Read Online Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget by Sarah Hepola - Free Book Online Page A

pulled me in anyway: a woman by herself, eyes cast downward, in an empty restaurant at night. Meanwhile, I decorated my work space with snapshots from high school dances where I clutched a gaggle of friends smiling on cue. I don’t think I’d ever realized how beautiful a woman alone could be.
    Anna and I became close that fall while acting in a shoestring production of a Chris Durang play. (Neither of us studied drama in college, but our small liberal arts program was the type where kids put on shows for the hell of it.) We were walking home from a rehearsal when she asked if I wanted to smoke a cigarette in her friend’s dorm. He was out of town for a few days, and we would have the whole 100-square-foot cell block to ourselves.
    It was one of those nights when a casual conversation unfolds into a fateful conversation. One Marlboro Light turned into a whole pack. Two Diet Cokes turned into half a dozen and a cheese pizza. We laid out the sad tales of our past like a Shinsu knife collection.
And here on the right, please admire my awkward first sexual experiences. Oooh, and have I shown you my bitter regret?
    I talked a lot about Miles that night. He and I had an ideal high school romance (except for the part where I cheated on him). He was hilarious and tender, a John Cusack of my very own (except for the part where he broke up with me after I cheated on him). The mature side of my brain knew our relationship had found its natural end. But my girlish heart kept getting tugged back to him. Sometimes I saw him on campus, walking with a girl who wore combat boots and a motorcycle jacket, and I felt like I’d been cattle-prodded.
Who the hell is she?
    To make it more confounding, Miles wasn’t the same person I once dated. College was like a phone-booth identity swap for him. He wore a rainbow knit beret now and grew his cute floppy bangs into long spiraling curls. His goatee came to a point, like a billy goat, or Satan. As if he were daring me not to love him anymore.
    But I couldn’t stop, I explained to Anna as she nudged a box of Kleenex my way. I couldn’t let go of him, even though I didn’t know him anymore. College girls weren’t supposed to be like this. We were supposed to be cool. Unencumbered. Free. Instead, I’d become one of Those Girls—the ones who drag their high school romance across the first year of college like a teddy bear on the ground. As for the actual teddy bear Miles gave me, I still slept with it every night.
    Anna didn’t have a boyfriend in high school. She was the valedictorian, and her closest companions had been novels. She knew books the way I knew pop songs, and listening to her sometimes made me wonder what I might have learned if I’d actually tried in my classes.
    Anna was also proof that not all teenagers drink. She told me about this time when she was 18. She had gone to a bar and seen two cute boys. She wanted to impress them, so she picked upsomeone else’s beer can and gestured with it while she spoke. When the cops walked in, the guys darted for the exit, while Anna got her first ticket. Anyone who got caught by the police said the same thing. “But, Officer, it’s not mine.” And Anna might have been the first kid in history to be telling the truth.
    We talked till dawn that night, and I was exhausted and exhilarated by the time I returned to my thin foam mattress. Sometimes I call this evening “the night Anna and I fell in love,” and sometimes I call it “the first night of our lives together,” but I can’t call it “the night we chain-smoked and ate cheese pizza in Mark’s dorm room,” because that happened pretty often.
    In the later years of college, she and I would drink wine on friends’ porches and sit together at picnic tables messy with tortilla chips and margarita spills. Anna knew how to knock back drinks by then. But in the first year we spent together, our adventures were limited to a 14-story dorm. We made each other mix tapes. We wrote each