Free Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget by Sarah Hepola

together.”
    I didn’t get it. I kept expecting him to revert to the role of high school boyfriend, snuggling in a booth built for two. But he was a college boy now, who wanted to live with all his doors and windows open. A few weeks later, I cleaned up his dorm room. Like a fucking den mother. I soaked the bowls crusted with cereal. Rinsed off and recycled the crumpled beer cans crawling with ants. I found two empty condom wrappers underneath hispillow, one more than we’d ever used, and I told myself:
Surely someone else borrowed his bed.
Nights got wild in his dorm, so it was possible.
Maybe a condom fell down from his roommate’s bunk.
What an idiot. But a person can invent any stupid story to keep herself from uncomfortable truths.
    A few nights later, I was hanging out in Miles’s dorm room, but this time I wasn’t the only girl. A pretty redhead shared her ideas about string theory. The girl with the combat boots and the motorcycle jacket dropped by. She was from Venezuela. And she said it with an accent—
Ven-ezz-waaay-luh
—like she was rubbing it in.
    I took long slugs from my jug wine. I didn’t care anymore. I was tired of counting calories, measuring each glass for its pleasure, trying to lose five pounds so I could win back the boy who refused to be won. I drank cup after cup as I sat on the lower bunk and retreated into myself so far I could almost see us from space.
    I could see that Miles and I would not get back together, and this was a good thing. I could see I was not the only girl for him. In fact, his life would be rich with women—smart, interesting women who might actually like
Star Trek
. These women would not apply mascara each morning, might not even shave their armpits, but he would dig that about them, the way he dug the girl from Venezuela, who wasn’t even thin. She was full-bodied and foulmouthed, but he liked her because she was original and comfortable being something other than conventionally beautiful. Because she would suck a bong with him in rooms that were wisely unlit, while I stood in front of a magnifying mirror, adding sparkle shimmer to my eyes.
    I left the room without saying good-bye. By the time I got back to my dorm, the wine had taken charge. I fell into thebushes outside the front entrance and spent a while digging around, trying to find the front door.
    My last sustained memory is Anna, floating like an angel in a Cure T-shirt down the bright hallway. She held my hair as I threw up into her small sink, the one that kept moving. She changed me into a baggy T-shirt like she was putting a onesie on a limp baby.
    Thank you, Anna. I’m so sorry, Anna. I love you, Anna.
    “It’s OK,” she said with a gentle shush. “You’re OK.”
    Over the years, I would become reliant on friends for the most basic information. How did we get home last night? Do you have any idea what happened to my jeans? Why is there a corn dog in my bed? After a while, I had to get more subtle—dig but not look like I was digging. “I had so much fun last night. What was the name of that bar again?” People repeated my antics back to me, and if I stayed still and laughed in the right spots, I could often complete the field report on my own behavior.
    I have a picture of myself from that night. Taken after I blacked out. I’m sitting on the bed, my eyes so narrowed they nearly disappear when I smile. I don’t know exactly why Anna took the photo. We were always documenting our lives back then, complimenting ourselves on how well we were living them. But this photo wasn’t going to be tacked up in my work space. She later told me that after she snapped it, I began crying harder than she’d ever seen me cry. I became unreachable. A void in me had opened, and she had no idea how to fix me. I kept saying the same thing, over and over.
No one will ever love me. No one will ever love me.
    When Anna told me what happened, I was shaken. And I wasn’t sure which worried me more: that I had blacked