Chapter 23
I could have been angry at Margaret for getting drunk without me.
Instead, I decided to catch up with her.
We gathered at Eleanor’s house, the best place for hooliganism given its size.
I didn’t want to get drunk for the first time in a basement with a bunch of people I only medium liked looking at me, and I didn’t want to get drunk for the first time in the back of a car and hope the driver would keep their word on sobriety.
I didn’t want total chaos. I wanted chaos without risk.
I wanted to be stupid without being worried.
I wanted to be foolish but not a fool, or be a fool but only in the company of my best friends and for a limited amount of time and without consequence.
We ate dinner with Eleanor’s parents at their oblong dining room table, vegetables and fish.
Afterward, we made a big show out of watching a movie, and when the movie ended, we went upstairs and played music at a volume sufficient to mask our conversation and deter awareness of any odd sounds we might make.
Unlike at my house, where my mom would have stuck her head around my door and asked that we turn down the music, Eleanor’s parents retired to their bedroom and left us alone.
We skipped around in circles trying on clothes.
We crowded into Eleanor’s bathroom, which was pale blue and pristine, its countertops empty until Margaret and I spilled our million cosmetic items onto the granite.
I began my makeup application rather gleefully.
I was getting what I wanted, a collective first time, and ignoring what I didn’t yet know how to resolve.
For the rest of our lives, we’d live in each other’s first memory of drunkenness.
Margaret had pinky-sworn to feign ignorance for the sake of the team.
We were still giddy from our reconciliation, high on again being able to send each other text messages about what we’d eaten for breakfast. In the group chat, too, we bantered, sent links to the behavior of other people on social media for discussion.
Eleanor chimed in occasionally, reserved.
Because I hadn’t seen her in almost a week and because Margaret and I hadn’t said Eleanor’s name again between us since I apologized for keeping the secret, it felt possible to pretend for an evening that I knew how to behave hanging out with both of them at the same time, the three of us together.
I used shimmering green eyeliner to trace the rim of my eye.
“You’re not going to immediately tell your mom about this, are you?” Eleanor asked while brushing her hair, which I found both rude and flirtatious.
Obviously, I didn’t like doing something to which, had I asked her permission, my mother would never agree.
However, I thought if she accepted the premise that I had to get drunk now and not later, not all the way in the future when it became legal and everyone else had been drinking for years, then she would have found my approach reasonable.
I knew she would have preferred that I get drunk for the first time by drinking wine in our living room, both parents present, but I had to try to be at least the smallest amount interesting.
I had to endeavor to be the least bit cool.
“Nope,” I said, flippantly and without looking her in the eye. The last time I’d seen Eleanor she had driven a hand beneath my dress. I’d prepared myself for sleeping in the same room as her again by masturbating repeatedly earlier in the day.
“Good,” she answered, but she hardly seemed excited for the night’s events. She and Margaret hadn’t seen each other since the fair. “We don’t actually need to get ready for this,” she said.
Margaret scoffed, as if getting drunk for the first time wasn’t obviously an event that merited hair and makeup. As if we weren’t always practicing how to be beautiful for the rest of our lives.
“You’re wrong,” Margaret said, staring at her face in the mirror with a liquid eyeliner pen in one hand. “I need winged eyeliner. I have a vision of myself being drunk with winged eyeliner on. That way, if I cry, I’m a sad queen.”
“Why?” Eleanor asked with her hands in the sink. She always washed her hands before she touched her face. She patted her wet palms on the pale blue hand towel that hung from a silver ring. “Are you planning to cry?”
“I mean, I might,” Margaret answered, holding down one of her eyelids and contemplating where first to apply the pen. She didn’t say she’d cried the last time, though I knew she had. “Especially if I’m wearing the right eyeliner.”
I held a hand above my plugged-in straightener to test its heat. I straightened and then released the first section of my hair. It fell silkily upon my shoulder. Silky hair sensations are helpfully productive of confidence, and I wanted confidence.
“I wonder if I’ll throw up,” I said.
“You’re definitely going to throw up,” Eleanor said. “Accept it now.”
“Great, thank you.”
Margaret made an initial stroke of ink on her eyelid and then immediately regretted it.
“Do you have makeup remover?” she asked Eleanor. And then, “Mina, you’re not going to throw up. I’m not going to throw up. No one is going to throw up. Throwing up is forbidden because it’s gross.”
“But if you do throw up,” Eleanor said, “please do it quietly.”
She sounded resentful. Margaret reassuring me had irritated her.
Eleanor must have heard her control over her tone of voice slip too, because she left the room in pursuit of makeup remover, which I was sure she kept beneath her bathroom sink.
When Margaret likewise departed to fetch a hair tie from her bag, I quickly opened the drawer in which I’d left El’s photo.
Neat rows of skincare filled the drawer, products organized by category within clear Lucite dividers.
Both the picture and my note were gone. All the bottles had been rotated, so their labels faced forward.
I stared at the drawer’s contents for a moment. Then I turned a few of them around.
After an hour of further preparation, we deemed ourselves sufficiently sparkled.
Margaret sprayed a heavy cloud of perfume into the air.
Eleanor and I ran through it with our eyes closed, our chests thrust forward, and our heads thrown back like beautiful vegetables being misted at the grocery store.
Eleanor slunk up and down from the basement by herself. We’d agreed on this as the least conspicuous course of action. She took a picture of the large wooden bar built into her basement’s back wall so that she could reassemble the bottles afterward exactly as they’d been.
“Genius,” I said when she explained this to us, and she gave me a look that meant, Obviously.
Then she carried bottles up the two flights of stairs to her bedroom in a tote bag she’d lined with a fleece blanket to prevent the glass vessels from clinking against each other.
Eleanor loved being logistically prepared for mischief, which I found charming, though I also felt wary of her mood, which she’d hidden again.
On her desk, we lined up disposable mouthwash cups, the tiny vessels decorated with finely drawn mint-colored flowers, which, in my emotion about our forthcoming rite, I found beautiful.
Into each cup, El poured a small draft. In the first, an inch of vodka, the next, an inch of whiskey, then wine, and last grenadine, none of us aware the red liquid didn’t actually contain any liquor.
This finished, Eleanor carried the bottles back downstairs, returned them to their original locations according to her photograph, and carried up four more.
She continued up and down the stairs until we felt confident she’d siphoned enough liquid to get three teenage girls drunk but not so much as to be noticed by her parents.
I think El was pretending her parents were very observant and scrutinizing of her misbehavior.
A little superstition enhances experience.
As we drew closer to the actual consumption of alcohol, I felt increasingly uneasy. I didn’t know what was about to happen to me. I sat down on the floor.
“No dying tonight, okay?” Eleanor said as she walked out of her bedroom to return the last of the bottles.
Margaret rolled across the carpet like a log to reach me.
“You make the most insane faces—like absolute looks of despair in her direction,” Margaret said. Reading my nerves, she added, “This is going to be fine. You’ll be fine.”
“I won’t turn into someone else, poof?”
She pushed her stack of bracelets high up her wrist. “Nope, I promise,” she said.
“You didn’t turn into someone else?” I asked.
“You mean I’ve been drunk before? Gasp.”
I rolled my eyes at her posturing. I wanted to be reassured before Eleanor got back and saw that I needed more reassurance. Margaret propped her head up with her hand, her elbow against the floor.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t turn into another person. I was me, just a little more willing to be an idiot. I felt a lovely desire to say whatever occurred to me.”
“Don’t you already do that?”
“Like yes, but usually there’s at least a second of resistance. People use alcohol as an excuse to be different than who they are because who they are is boring. My mom told me that. You already say weird things. You’ll be fine.”
I put one of my feet on her thigh.
“What about El?” I asked. “Will she still be El, or different?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Margaret said as Eleanor walked back into the room. We hadn’t heard her feet on the stairs or her hand turning the doorknob.
“What are you trying to find out about me?” she asked, and, for a moment, I thought she looked afraid.
“Whether or not you’ll turn into a two-headed serpent after drinking this magic potion,” Margaret answered smoothly.
“I mean, hopefully I will,” Eleanor said. “Will you?”
“It seems likely,” Margaret answered, and slithered suggestively on the floor. “This is what snakes do, right?”