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

new imperative: If you want a guy, go after him. What’s stopping you? We didn’t use words like “feminism”—a fussy term for earlier generations, like “consciousness-raising” or the ERA—but it was understood that we ran with the boys. Argue with them. Challenge their ideas about sex and Ernest Hemingway, because they’d been holding the megaphone for too long, and we needed to wrest it from their grip. I even wore cologne. Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men. And slathering my neck in that rich, oaky musk gave me a kinky thrill, like I’d been rubbing up against some low-rent Johnny Depp.
    But my lessons in women and power did not extend to the classroom. I was not a hand raiser of any kind. I took a C in myLiterature After the Holocaust seminar, because I couldn’t force myself to open my mouth, despite participation being 25 percent of the grade. I ran into the professor on campus one day. She had dreads and a wry smile. I didn’t even know they made professors this cool. We chatted for a bit, and she said, “I don’t get it. Why didn’t you ever talk in class?” And I blushed and said, “I’m shy,” and she said, “Well, you shouldn’t be.”
    No, I shouldn’t be. I wasn’t
meant
to be. And on the balcony of my apartment, I was not. Under cover of night and Keystone tall boys, I was full of righteous fire and brimstone. How I loved the taste of conviction in my mouth.
    That is bullshit. You’re wrong. Prove it.
    I was done sucking up to men. Fluffing their egos. Folding their tightie whities. I was going to smash my bottles against the wall, and someone could clean up after me, goddammit. I stopped leaning over makeup mirrors and blow-drying my hair. I wore clothes that stank of hamper and Marlboro Lights, and it seemed to me that men got off on this new uncorseted persona. That’s what they said: We like strong women. That’s what they said: Be yourself. So, death to the girl of the nervous fidgets, behold the woman with a beer in her hand and one endless cigarette. No more hearts doodled in spiral notebooks. No more falling in love with every boy who looks your way in biology class. But falling into bed—now, this was another topic entirely.
    That’s what Mateo and I did that night. We slinked off into my bedroom while the party rambled on, and we ripped off each other’s clothes in a blind, snarling rage. For so long, I wondered how it would feel to sleep with someone other than Miles. To run the tip of my nose along the powdery skin of his stomach, soft as a puppy’s belly, and into the feral thicket of short, wiry hair leading down below. But I couldn’t tell you what sex withMateo was like, because all I had the next day was a flash of a memory, five seconds of a frame: me, on top of him, my hands digging into his chest and my hair swishing around madly. I am told that I screamed. The kind of excitement that travels through flimsy apartment walls.
    “I guess I don’t need to ask if you enjoyed yourself,” my roommate Tara said the next day over coffee.
    But that seemed like a very good question. Honestly, I had no idea.

    I LIKED THE idea of being “experienced.” I was 16 when Miles and I had sex. I saw no explosion of glitter, no doves released into the air. Actually, it felt more like a bowling ball being shoved up my vagina (but a very sweet and loving bowling ball). I adored Miles. But our sex drives were set at different volumes. Mine was the medium hum of a transistor radio. His went to 11.
    This is how teenage boys are, right? They’ll hump anything. Hump the furniture. Hump the floorboards. Their dicks are like divining rods forever finding gold inside someone else’s pants. And me? I was a cuddle bunny. I liked soft stroking and delicate kisses, and those nights could be a little heavy on the saliva and the grabbing for me.
    I wasn’t a prude or anything. That was a slur in high school.
Don’t be a prude.
Guys would joke about girls so frigid their knees were sewn