Free Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood by Koren Zailckas

another, she kisses a moose head on the cheek.
    There is something reassuring about every letter I get from Margaret. She isn’t just a testament to my ability to be liked. Over time, she’s become a real confidante, and I find myself telling her things I don’t even feel comfortable sharing with Na-

    50 INITIATION | First Waste
    talie. I write to her to say: “I’m afraid I’m ugly,” or “I’m afraid I can’t ever be the person my mother wants me to be,” or “I’m afraid I’ll never be able to bear the sound of my own voice on a message machine or the look of my own face reflected in a store-front.” I even send her a few of the poems I’ve started to write. But I make a mistake when I tell her about Halloween. I write, “I kissed a boy and it was liberating. We were curled up
    in the dirt, among dead people. I was completely smashed.”
    I take great care when I choose the word smashed as a euphe-mism for drunk. There are infinite slang terms to choose from: bombed, blasted, capsized, toppled, clobbered, dismantled, damaged. But they are the type of violent action verbs the boys I baby-sit use when they play with G.I. Joes. None of them have smashed ’s fragile femininity.
    Smashed reminds me of the moment Laura Wingfield’s glass unicorn tumbled off a table and broke its horn in The Glass Menagerie. For the past few years, I’ve felt as though there’s been a glass shield around my heart, the type of protective barrier that
    says in case of emergency , break glass . Apple brandy put its
    fist through my isolation. I let my reticence break apart. I vowed to no longer be as emotionally delicate as spun crystal.
    Five days later Margaret sends a response.

    Koren, [no dear, sans stickers]
    I got your letter. By “smashed,” I can only assume you meant you were drunk, which is not only not cool, it is disgusting, as is the fact you thought I’d be interested in hearing about it. Do you have any idea how many people die each year from drunk driving? It’s 18,000 . I know because I’m in Students Against Drunk Driving here at Montgomery High
    School. There was a senior here who died drunk driving. Did you know that by the time you graduate from high school at least two people in your class will be dead? Do you really want to take the risk that you could be one of them? I’m cry-ing as I write this because I can’t believe that someone with all your gifts could be so selfish and susceptible to peer pres-sure. I think you should really think about what you are doing. In the meantime, I don’t know if I want to keep exchanging letters because I just don’t want to hear about it. Maybe one day I will trust you again.
    Margaret
    P.S. Enclosed is a poem I think you should read.

    I feel like I’ve torn open a chain letter.
    My stomach flops and my hands quake. I want to read the let-ter again, to make sure Margaret is really suggesting I might die, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Instead of writing in her usual slanted cursive, Margaret has printed, and the word died looks even more menacing as a result. I want to run the letter through my dad’s paper shredder, or burn it, or take it into the woods and stuff it deep into an animal’s hole.
    Up until this moment, I’ve been lucky every time I drank, in the fact that there were never any consequences. No police officer or parent happened upon the crime scene. And though I’ve been hungover, I’ve never even thrown up. I feel as though Margaret has jinxed me with this letter. From here on out, my drinking is doomed. I can feel it.
    The worst part about it is that her threat is nameless. I don’t know what form the bad luck is going to take. Margaret has only assured me that some inexplicable accident is coming, the

    52 INITIATION | First Waste
    way chain letters promise heart attacks, or serial murders, or freak storms that blow down houses.
    The “trust” part infuriates me, I can’t understand how my drinking is a betrayal of