Read Online Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood by Koren Zailckas - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Koren Zailckas
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in-dividual.
Everyone is talking at once, bruiting irrelevant stories, but brandy holds us together with a strange harmony like a doo-wop group, where each voice rises and halts with its own stray ooh waah ooh.
The very next thing I know, I’m lying faceup on the ground with my head propped against a headstone engraved with the name clyde barker . I imagine Clyde’s corpse directly under me, like we are two parallel lines spaced six feet apart. Overhead, the sky is huge and domed like the screen at the Boston Plane-tarium, where we went on a recent class trip.
Mac is over me, too, saying “Barker, Barker,” and barking like a deranged poodle. In the lantern light, his pumpkin face looks distorted, as though he’s holding a flashlight under his chin. The wind rattles the trees and leaves tumble everywhere, like it’s snowing foliage.
Mac is heavier than he looks. When he lowers his skinny skater frame on top of me, I feel like I’m being buried alive. I
46 INITIATION | First Waste
think of Madeline in the “ The Fall of the House of Usher,” which we just read in school, and wonder at what point she stopped scratching the lid of the coffin and just fell into death, the way I let Mac fall into me. He is holding my head with both hands, the way I might hold an open book. My hat slides off and falls at the foot of Barker’s tombstone, where someone bereft would place a bouquet.
Under any other circumstances, I would be afraid. Mac is four years older, and he is probably a bum the way my dad says “All boys are bums.” He has a pierced eyebrow and a Chevy Camaro, and Billie says he sells pot. He may or may not have had sex before. He may or may not want to have sex with me right now.
At this moment I am not one bit chicken. I like the ano-nymity, the fact that I don’t know who I’m kissing beneath his skeleton suit. Mac isn’t kissing me, either. He’s kissing my shit face, which makes me feel less vulnerable. I imagine it’s the way Elijah Wood felt, wearing that Nixon mask, while Christina Ricci had sex with him in The Ice Storm. Mac is pressed smack into me. He is closer than any boy has been before, but I feel like there is a protective layer between us, a type of atmospheric safe sex.
His tongue parts my lips. His breath is potent, the way I imagine mine must be, and his cold, wet lips remind me of a bowl of eyeballs (they were really skinned grapes) I stuck my hand into once, when I was blindfolded at a Halloween party. I kiss him back because out of the corner of my eye I see that Bil-lie is kissing Phil, and that seems like as good a reason as any. Mac’s hands are on me, too, latching on to me in places I my-self don’t dare touch. One curled hand is wrapped around the bantam bulge of my bra, the other kneading my upper, upper
thigh like he is trying to give me a charley horse. I see where he’s touching me more than I can feel it. My synapses are bootless beneath layers of thermal underwear and the deadening effects of brandy. I could be thumbed and needled and barely feel a thing. I try to will myself to reciprocate, but I can’t find my hands.
Thanks to apple brandy, I can only gauge my general position. I can see the outline of my body as though I were watching myself from far away, the way people who’ve come back from the brink of death claim they watched doctors resuscitate them from high above their own operating tables. My body is there in the dirt, tucking one Herculean hand under the back of his T-shirt (it must be cold because it makes him shiver), while my essence is someplace much higher, far above the cigarette butts and the stone rows and the longest-reaching flashlight beam.
In college, we’ll describe this as dead drunk. It’s the kind of drunk where your eyes roll back in your head and your friends, smiling, say, “She’s gone to a better place.”
The next morning I feel like a corpse awakened at a funeral, which is an image I definitely read in a poem, but am
Everyone is talking at once, bruiting irrelevant stories, but brandy holds us together with a strange harmony like a doo-wop group, where each voice rises and halts with its own stray ooh waah ooh.
The very next thing I know, I’m lying faceup on the ground with my head propped against a headstone engraved with the name clyde barker . I imagine Clyde’s corpse directly under me, like we are two parallel lines spaced six feet apart. Overhead, the sky is huge and domed like the screen at the Boston Plane-tarium, where we went on a recent class trip.
Mac is over me, too, saying “Barker, Barker,” and barking like a deranged poodle. In the lantern light, his pumpkin face looks distorted, as though he’s holding a flashlight under his chin. The wind rattles the trees and leaves tumble everywhere, like it’s snowing foliage.
Mac is heavier than he looks. When he lowers his skinny skater frame on top of me, I feel like I’m being buried alive. I
46 INITIATION | First Waste
think of Madeline in the “ The Fall of the House of Usher,” which we just read in school, and wonder at what point she stopped scratching the lid of the coffin and just fell into death, the way I let Mac fall into me. He is holding my head with both hands, the way I might hold an open book. My hat slides off and falls at the foot of Barker’s tombstone, where someone bereft would place a bouquet.
Under any other circumstances, I would be afraid. Mac is four years older, and he is probably a bum the way my dad says “All boys are bums.” He has a pierced eyebrow and a Chevy Camaro, and Billie says he sells pot. He may or may not have had sex before. He may or may not want to have sex with me right now.
At this moment I am not one bit chicken. I like the ano-nymity, the fact that I don’t know who I’m kissing beneath his skeleton suit. Mac isn’t kissing me, either. He’s kissing my shit face, which makes me feel less vulnerable. I imagine it’s the way Elijah Wood felt, wearing that Nixon mask, while Christina Ricci had sex with him in The Ice Storm. Mac is pressed smack into me. He is closer than any boy has been before, but I feel like there is a protective layer between us, a type of atmospheric safe sex.
His tongue parts my lips. His breath is potent, the way I imagine mine must be, and his cold, wet lips remind me of a bowl of eyeballs (they were really skinned grapes) I stuck my hand into once, when I was blindfolded at a Halloween party. I kiss him back because out of the corner of my eye I see that Bil-lie is kissing Phil, and that seems like as good a reason as any. Mac’s hands are on me, too, latching on to me in places I my-self don’t dare touch. One curled hand is wrapped around the bantam bulge of my bra, the other kneading my upper, upper
thigh like he is trying to give me a charley horse. I see where he’s touching me more than I can feel it. My synapses are bootless beneath layers of thermal underwear and the deadening effects of brandy. I could be thumbed and needled and barely feel a thing. I try to will myself to reciprocate, but I can’t find my hands.
Thanks to apple brandy, I can only gauge my general position. I can see the outline of my body as though I were watching myself from far away, the way people who’ve come back from the brink of death claim they watched doctors resuscitate them from high above their own operating tables. My body is there in the dirt, tucking one Herculean hand under the back of his T-shirt (it must be cold because it makes him shiver), while my essence is someplace much higher, far above the cigarette butts and the stone rows and the longest-reaching flashlight beam.
In college, we’ll describe this as dead drunk. It’s the kind of drunk where your eyes roll back in your head and your friends, smiling, say, “She’s gone to a better place.”
The next morning I feel like a corpse awakened at a funeral, which is an image I definitely read in a poem, but am
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