Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood by Koren Zailckas

creaked, and gathering de-vices we might use to prop, resist, and muffle them. At night, we’d wait for the TV to fall silent in Natalie’s parents’ bedroom, and we’d silently stuff Natalie’s bed and my sleeping bag with stuffed animals and sweaters. Then we’d tiptoe down the stair-case, roll open the garage door, and sprint to where the driveway meets the street.
    Most nights, the joy of the prison break was enough. We didn’t need any plans, aside from walking the culs-de-sac like two ghosts, taunting the neighbors’ tied-up Labradors, kicking bits of gravel and sharing cigarettes.
    We’d learned to stay in the neighborhood after the night we hitchhiked to a party near Natalie’s boarding school, where we drank Heineken and listened to a band, and nearly got stuck

    58 INITIATION | First Offense
    there without anyone to drive us home. At three a.m. , we’d finally agreed to pay an older boy fifteen dollars in exchange for a ride. He had a summer job as an ice-cream man, and he drove us home in his singing white truck.
    Years later, when my parents ask if I used to drink and sneak out because I wanted to test their boundaries, I’ll say yes, even though that was never my aim. I won’t know how to tell them it was a suicidal impulse that drove me out windows. I had a curious It’s a Wonderful Life –like compulsion to explore what my house, or my life, would look like without me in it.

    Natalie and I find a stand in our condo closet. It’s a fold-out deal with metal legs and canvas rungs, and whoever put it there probably intended it for supporting suitcases or drying beach tow-els. But we see its full potential. Natalie unfolds it beneath the bedroom window and steps back to whisper, “After you.” I position one foot on each of the metal legs and stand there, spread-eagle, for a moment of breath catching before I grab both sides of the window frame and hoist myself out, one inch at a time.
    We don’t speak a word until we hit the pavement in the condo’s parking lot. That is the divide, the predetermined finish line, and once we cross it we’re free. There, we slip our feet back into our sandals and let out our pent-up laughter. All around us, the strip is illuminated with neon signs and headlights. People are everywhere, in cars, leaning out of hotel windows, roaming the sidewalks as they drink from foam-sheathed beer cans.
    I feel like I did when I was younger, when my sister and I would linger on the stairs in our nightgowns during my parents’ adults-only dinner parties, listening to the muffled laughter and the chiming sound of my father hitting his wineglass with a
    spoon. Tonight, the Coastal Highway confirms that old suspicion: There is a whole world that takes shape during the hours I’m asleep.
    Across the street from the condo, Natalie and I wait for the trolley car, trying to decide if the ten dollars wadded up in our pockets is enough to feed the fare machine for two round-trip tickets. It is. When the trolley pulls up, we choose seats in the far back, which we know to be the most desirable spots on a school bus. We ride for thirty minutes, and fifty blocks.
    Earlier in the day we met a guy behind the counter of the Pizza Palace who directed us to the part of town where the college kids hang out. They are waiters and lifeguards, he said, who rent entire houses on their own. Listening to him, I couldn’t help but envision the staff kids in Dirty Dancing, the way they embraced booze, sex, and rock music like life, love, and the hunt for happiness. I sit in the trolley’s grooved plastic seat, imagining I’m Baby—only I won’t have to carry a water-melon the way she did to get into a party; I sense that being a girl is its own free pass inside.

    Natalie and I aren’t sure where to go once we step off the trolley. It’s my idea to take off our sandals and wander down the beach, past all the darkened resorts that have beach chairs stacked in the sand. We aren’t walking anywhere