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

looks like a criminal, on ac-count of his T-shirt’s black-and-white prison stripes, which he wears with a plastic belt and jeans so tight I can make out the

    62 INITIATION | First Offense
    square of cue chalk in his pocket. He is small, nearly my size, with blue eyes that stand out behind blond bangs so long they clear the bridge of his nose. He says he studies painting at a Maryland art institute where classes like “interactive media,” “experimental animation,” and other things I’ve never heard of are required. He’s spending the summer painting his senior the-sis project between shifts at a local surf shop. When I ask what he paints, he says, “Come on up and see.” As I turn to follow him upstairs to his studio, Natalie says she’ll stay behind. She is busy sharing cigarettes with a University of Maryland boy named Wally.
    Greg’s canvases are scattered across the floor of the studio, and more are propped up against easels and walls. I can’t find a common motif. There are paintings of cracked eggs, hands holding apples, the shriveled breasts of a woman he says is a portrait model. What catches my attention, what holds me trans-fixed the way a nail holds a mirror, is an oversized American flag on the ceiling. It is riddled with holes and faded from the sun, and the effect makes it look exactly like a flag (was it the original American flag?) that I’d seen hanging in a museum in Washington, D.C. I take it as a symbol of independence. I would die to be twenty, to spend summers away from my parents, painting still lifes and gluing up surfboard gashes.
    I tell Greg lies, heaps of them. Actually, they aren’t lies so much as they are little shifts in facts that, I think, make me ap-pear worldly in his eyes. I tell him I am eighteen, spending a month in Ocean City with my aunt before returning home to Boston for my senior year of high school. I weave all my stories around these small substitutions: eighteen as opposed to fifteen, relatives as opposed to parents, big city as opposed to small town. The persona I create isn’t terribly far from the truth, but
    it makes me feel safer around him, more anonymous and less exposed.
    We kiss for a while amid the toxic smell of art supplies, and Greg is gentle with me. When my hair falls into his mouth, he brushes each wet thread away. When I say something he can’t quite hear, he says, “I’m sorry, sweetheart?” And the word sweetheart sounds so tender it soothes some raw part of me, and I find myself whispering so I can hear it again.
    I imagine that Greg understands me, that he has a psychic sense for how far I am from the place where I started. I think compassion drives him to hold me closer. When I speak, he concentrates like someone listening to a seashell, and I think he can hear the ocean that is pitching itself around inside me.
    That’s the thing about social drinking: In the end, it’s the drinking that creates the scene, not the other way around. You grow to relish the buzz, regardless of the situation. Once you’re there, really there inside that moment, with its neighborly warmth and conversation, it’s hard to tell what’s responsible for producing emotion. What’s responsible for the light-headed feeling? Is it the Molson, or the boy who is running his fingers through the ends of your hair? Are you chatty because you’re drunk, or because you’re connecting with someone on a level that you have never before experienced? To an outsider, the distinction is an easy one to make. But when you’re fifteen and fe-male, when you experience these feelings first and later only when you are drinking, it becomes a question of which came first, the liquor or the Greg?

    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

    64 INITIATION | First Offense
    background. I feel guilty for neglecting her. I imagine