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

insert it into my knee. He is pointing out exactly where on the X-ray board, where my bones are lit up like a slide show of his recent trip to Fiji, and yet all I can think is, There is some mistake, that skeleton can’t possibly be mine.
    The bones are just too regular, like a stock photo from Gray’s
    Anatomy. I’d assumed that inside I’d look as dark and knotty as I feel. I was hoping the X-ray board could show me the injury I feel so deeply, a hurt that justifies the framework I’ve been using for living. For the past year, I’ve told myself that I’m drinking and smoking and otherwise acting delinquent because high school has dealt me a shitty hand, that I am winning neither pop-ularity nor academic contests, that I am unsure and insuffi
    in a word, sick. But there on the X-ray, I’m faced with proof that, deep down, I’m sturdy; even full-grown. Dr. Fix-It says so. It is the notion of health, not injury, that makes me ill. It forces me to lean over and put my head between my knees.
    I spend the rest of the school year hobbling up stairs and out of cars, never certain when my knee will submit and give out under me. Without my intricate agenda of after-school activities, I give in to self-imposed quarantine. I spend afternoons

    56 INITIATION | First Offense
    paging through stolen library books in the backyard’s canvas lawn chair. Evenings, I keep vigil in the living room in front of infomercials.
    In an effort to cheer me up, my mother proposes a vacation. I propose Ocean City. We spent three consecutive summers there, when I was five, six, and seven, and I’ve retained every second of each of them. I can remember burrowing for sand crabs in the wet sand down by the surf, letting them squirm to their deaths in a pebble-filled tank because I loved them too much to liberate them. I remember the boardwalk, where my mother bought me a T-shirt with a beaded hem that jingled when I walked. I remember the length of beach where I played catch with my fa-ther, way past my usual bedtime, and the way my hands looked when they slow-motion-grasped for the glow-in-the-dark ball. I remember the name of every resort on the strip—The Golden Sands, The Palm, The Prism—and the mirrored windows that made each one look as sunny as the sky. I remember mornings that I sat on a condo carpet, eating Cabbage Patch Kids cereal, which was the type of sugary snack that was forbidden at home, and savoring each candy-coated puff on my tongue like a gem-stone far too precious to swallow.
    To other people, Ocean City may be a tumbledown summer town with a name that ought to be implied. But to me, it’s al-ways represented hedonism.
    I imagine my parents associate Ocean City with unity, with the years before I hit adolescence and became too mean and moody to take, because they agree to my destination quickly and resolutely. My mother even suggests I bring Natalie, who is home for two months on summer break, because the condo she’s rented is big enough for us to have our own room. It feels like her final attempt to coax a smile out of me.
    • • •
    The bedroom Natalie and I share turns out to be more like our own little apartment. It has its own bathroom, a queen-sized bed under a tufted comforter, and a sitting area where yellowed paper-backs are stacked beside a transistor TV. We fold our swimsuits into the room’s white dresser and spread our arsenal of curling irons across the paint-chipped surface of the nightstand. Natalie parts the window’s lace curtains, and we stand for a few minutes in front of it, awed by the condominiums that shoot up thirty stories high over the Coastal Highway. My parents’ room faces the beach, and ours faces the street, and we prefer it that way.
    We wait three nights to push out the screen and boost ourselves out of the window.

    We started sneaking out of Natalie’s house a month ago. We’d spend whole days drafting our escape plans, testing to see which hinges whined, which floorboards