Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood by Koren Zailckas Page A

in particular, but Natalie keeps urging me to move faster because it’s her na-ture. I trail behind her, watching the red tip of her cigarette move to and from her mouth, and the way the wet sand erases her foot-prints as soon as she makes them.
    Down the beach, we see a campfire. In the dark, we can spot its orange spark, like a meteor, from a long way off. As we tread closer, we can see the empty beer bottles in the sand and the keg

    60 INITIATION | First Offense
    on ice in a trash can, a web of people settled around it. It looks like any cigarette or beer ad: a tight-knit circle of strangers made friends by atmosphere alone. Girls huddle on driftwood while boys drop kelp down their blouses. Flames brighten their faces. Steely waves crash at their backs.
    It feels good to give myself over to that formula. It is like the type of extra credit where you get points for just showing up. The kids on the beach don’t care that they don’t know Natalie and me. A boy stands to offer us his space on a blanket. Someone else brings us beer in clear plastic cups. They welcome us into their circle, no questions asked, and we don’t have to work for any of it.
    The funny thing about that unconditional stamp of approval is that it makes me act less like myself. For all intents and pur-poses, it should make me more comfortable being regular old Koren—idiosyncratic, a bit phobic in groups, but a decent girl if you get to know her. But instead, I, too, conform to a beer-ad version of myself. I kick off my shoes and pirouette in the sand. I agree to drink beer from a funnel, even though I know the boy channeling it through will pour too fast, and I will end up wearing the thick tar of beer and wet sand. When Natalie and the other girls strip down to their underwear, I do, too. I ride a boo-gie board in my undershirt and white cotton panties, and don’t care when the salt water makes my skin show through.
    At the time, I write off these behaviors as a need to adapt. I don’t want to stand out as a high-school girl, the type of baby who can’t keep up with buxom sorority girls from Southern universities. I want to prove that I can funnel as much beer as they can, that I can unflinchingly take the same lascivious looks in the dark.
    Later, I’ll be able to see that this is how it all starts. I concede
    to shifting my personality, just a hair, to observe the standards I think the situation calls for. From now on, every time I drink, I’ll enhance various aspects of myself, willing myself into a state where I am a little bit brighter, funnier, more outgoing, or vi-brant. The process will be so incremental that I’ll have no gauge of how much it will change me. I will wake up one day in my twenties like a skewed TV screen on which the hues are all wrong. My subtleties will be exaggerated and my overtones will be subdued. My entire personality will be off-color.

    Natalie and I cut and run again the next night. It’s the same es-cape route: over the stand, out the window, and down the strip on the trolley. This time, we head for a party in a large, stilted cottage a few blocks west of the beach. At the campfire the night before, a boy wrote the address in ballpoint pen on Natalie’s fore-arm.
    When we swing open the house’s screen door, there isn’t a party inside. There are college guys in T-shirts and swim shorts, just loafing around. They conjure up images of half a dozen frat-boy movies. The house is a labyrinth of rooms, empty, but for a few neon beer signs, pizza boxes, and TVs paused on video games. In the den, a few girls watch boys shoot pool from a sag-ging couch. Some fluff their hair so it falls over their shoulders. A few eye us distrustfully.
    I make wide-open eyes at Natalie that say This is a tragedy.
    But she just screws up her face and turns a corner toward the kitchen because she knows full well I’ll follow her.
    There, a boy introduces himself as Greg and offers us beer. Right off the bat, Natalie says Greg