Swell

Teenagers drink. Some like it. Others find they need it to cover up the pain of divorce, a parent who doesn’t care, verbal abuse, neglect, heartbreak. It can happen to the best kid in the world under the right circumstances. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be forever. Listen to your teenager, understand he or she will do things you don’t approve of, and
always be there
through this vulnerable time.

I dedicate this story to those of you I partied with in high school, including that one popular boy who did indeed have a jug of wine locked up in his desk, and who later broke my heart. Thank you for the experience because it made me the storyteller I am today.

Chapter 1

Swell. That’s what it felt like my body was doing after many beers. Beers before wine. I think I had a tequila shooter… maybe three? Now I was in the back seat of a car. It sounded like the muffler had been chopped off. A lawn mower.

Hands were on my boobs, squeezing one, then the other, then back to the first one. The guy that was attached to the hands looked black and white in the dim night lights. He had bright teeth and big nostrils.

I sort of understood the sounds that were flying across the car. They sounded like dream voices, the kind you hear in the twilight part of sleep when you can’t tell if the voice is real or not.

≈

From birth until I was 15 years old, my parents drank every day. Stuff like wine, beer, and the occasional bourbon at Christmas. I never considered drinking any of the bitter, burning, yucky stuff myself. The few times I’d had wine, I was at a wedding or
a Passover Seder. Being underage, I was a million years away from being able to buy anything legally, as if I wanted to. Little did I know better.

However, plenty of kids in my high school already knew about the can and bottle. They’d show up to football games and pass out underneath the bleachers, or sneak drinks at the school dances and whip everyone into a pogo frenzy. I didn’t know any of them personally, but I was sure they’d be at the upcoming Greek Week toga dance.

This was my first Greek Week, an event put on by my high school every year. Each day, students in different groups competed for privileges like free cafeteria lunches (yuck) and lunch with the principal (extra yuck). At the end of the debacle, a Toga Dance was held. It was the perfect excuse to wear bedding.

I wanted to look cute, or even better, hot, in my sheet. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell where my threshold for hotness started, if I even had one. For now, I was lucky enough to be out of the training bras I’d burned before starting 9
th
grade.

With my K-Mart sheet and branches from the tree outside my bedroom wrapped around my head, I sat waiting for my best friend, Jenna Beltran, to pick me up. Actually, it was her mom who was driving us to the dance, being that we only had our learner’s permits. We planned to stay at the dance until the very end — something we hadn’t been allowed to do at any of the other dances. Not tonight, though, because this was the last dance of the year.

“Rebecca! You look like a Greek goddess,” said Mrs. Beltran, twirling a blonde lock and cracking her gum.

I had to step up into her SUV, holding onto handles to give me an edge before I plopped down next to Jenna. I felt like a sad excuse for Greek beside her pink satin sheet, roses trailing around her neck and into her hair. Had she visited a costume shop or something?

“I feel so homemade next to you,” I said, tucking my sheet over my boobs. Although I was wearing a tube top underneath, I didn’t want to even make it look like I was having a nipple slip.

“Aw Beck, it’s just a sheet and some flowers. Nothing special.” She sighed, stretching out her long, pale legs. They were wrapped in gold Roman sandals that snaked up her calves. I had always wanted to be tall, or at least as tall as Jenna.

She was a six-footer, with strawberry blonde hair tumbling down her shoulders that was always neat, shiny, and bouncy. Then there was me. Okay, I wasn’t super-short, but at 5’6 I wished I had more height, not to mention more of everything like longer hair and bigger boobs, and less of others, including the proverbial ass and hips that no matter what I did stuck out front, side, and rear. My silhouette, which could be called hourglass shaped, was constantly challenged by rippling jiggle and junk in the trunk I swear didn’t belong there.

My Auntie Rhonda had once said, “Girls get their father’s mother’s boobs and butt.” This made me think back to my dad’s mom, Marilyn, doing the dishes after a dinner party when I was a child. Her bottom was wide enough to cover both sides of the kitchen sink, and her boobs too small to hang over the dishes as she washed them. In the mirror, all I could do was agree with and then curse my aunt.

But my toga enhanced everything nicely, cinching my waist and pushing my hips out in a Kardashian kind of way. An added benefit, the sheet didn’t cling to any of the bad parts.

“Mom, you’re right. Beck looks like a Greek goddess — a hot one.” Jenna slapped my arm. I couldn’t help but feel proud that I’d gotten it right in her eyes, because everything Jenna did seemed perfect in comparison to me.

I walked into the gym and saw the bouncing, swirling mess of white sheets, leafy garlands and Roman sandals. I felt like another fish in the pond. A lesser goddess, once again shrunken next to the pink beauty that was Jenna. At least the music was good.

“Louie-Louie! Let’s dance!” hooted Jenna, grabbing my hands and ripping me across the wooden floor, past a circle of popular kids and to the middle of the gym. She started gyrating and shaking, roses falling from her hair as it flew back and forth across her face, instantly attracting a few fans who stood to watch the frenzy. Not to look like a dork, I started bopping around too, but certainly wasn’t anywhere close to throwing my dark, straight-as-an arrow hair around my face. It would poke my eyes out.

A few songs later and I was panting for the drinking fountain. This dance had turned out to be fun. I was free to groove, drip with sweat, and do it all in a sheet. That was good enough for me. Even when the water dripped down my chin, across my collarbone and into the sweat trail that flowed into my tube top, it felt like anything could happen.

When I returned to Miss Pinky and the circle of pals she’d attracted with her crazy dancing — mostly mathematical types and girls with puffy cheeks and glasses — I stood for a moment to watch. It gave me a chance to slow down and get my heart back into gear so I could rev it up again.

“What’re you standing there for?” asked a slurring voice. A hand wrapped around my bicep, and suddenly I was pulled away from Jenna’s jig and toward the popular kids. It was all moving so fast that I didn’t have a clue who’d hauled me over to the forbidden zone.

When my abductor turned toward me, I realized it was Christian Rusch. He was one of those popular guys who really had things that made him that way. Christian was a gifted pianist and made all of the talent shows. He was also an athlete extraordinaire, kicking ass on the school’s basketball and track teams. And he was smarter than anyone I had seen in that school, winning tons of awards, prizes, and scholarships. He lived and breathed math, science, and history, and had a photographic memory to go along with his 4.0. And here he was, drunker than a skunk and dancing with me.

He smelled like my great Auntie Rose, who always kept the Carlo Rossi company at family events. You know, those huge bottles of wine? Christian smelled like that, and he had this Joker’s grin on his face as he watched me match his dance moves. It was hard to keep up, I guess because he was conditioned and I was a lazy letch. There was no time to think about what I was doing, only that Christian Rusch had wanted me to dance with him.

We danced through five songs before he took a break, pulling me by the hand
to the drinking fountain. He put his head under the water stream, and allowed the water to run down his neck and into his shirtless toga. There was a small amount of hair on his chest and I tried not to look at it. Christian, however, was staring at me like birthday cake.

“What’s your name?” He leaned against the fountain, wiping his mouth on his forearm.

“Rebecca.”

“Of Sunnybrook Farm,” he said with a laugh.

“Yeah, I guess so. But my friends call me Beck.” My cheeks were hot.

“Like the beer,” he said before taking another lap at the fountain.

I decided that since everything was happening without thinking that I shouldn’t think too hard about what to say next. “And you’re Christian, right?”

He nodded, went for another drink of water, and just as quickly as he brought me out of my comfort zone, grabbed my hand and ran us back to the dance floor. This time we went back over to Club Jenna, which had branched out into a large circle of clapping young Greeks, Jenna at the center changing dance partners every few beats.

Christian took both of my hands and started pogo dancing. Up went my heart rate again, and I was thrilled at just having someone to dance with other than Jenna or a nerd. Even better, it was Christian.

The music took a sudden dip, lulling into a slow song. Christian stood with his arms out, and I guessed I was going to slow dance with him. It was strange to have my hot, sticky body melt with his, which was even hotter and stickier and smelling like a liquor store. But I ignored it, clinging to his damp arms as we swayed back and forth. He didn’t have a lot to say, and all I could think about was why he wanted to dance with me. If someone else had been standing still among the bouncing sheets, would Christian have picked them? I couldn’t figure it out, so I decided to enjoy it, as moments like these didn’t come along often. In my case, they didn’t come along at all.

Unlike the girls in school who seemed born and bred to be in the back seat of a car, I didn’t have any experience with dating. Sure, I’d had crushes. But Christian was the worst case of lust ever. I would study the outline of his face, his full lips, the way his hair fell into his eyes when he was near me in the lunch line. He seemed nice, but no matter what I did, be it dressing like a ho-bag (my version consisted of an above-the-knee skirt and scoop neck blouse, along with one-inch heels — no competition with the Lady GaGa’s running around school), or pretending to fawn over his latest award or newspaper clipping when he was within earshot, Christian didn’t seem to think of me as girlfriend material
.

When the slow song ended, so did the dance. Christian walked me out of the gym, his arm wrapped around my plush waist. Jenna followed us in a giggle fit.

“I’ll see you around,” he said before embracing me in a big, lurpy hug. A fresh cloud of wine scent flew up my nose.

“Yeah, I will,” I replied before he let me go. Jenna immediately grabbed my arm and opened her mouth as we zipped toward the parking lot.

“OH MY GOD! Do you know who that is? Do you? Do you?”

“Christian Rusch.”

“But it’s HIM, and he danced with
you
! Man, Rebecca, you must be peeing your pants.” She pulled the remains of rose petals from her now-tangled nest of hair.

“I’m still in shock. I can’t believe what just happened.”

“Geez, you think something that good could happen to me? No!”

“Maybe it was the pink sheet,” I snickered. I looked down and noticed that my own sheet had slipped down past my tube top. Oh well, so much for nipple slips.

“He was acting goofy. I think he was drunk.”

“He
did
smell like wine. Really bad.”

“Drunk or not, he’s hot and he had his hands on you!” She sighed, clasping her hands in front of her and rising onto her toes.