Underage and Reckless
When I was fifteen years old, my parents went out of town for the weekend and took my two younger sisters with them. I had managed to convince mum that I didn’t need to stay at Nana’s because I was going to be staying at my friend Olivia’s*. The thing is Olivia had told her mum that she was going to stay the night at mine. Being generally sensible and trustworthy young girls, neither of our parents had felt the need to double check our proposed whereabouts with the other.
At approximately 10 am that Sunday morning my family drove up our driveway to discover bottle caps strewn around the house, a beer funnel in the bin, bottles of tequila floating in the pool, and a group of ten or so young girls and guys hastily gathering their belongings and making their escape, beet faced and stinking of alcohol. At approximately 10:02 am, I was sitting in my bedroom crying while my dad yelled at me. By 10:03 am I was grounded for the next two months.
While I don’t care to divulge the details of exactly what happened that fateful Saturday night – six years on I still feel guilty as hell for ruining my parents' trust – I can tell you what brought me to that moment, and what happened in the year or so after.
Pre-2008
I was never the ‘cool’ kid in school. Having always been bright for my age and an avid reader had given me an automatic ‘nerd’ label that seemed to follow me around no matter what I did. Not helping my cause, I had fallen in love with The Babysitter’s Club when I was very young which had given me unrealistic expectations of what life should be like by the time I reached thirteen: Mary-Ann had a serious boyfriend for a large amount of the series AND there’s a book titled ‘Boy Crazy Stacey!’ Needless to say, my expectations of love were very high.
All of this meant that at the ripe old age of 12 I felt embarrassed that not only had I never been kissed, no boy had even shown a glimmer of interest in me. At the time I had glasses, braces, and the chest of a young boy (this last part didn’t change until I was about 17). This embarrassment was only worsened by the fact that everyone around me seemed to be ‘going out’ with someone; people kissing behind the bike-shed were practically school-wide spectacles that I was never a part of. Looking back it is so absurd that I felt like I was somehow being left behind, but at the time I felt like I was destined to a life of collecting dust upon a shelf. I felt desperate to be noticed.
When I reached high school, I befriended a girl I had known as a tiny tot but hadn’t seen in years. Rose* was beautiful, funny, got along with all the popular kids, and had the chest of a Playboy bunny. This last asset awarded her an enormous amount of attention from a vast amount of guys. She was also going through her ‘rebellious’ phase, sneaking out her bedroom window every night to visit different boys. She was every parent’s worst nightmare and I was in total awe of her. About half way through year ten she deemed ME to be her new best friend and I signed up wholeheartedly.
In the year between becoming Rose’s best friend and becoming grounded I changed as a person. Rose and I would regularly go to parties, telling our parents we were “having a sleepover at Bridget’s.”* We started drinking. Rose’s older male friends would buy us alcohol and she would pay them in flirtation. She attracted so much attention from guys and some of that attention would shower onto me merely by being in her presence. For the first time in my life, I felt cool. I was tangled in a web of lies to my parents but I didn’t care: drinking made me ‘cool.’ I had a very slim build and was naturally underweight and realistically couldn’t handle any more than two drinks in a night. Rose, however, drank to give the boys a run for their money, and I would follow suit in fear of looking uncool. I would drink entire boxes of KGBs and still go looking for more afterwards.
On my worst night, Rose left me in an unfamiliar suburb after a party (the guy who picked her up wouldn’t let me in his car because I was too drunk. Rose stayed in the car and drove away laughing. Good friend, huh?). I stumbled down the footpath for about half an hour trying to find my way back to her place. I was woken up an hour later by a couple of my friends Thomas* and Luke* who had spotted me asleep outside a dairy. They took me back to Rose’s in a taxi (of which I was vomiting out the window the entire drive) and I promptly fell asleep with my head in the toilet. I remember feeling like a ragdoll; totally helpless to actually do anything. I woke the next morning with hickeys all over the right hand side of my neck. For the first time I felt like a fool. A dirty fool with no self-respect. To make matters worse, I had to sing a recital that day with the hangover from hell and a neck slathered in makeup. The look on my mother’s face when she spotted the bruise is one I will never forget.
Two weeks later I was grounded. While my life was put on hold for two months, I had a lot of time for self-reflection. It was only then that I realised what an idiot I had been; the basis of so many of the friendships I had coveted was alcohol. Yes, I had finally received male attention but at what cost? My dignity? I had lost the respect of my family, my level of ‘cool’ was severely diminished in my friends’ eyes and I was scraping by at school with NCEA level 1 exams looming around the corner.
Post-2008
With a lot of hard work, I did manage to pass my level 1 papers with flying colours. However not everything was remedied so easily. In order to earn back my parents trust I stopped drinking. The flow on effect from this was that I also stopped being invited out to parties with friends. This eventually led to not being invited to hang out with friends at all. In a culture where teenage drinking was the norm, my decision to stop doing so effectively marked my social suicide. In my final two years of high school I can probably count the number of parties I went to on one hand.
I wasn’t the only one, though; my friend Olivia had also been seriously grounded after that night at mine, and so while everyone else was out at parties she and I spent time becoming best friends – in a healthy way. Olivia also stopped going out so much and she and I would often bitch about the drinking culture at school. Some weeks it felt like it was all our friends could talk about; Mondays and Tuesdays conversation topic was “OMG how much fun was Saturday night?!” Wednesdays would be “who’s having a party this weekend?” and Thursdays and Fridays were nothing but “OMG can’t wait for Saturday night! Who’s going to buy our alcohol?” From the outside, Olivia and I found it absurd.
The number (and nature) of drunken stories we overheard were alarming. Friends getting so drunk they gave guys oral sex in front of everyone else. Friends getting so drunk they would decide running up the street naked in return for another bottle of vodka cruiser was a good idea. Friends getting so drunk they had sex with other friends’ boyfriends. Olivia and I would be the ones left to pick up the pieces of friendships destroyed by the influence of alcohol.
When I was on the inside, I drank because I had succumbed to peer-pressure and thought it made me cool. I wanted boys to notice me because I felt I was failing at being a girl without their attention. Once I was back on the outside I realised how bullshit that was. That’s also when I saw past qualities of mine reflected in other girls my age; drinking because it was the cool thing to do, only to feel like total idiots when things messed up.
Now 21, I look back on my high school self and want to slap her. If one good thing came out of it all it is that my sisters learned from my mistakes: my 18 year old sister doesn’t drink and never has, and my 15 year old sister seems to be avoiding the peer pressure which pervades her age group at school. Last weekend my parents went away for a few days and my boyfriend and I had gone out for the night, leaving Miss-15 at home with her best friend. We came home a few hours earlier than we had planned and found the two girls curled up on the couch with a bowl of popcorn between them watching some silly movie. It made me smile to see that 15 year old her is nothing like 15 year old me.
If I can pass on any words of wisdom, it is that there is nothing less cool than an out of control drunk teenager. I became ‘cool’ and finally felt truly happy when I started respecting myself, my body, and my family. ▼
