Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (10 page)

Three beers
and twelve watercolors later, I go downstairs to find Natalie. It isn’t that I have forgotten about her; she has al-ways been there in my mind, like a telephone ringing in the

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background. I feel guilty for neglecting her. I imagine she’s downstairs on the porch, smoking a Marlboro and delivering a sermon on Kurt Cobain conspiracy theories, which is her version of small talk. Hopefully, she’s done some kissing, too, with Wally, in which case she won’t be fed up with waiting for me. Ei-ther way, I’m obliged to go downstairs and pick her up.

But Natalie isn’t on the porch. She isn’t in the TV room, the game room, or the kitchen, either. I know because I am gripping Greg’s hand and tugging him from one room to the next. I can’t imagine where Natalie is, or why she would leave me. That’s the big thing: I don’t understand how she could abandon
me
in a house full of strangers, with dawn about to break. I imagine my parents getting up in a few hours, making breakfast and going about the business of preparing for the beach; sooner or later they will discover our empty room and the towels we have stuffed between our sheets.

Greg decides we should check Wally’s room, and relief washes over me. It occurs to me that the night has already been going in the direction of a double date: The boys have paired off with us, to steal whatever couple time they can.

Sure enough
, there is a girl in Wally’s room, but she isn’t Natalie.

“Your friend left,” Wally says through the crack of the door. Through it, I can see one of the blondes from the couch downstairs. She is wearing only turquoise-colored underwear and us-ing the corner of a blanket to shield her bare chest. In the yellow lamplight she looks less intimidating, and much more freckled and angular. It occurs to me that she’s probably my age.

“What do you mean she left? Did she say she was going back to the condo?” Panic is moving in to displace my buzz, and the

feeling is intoxicating in a different way. My throat tightens enough to cut off my breath. I can feel my pulse in my head.

Wally gives a puny shrug, as if to say,
Not my problem,
before he

closes the door. I hear the click of it locking, and before I know what I’m doing, I am bringing my foot back over and over, pound-ing the rubber toe of my sneaker against the door. The wood feels fl , like it might be particleboard, and the door rattles in its frame. As hard as I kick, Wally won’t come back to open it.

Greg puts his hand on my shoulder to stop me.

I start screaming. At first, there are no words. I am little more than a trumpet screaming out notes. Beer has given my voice a new wind, and it makes each squeal breathe through me brassy and clear. “What did he do with Natalie? Where
the fuck
is Natalie?”

I can feel tears welling up in my eyes, and they are danger-ously close to spilling out onto the folds of my cheeks. The song of my screaming is reverberating off the walls. It blows open bedroom doors and makes boys poke their heads out.

Greg is looking at me as though I am a deranged animal he is not sure how to restrain. Something in his look implies I am being irrational. It’s the look I get from my mother when she remembers midway through a fi that I’m a teenage girl and therefore have no perspective. It occurs to me that he cannot empathize; he has never empathized. He has no idea why I am upset.

“Do you mean Wally? He wouldn’t do anything to her. I’m sure your friend is fine. She just decided to go to another party, that’s all.”

I don’t know how to tell him that Natalie and I don’t know about any other parties. This was the only address Natalie had printed on her arm.

The only place I can think to look for her is down on the

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beach, near the burned-out shell of the campfire left over from the night before.

Greg comes
with me to look for her, but I am beginning to feel uneasy around him. I feel myself shifting into confessional mode, like I might slip up and tell him everything. Each moment that I fail to find Natalie, I am more hysterical and I care less about maintaining the details of my cock-and-bull story.

The sun is starting to come up. The waves rolling over my feet look like frothy green tea, and the sand is the color of burned sugar. The world is turning seaside colors again, and it reminds me that there is little time left. I have to find Natalie and get her back through the condo window.

I decide to tell Greg I lied to him, that I am seventeen and not eighteen. It still isn’t the truth, but it feels like a small admission of guilt, like I am admitting in a critical moment how inexperienced I am.

We scuffl along the sand, and this time I am the one to walk fast, and I turn around every few feet to make Greg hurry up. When we get to the site, the same fi is burning. The same keg is being pumped from the same trash can by the same people wearing alcohol-induced grins. In the light of dawn, they seem so much more loathsome than they did the night before. Everyone is too stupid or drunk or self-absorbed to help me fi Natalie.

The beach is whipping up a strong wind that straightens out wind socks and sets porch chimes clanging, and it feels like a slap in the face. I lean against Greg, trying to brace myself from it, while he stops to question people on the beach.

The conversation goes like this:

“Have you seen an eighteen-year-old girl with green eyes and freckles?”

“Seventeen,” I correct him, and wonder if he’s been listening to me at all.

“What was she wearing?”

“What was she wearing, again?” Greg asks me. “A green polo shirt.”

“A polo shirt. Green.”

Finally, someone points to a lopsided condo on the corner. I break free from Greg and take the steps to the door two at a time.

Inside,
I find Natalie in an armchair, looking wilted. She is con-scious, but barely. Her head is bowed forward and her eyes, rolled way back, divulge only the whites. It is a look she once per-fected at a rock club, when she pretended to pass out in the pit so we could watch the band from a better vantage point backstage. I can’t help hoping she is faking again.

Around her are guys and a few girls, jumbled around a cof-fee table and on a paisley sofa, playing cards and sipping beer. A joint, the first I have ever seen, burns in a scalloped clay ashtray. I don’t need anyone to tell me it isn’t a cigarette. Somehow the smoke just smells green.

I go to Natalie’s armchair and grab one of her legs with both hands, rattling it loosely, the way I might rouse someone from an afternoon nap. With the white flesh of her thigh in my hand, I realize she is wearing someone else’s clothes. Her jeans and polo shirt have been replaced with blue mesh shorts and a white undershirt.

I don’t even bother asking Natalie where her clothes are because it’s clear that she can’t speak. Instead, I stand up and spin around to face the people on the sofa; I ask them where the
fuck
her clothes are.

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“She threw up on them,” a girl with a throaty voice says. She holds the joint between the nails of her thumb and her index fin-ger and examines it like a tiny bug she is thinking of squashing. “Natalie?” I lean over and shake her by the shoulders, too hard now, but I can’t help it. I am desperate to wake her in the way people are desperate to revive their dead lovers in made-for-TV movies. I don’t care if I look melodramatic. This is the

closest I’ve ever come to seeing a corpse.

“Natalie?”
When I call her name in my trumpet scream, the green half-moons of her eyes roll in my direction.

“You fucking bitch,
” she says and leans over as if to spit on me, but drool just rolls down one side of her chin in a glistening tear.

A guy says, “This might be a good time to get her out of here.”

Greg hauls Natalie out of the armchair and onto her feet. He has to hold her by the waist to keep her upright, while I hunt for her shoes. She stands there like a ski jumper, leaning her head into his chest with her legs locked too far out behind her. She lets out another string of profanities when I lean down to put on her flip-flops.

“
Fucking bitch-ass dirty slut.
”

She drops to her hands and knees on the floor, and her shoulders start to tremble like she is going to be sick.

Someone says plainly, “Get her out of here.”

Greg tells me to kneel down beside Natalie and wrap one arm under her shoulder and around her waist. He does the same thing on the other side, and when he says, “Ready, set, stand,” we do, and my knees buckle for a brief moment under Natalie’s dead weight. Together, we move emphatically for the door, like we are storming out of a movie that has deeply offended us.

• • •

“Are you
okay to stand up? If I set you down, you’re not going to fall, right?”

Greg tries to lower Natalie to the sidewalk beside the trolley stop. His questions are more or less rhetorical, as Natalie has been reduced to gurgling whenever we speak to her. Her limbs look too heavy for her to move. When she tries to lift her hands, they only come up an inch or two before they fall back down and roll away from her. Greg says she looks like a rag doll; I think she looks like one of my dog’s dilapidated chew toys.

The second Greg lets Natalie’s feet touch the concrete, her entire body folds under her. She assumes the position of a chalk outline on
NYPD Blue:
arms outstretched, with her legs wrenched one way and her neck twisted the other. We let her rest like that while we wait. All around her on the sidewalk, ants are building knolls that look like ginger.

“How did she get like this?” I cover my hand with my mouth as I speak because Natalie is emitting a sour smell that makes me think I might throw up, too. “Honestly? She wasn’t drunk at your house. How do you think she got this way? Do you think she took pills or something?” Natalie has told me about kids at her school who steal prescriptions. They mostly sell downers, she says, the kind of painkillers that make you feel as weightless as an astronaut somersaulting through a spacecraft. Greg shakes his head. I’m not sure if he means to say no, or if he is trying to clear his bangs from his face. He says, “Naw, she just had too much to drink. Once you get her home she can sleep

it off.”

I should believe him because his eyes are calm, in a way that suggests he has been through this scenario a million times be-fore. But I don’t. I don’t see any way that this is going to be okay.

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In my mind, I have a very distinct picture of what is going to happen next: I will get Natalie back to the room, tuck her into bed, and sometime during the night she will choke on her own vomit and die. That was the one unmistakable thing I learned from our alcohol unit in health class—sometimes, if people get drunk enough, they can drown in their own puke, like Jimi Hendrix. There is even a parody of “Purple Haze” that goes “excuse me while I choke and die.” I think I’m going to have to resuscitate Natalie while my parents sleep, unsuspecting, in the room next door. I don’t even remember how to do mouth-to- mouth. I don’t know how far you’re supposed to tip the head back, or how many seconds you’re supposed to wait between giving breaths.

At any minute, I imagine my parents will hit the bar on their alarm clock. My mom will go to the bathroom and start the shower spray; my ten-year-old sister will turn on cartoons; my dad will go out to buy bagels. There is no way I can stuff Natalie through the window in her condition, and if we use the front door, my parents will instantly know about the beach, the boys, and the booze.

I am stuck in this situation, and the feeling that follows that realization is the same dread and shortness of breath I felt the time I got wedged behind a basement bookshelf I wasn’t strong enough to move. I am trapped and there is no way out; I can’t keep that knowledge to myself any longer.

I unleash a string of confessions on Greg. I tell him that I am not eighteen or seventeen, but fifteen, and that I am actually staying with my parents and not an aunt. These are small distinctions, but to me they feel indispensable, like pronouns, without which he has no hope of understanding my language.

He says, “Don’t worry about your parents. They’ll be mad at

first, but so what? The worst they can do is ground you. It’s not the end of the world.”

The sun is creeping up the sky like a bug on a wall, and all around us people are climbing into their cars to go to work. I look at Greg, and notice for the first time that he is practically crawling out of his skin, anxious to go home and, presumably, sleep before his shift at the surf shop. He, too, looks younger in the sunlight, less collegiate, more like a boy I barely know.

The trolley pulls up and I thrust Natalie onto it.

The ride
back to the condo is unbearable. Natalie vomits twice, and each time I struggle to hide her from the bus driver, who is watching us knowingly in his rearview mirror. I lean over and pretend to tie my shoelaces while I cover the puddles with stray newspapers. Whole families get on, carting canvas bags filled with black beach towels and sunblock. Businessmen drink coffee from foam cups and peruse
USA Today.
Construction workers clutch their scuffed hard hats in their laps. Some of them look at us with disgust, and others offer commentary, like “Friend had a rough night, eh?”

No one offers to help. No one pulls the emergency brake and shouts for a doctor. To them, we are no crisis; we’re a joke. Their smirks reflect my most grisly apprehensions. We are ingrates, prime examples of godless, suburban white girls, defects in the knit of society.

When we get back, Natalie is still too drunk to climb through the window. I am forced to do the unthinkable. I cringe, and carry her in through the condo’s front door.