Free Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss by Frances Stroh

of beer and cigarettes wafting into the vestibule when I stepped in. I knew I smelled like a frat bar.
    “Sorry I’m late,” I said.
    Coleruso just stood there staring at me. Twenty-two and new to Taft, she had no idea how to carry out a bust. Having shadowed me for months now, she was freezing.
    I signed in on the roster and swiftly retreated to my room before she could figure out what to say. Three days later, she turned me in to the dean. I was suspended for two weeks. My parents took the news in stride. A little beer wasn’t a big deal to them, although it was clear they hoped I would clean up my act after my suspension, which I spent in Grosse Pointe with Whitney and Ollie while my parents vacationed in the Bahamas.
    Two weeks in Michigan was a long time, particularly in February. I couldn’t call any of my friends in Grosse Pointe, because my parents didn’t want anyone to know I’d been suspended. Confined to the house, I spent the mornings keeping up with my schoolwork and the afternoons watching HBO with Whitney.
    I missed getting stoned with my friends at school and would make do smoking a bowl myself in my room at the end of the day. I’d sit in my window seat watching the flurries blowing around outside, the house dead silent, Ollie downstairs roasting a chicken the way she used to do for us. Whitney would be in his room doing homework. I wondered if I appeared to him the way Charlie had once appeared to me—pasty skinned and preoccupied. Whitney had been alone for a year and a half, and this was our chance to reconnect; instead, we were both holed up in our separate quarters. I’d given him a couple of Neil Young cassettes, and I could hear “After the Gold Rush” floating down the hall from his room.
    I took another hit, holding the lighter in the bowl until it burned my thumb, and exhaled. I cracked the window. A few flurries of snow blew in, melting instantly.
    True to form, Ollie never mentioned the daily cloud of pungent smoke to my parents when they called to check on us, or let on about much of anything. She’d always been on our side, throughout everything that had happened, and I loved her for that.
    W e stood under the bleachers at a lacrosse game—Taft versus Hotchkiss—while the crowd above us roared.
    “My brother was busted by the Fed for dealing coke,” I told my friend Trey. My head felt light with the beer we were sharing.
    “No shit, really?” He took the last drink from the can, then tossed it on the ground. “The fuckin Fed ?”
    “But don’t tell anyone.” I tucked my hands into my jeans pockets. “My parents made me swear I’d never say a word about this.”
    “I swear,” said Trey. “But that’s, like, crazy.”
    We’d been hanging out lately, getting stoned in the woods, smoking cigarettes and kissing behind the science building after vespers and dinner. I’d hung out with him one night in the fields while he tripped hard on mushrooms, laughing aloud at the stars. He had a high school band—Space Antelope—that played twangy Grateful Dead–inspired tunes.
    “You’re the first person I’ve ever told out loud,” I said. “I guess I needed to tell someone.”
    Trey looked at me and grinned. “Cool. So now you’re lighter, right? Now you don’t have to worry anymore—you’re free.” His auburn hair caught a splinter of sun, turning it gold. His lashes were blond, almost invisible.
    I leaned against the rough edge of the bleachers. The crowd stood up and cheered, a riot of stomping feet and shouts.
    “Now I’m free,” I repeated.
    I wondered if this could be true. I never felt free for very long, only for a few days or weeks before the heaviness came back. Whenever I had that feeling of lightness, I knew it wouldn’t last. Which meant I had to do something, drum up some new excitement, to keep ahead of that terrible weight.
    F or ten hours I pretended to be asleep in the back of the car with my trunk. My father drove silently, stopping only for