Oprah on the couch. He and I didn’t speak much anymore. He stuck to his room and his Judas Priest. But he had an older sibling’s homing device for sore spots. “Fat” was the meanest word you could call a girl. The ab
solute worst thing in the world.
My first diet started in seventh grade. My cafeteria lunch shrank to iceberg lettuce dribbled with low-cal ranch dressing. I loaded up on Diet Cokes. Three, four a day. After school, I grape-vined to Kathy Smith’s aerobic workout. I confined myself to frozen Lean Cuisine dinners. Cheese pizza. Cheese cannelloni. Cheese lasagna. (The same three ingredients, rolled up in different shapes.) The diet craze of the 1980s was a nationwide tornado that left leg warmers and V-hip leotards in its wake. Even my food co-op mother bought a book listing calorie counts, and I memorized those entries like Bible passages. I couldn’t tell you much about John 3:16, but I knew Blueberry Muffin: 426.
The misery of calorie restriction is well documented, but what people rarely mention is that it’s also a bit fun. How much hunger can I tolerate? How much joy can I withhold? What a perverse pleasure, to be in charge of your own pain.
My extreme dieting became a power struggle with my mother, just like the extreme amount of Wet N Wild makeup I wore or the extreme number of sitcoms I watched every afternoon. I was the dish thrower in our house now. The good part about weight obsession, though, is how it bonded me with other girls. Quite a few of us were sweating in unitards by then. Two of my friends told me about lying in bed one afternoon in their bathing suits, circling trouble spots on each other’s body with a permanent marker. And when I heard that story, I thought: That is love.
BY EIGHTH GRADE, I had discovered a surprisingly dependable revenue stream for adulation. I wrote morbid little tales inspired by Stephen King books. Teachers and classmates cooed over my twisted imagination and PSAT vocabulary. Writing made school an opportunity instead of a fear parade. Of course, English was my favorite subject.
