The first night I drank was also the first night I had sex. I was on a high school trip in China, where we were touring Bertolt Brecht’s play The Caucasian Chalk Circle. I was seventeen and a senior. I went to an unusual high school: a performing arts charter school with a total of ten students. Since I had spent the better part of the last six years around Rick, I had never been interested in drinking. I associated it with hidden piles of beer cans, his hairy body passed out in the driveway on the night of my mom’s art opening, the slur of his voice as he yelled at me to clean up the goddamn kitchen. In China I watched as my classmates drank wine with scorpions curled up in the bottom of the bottle. I laughed as they kissed and danced and threw up over the side of the boat, but I did not participate.
On our last night, in Beijing, we went to a restaurant that turned into a club after ten. The tables were cleared, and patrons climbed on top of them to dance and drink. At the bar, I asked for a tequila sunrise because I had seen someone order it on TV once. It was sweet, citrusy, and ended with a wild kick to my throat that made me feel invincible.
I walked home with classmates barefoot through the streets of Beijing. I flashed a passing cab and laughed, giving no thought to my chubby, white stomach. I went up to a sophomore’s room and had sex for the first time. It was, unsurprisingly, awful. My body was numb and wobbly. I gave him sloppy kisses and told him to put it in. He was equally drunk and obliged. All the while we could hear our classmates giggling outside the door. I remember a pinch, a dry attempt at movement, and then sleep.
I don’t know the first night Sarah drank. The first night I caught her, she was fourteen years old and had a group of girls sleeping over. I walked in on one of them vomiting out of Sarah’s bedroom window.
“So, you guys are drunk,” I said.
“No, we aren’t!” my sister shrieked as her friend pulled her head out of the window, wiping her mouth clean.
“Yeah, you are. And”—I made a show of sniffing the air—“it’s Bacardi 151.”
My sister’s mouth dropped open, and then she smiled sheepishly. “Okay, yeah. Don’t tell Mom,” she begged.
I didn’t.
I remember when I was home visiting from college and saw her getting out of the bath. She was fourteen, and I caught a glimpse of her shaved pubic area while I was brushing my teeth. I realized then that she might be having sex, that her body was no longer something I knew anything about. I found out later that the first time she had sex, she was thirteen. My dad let her and a seventeen-year-old boy named Gil sleep in a tent together, alone, at my dad’s property in the mountains. Where was I when my sister was deciding to open her body to someone? Where was I to talk to her afterward?
I imagine two movie screens running next to each other, our lives side by side. There are places where the images are the same: the night we did coke and I threw up into the bathroom sink (all I could say was “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry” as she cleaned vomit from my hair); the weekend she made her amends to me at a women’s sober-living house; the day our father died. There is much of her screen that is blank for me, that I have attempted to fill in with journals, conversations, and investigation. In those dark gaps of her life, I imagine great shadowy monsters I could have saved her from. In every version, it is my fault.
Sarah loved boys and girls. Sarah loved kissing and drama and shitty sex. She loved commitment and cheating and fights with girls she called sluts for sleeping with strung-out boys she had claimed for herself. She was suspended from high school for making out with a girl on campus. She moved her first serious boyfriend, Ethan, into my mother’s house, threatening to run away if my mom didn’t let him stay. She would fuck this boyfriend in the farmhouse my mom was restoring. My mother and I would sit at the dining room table watching the old chandelier tremble and sway, small bits of dust and plaster falling down on us until the noise of a high-pitched moan would carry down the stairs and all would go quiet.
After I left home, Sarah and my mom fought all the time, about her cutting class or Ethan living at the house. They had a similar temper, quick to explode and quick to forgive. My attempts at playing peacemaker were met with annoyance, although I was often the first one either of them reached out to when they were fighting. It was not uncommon for one of them to call me “condescending,” probably because I relished telling each of them what they were doing wrong. I felt both invulnerable after beating cancer and convinced I was going to die young anyway. I had the answers for every question except my own.
My mother called me in my first semester at college. Sarah was skipping school, not doing her homework, and my mother said she was “at her wit’s end.” I called Sarah as I walked to class, trudging slowly up a steep hill. I tried to convey all nineteen years of my wisdom to Sarah. “You really need to get your shit together—Mom is pissed, and I am tired of hearing about it.”
“You have no idea what my life is like,” Sarah said. “And Mom is super hard to live with.”
“Why? Because she makes you go to school?” I sighed. “You’re such a fucking drama queen.”
“It’s really hard going to school where everyone knows what a perfect student you were.” She was near tears, but she said the word perfect like it was burning the inside of her mouth. “It’s a lot to live up to.”
“So now it’s my fault that you aren’t doing your homework?”
“That’s not what—”
“Everything would be so much better if you just did exactly what I said.”
With Tess
If I could, I would pause both of our stories, with me figuring out my life after cancer, and her on the verge of fifteen and her first encounter with opiates. I would go to her and lay my head in her lap and tell her how scared I was of the cancer returning to my body. I would ask her about Ethan and school. She would tell me the things that I’d only discover once it was already too late: she and Ethan did small lines of coke in her room, drank from hidden bottles of cheap vodka and rum, crushed up Adderall and snorted until their noses bled. She would tell me how she ran through the redwoods drunk, smoking pot out of an apple pipe, how she hated her stomach so much the diet pills seemed the only way forward. I would listen.
Instead, I went to Rome to celebrate finishing my cancer treatment and spent two months drinking, dancing, fucking, and feeling invincible before heading to school. Sarah met Tyson and OxyContin.