The first drink she has is wine and it’s gross, bitter, nasty and purple but it’s also oh so classy. She’s only six, or maybe she’s seven, and she was only allowed a single sip but the taste lingers on her tongue for the rest of the night and she stalks right up to her little cousins with her chest puffed out and tells them that she’s had some wine which makes her practically an adult and the littlier tykes let her order them around while the adults slur Christmas carols and get their keys taken away.
She doesn’t really understand what alcohol is or why people drank so much of it because the wine is awful and she has no real desire to taste it ever again but she does enjoy the way her parents’ speech gets all funny and how their actions get a lot more vibrant.
At her age, her understanding of alcohol is this: People become more colorful when they have it and no one seems to think it’s a bad thing.
She didn’t know it then, barely knows it now, but that kind of thinking stuck with her in the back of her mind in the most unhealthy of all fashions.
Melissa is the odd one of the group because she comes in late(r). She’s almost done with elementary school when she meets everyone and it’s a little weird and she’s a little scared because they’ve already known each other for this and that many years and she has no friends in this new town whose name she doesn’t yet remember.
Malcolm is the one who says hi first but the rest follow pretty quickly and Melissa doesn’t think anything of them at first except that maybe she could make a friend or two.
She makes five and within a week it already feels like she’s known them forever but that might be because they’re young and when you’re young, making friends is as easy as declaring them.
It works out though and at one point when she doesn’t feel like chasing butterflies with the rest of them, Kaleb tells her that it’s like she’s the missing piece of the puzzle in their little group of friends.
The thought makes her smile.
She moves again halfway through middle school but it’s only to a house a few streets down and it’s smaller than the other two but still homey enough for her not to think very much of it. The only thing she doesn’t like about it is the fact that she now had to share a room with her sister and she doesn’t really understand why.
What she does understand is this: Daddy stops wearing suits to work and there are no more dinner parties with fancy drinks that come in all different colors with special glasses people held with their pinkies out and everything is replaced with cans sporting the kind of drinks she still wasn’t allowed to have.
She finds out what beer tastes like after she sneaks a drink when her dad gets up from the old couch to pee and she ends up liking it more than the wine she had way back when.
She continues to sneak occasional sips throughout middle school and starts stealing cans when she gets into high school.
Her parents don’t notice because they’re too busy doing taxes on the dinner table since the study no longer exists and they’re too stressed out to realize that they aren’t the only ones downing beer cans like soda cans.
She starts sharing not too long into freshman year but only very rarely and only with the girls at their sleepovers. They never go to her house, there just isn’t enough space to fit two extra girls, but it’s fine because Connie loves having slumber parties in her big empty house and they all enjoy the occasional act of badness.
They have a particularly fun night of truths when they end up with a bottle of wine and a few too many swigs of it. She’s not the one who brought it but she ends up drinking the most even though she still hates the taste but the bottle had to be finished by someone.
Connie conks out first, Valerie snores a little later and Melissa stays up all night long, waiting for her hazy head to clear up.
Malcolm gets them into their first party and they enjoy the hell out of it. It’s here that she learns her limit is about three shots before she’s really acting crazy. She doesn’t know why it takes so little but she doesn’t really care about it that much. What she does care about is the fact that Jerry suddenly looks a lot cuter in this light and she wants him to steal her first kiss.
He does but he’s drunk too and she’s pretty sure he doesn’t remember it.
She doesn’t stop thinking about him afterwards, even when they’re back at school on Monday and taking tests like none of it ever happened. He gets less cute as the day wears on but it doesn’t change the fact that she’s starting to realize that he’s always been a sweet guy and she maybe, kind of, sort of has feelings for him.
They get worse as time goes on and she ends up thinking about him even more every time she drinks.
They end up going to a lot of parties after that and she adds another shot onto her list for every year she’s still in school so that by the start of her last year in her high school career she can take about six before she feels like dying.
Kaleb always counts their drinks and it makes her laugh because she’s not stupid enough not to catch him mixing more juice than liquor into everyone’s cups and sneaking water into her hands every chance he gets but it never changes the fact that Connie always ends up holding her hair back as she vomits half an hour later when she’s sure Jerry’s nowhere to be seen.
One thing becomes very clear the more social functions she goes to and it’s that Jerry does not like her.
And it’s not because of her, she’s pretty sure about that, because he’s perfectly nice and one of her best friends and they talk a lot about a lot of things and they never mind each other’s company. It’s about the fact that she’s undeniably female and he doesn’t seem to appreciate her anatomy.
She knows because being drunk doesn’t mean being stupid but she hopes because he hasn’t said a word, hasn’t done a thing, and there’s always a possibility her gaydar is completely off.
She doesn’t say a word either because she’s pretty sure no one else but maybe Kaleb knows. Hell, she’s not even sure if Jerry knows, and that makes things a lot worse than they have to be.
Until Jerry sits her down one day close to the next new year and tells her that he’s as gay as gay can be and she hugs him like her heart isn’t breaking.
She makes an ass out of herself when the clock strikes twelve a few days later as the fireworks start going off and she’s yelling at Jerry, half hoping that the fireworks will drown her voice out. He hears her though and she’s not paying attention to anything else but the way his face looks and she can tell it’s laced with nothing but pure and complete sympathy and she knows that she’s lost.
It’s the final stamp on her heart and it’s over.
She doesn’t know what else she could possibly say but she’s saved by a loud thud and when she turns around Kaleb is on the floor, Malcolm’s bleeding and she starts to wonder when the hell that happened.
She’s not really listening to the explanation to the question she didn’t ask out loud but even if she had been, she’s not sure she could identify the words Kaleb is blubbering but she moves first, moves fast, and her arms are around her friend and her shirt ends up soaked with more than just the beer that Val spilled on her.
Kaleb falls asleep on her and she thinks about what it means to really cry yourself to sleep like that and then Malcolm, with his bloody shirt and smarting nose, lifts his best friend up and takes him home, Valerie trailing right behind him.
She doesn’t know where Connie disappears to but after she watches the fading figures of her closest friends she realizes it’s just the two of them and they’re talking and, well- honestly it’s mostly her talking and her apologizing and her telling him that she wishes this and that and that and this but then Jerry pours out the rest of her forgotten drink onto the floor and they hug it out.
Her heart’s still breaking but it doesn’t hurt as much the second time and she wonders if that means it’ll stop one day.
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Short Story"A year later, his dad gets sick, and no one has any idea. It’s partly because his mom chants the “he’s going to get better, he’s going to get better, he’s going to get better” mantra to sleep every night, partly because his sisters are too young t...
