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

out again, or that when the deepest and truest part of me was cracked open, the only thing that poured out was need.

DRESSING IN MEN’S CLOTHES
    I started wearing my dad’s clothes in the fall of my sophomore year. I had raided his closet over the summer, plucking out a gray flannel shirt and a pair of Lee jeans, flecked with paint.
    “Can I have this?” I asked.
    And my father, confused. “What are you going to do with it?”
    It must have been strange, to find his pint-size daughter rummaging through his battered old work clothes. But in the fall of 1993, the accidental lumberjack look was a uniform. I liked the drape of that flannel and how those jeans slid down my hips. I had to keep yanking them up, like a tiny girl in a giant’s clothes.
    I wore two of my dad’s undershirts as well, which were thin and nearly transparent from multiple washings, so they had this luxurious softness. I liked that you could see straight through to my bra, which makes no sense, given the insecurity about my body that had dogged me since adolescence. But the shirt pointsto some essential conflict. A desire to flaunt and be masked at once. The undershirt was like a side door to exhibitionism. I had to be careful not to look too deliberate. That was the worst sin of all: trying too hard.
    Sometimes I wore those undershirts inside out. I have no idea why I did this, except that it seemed daring to show a disregard for propriety.
    “Your shirt’s on inside out,” a guy told me at a party.
    “Your life’s on inside out,” I snapped back.
    And he smiled. “You’re right.”
    I had a crush on that guy. Mateo. He had a poof of curly hair like John Turturro in
Barton Fink
, and he was gruff and unsmiling like so many 19-year-olds. But if you nudged him right, he could be adorable and silly. I have a picture of him sitting in my apartment wearing my silky Victoria’s Secret bra over his T-shirt and another of him paging through an old
Teen Beat
magazine with mock excitement.
    My off-campus apartment was the party hub that year. The place was named the Casbah, so we were almost contractually obligated to rock it. My drink was Keystone Light. You could buy two six-packs of tall boys for five bucks at the Fiesta Mart—the equivalent of 16 beers for the price of a Wendy’s value meal, which turned Keystone into the unofficial sponsor of our ragers.
    That’s what we called our parties: “ragers.” A word associated with anger and weather systems, which is appropriate given the state of our living room the next day. Halogen lamp kicked over, beer bottle floating in the fish tank.
What the hell raged through here last night? Oh, yes. It was us. We raged.
    It was during one of these ragers at my apartment that Mateo and I had sex. At the time, we were in a play together, and wewould sit in the dressing room before and during the show, knees brushing thighs. The flirtation had been building for weeks, but I needed some inciting incident. A match thrown on our diesel fuel. We were outside on the walkway of my crumbling cinderblock complex. I was chain-smoking, one cigarette lit on the tail end of another. And I said to him, with the confidence of six beers, “I bet you won’t kiss me right now.”
    He was leaning against the wall. His forehead rippled as he looked up, all squint and slouch. He looked at the parking lot, at the dozens of people around us. He looked everywhere but at me. Then he said, “I don’t think you’re going to win that bet.”
    The idea of coming on to men was new. In high school, this would never have occurred to me. I had waited for Miles to kiss me, for months that felt like years. My coquettish signaling: sit next to him in class, play with my hair, cross my legs so they looked thinner. I read the tea leaves of his every gesture.
He called me last night. What does it meeaaaan?
This was how I understood seduction. Keep inviting the guy closer, but sit still until he pounces.
    College flipped that script. The