The Princesses of Iowa

Everyone knows you’re not supposed to drink and drive. I mean,
obviously
. They start telling you that in fourth grade and you nod along, wide-eyed, because you can’t imagine ever being stupid and awful enough to drink at all, much less drink and drive. You make posters about how dumb it is, drinking and driving, and they hang them in the elementary school hallway. You tell your parents to stop smoking and accuse them of being alcoholics if they have a glass of wine with dinner more than once a month, and in health class you take tests on drugs, where every single drug is listed with a bunch of outdated slang and possible side effects, which all include death. Tobacco (butts, heaters, cancer sticks): lung cancer, emphysema, DEATH. Alcohol (booze, hooch, sauce): impaired judgment, loss of consciousness, DEATH. Marijuana (ace, grass, hay): disorientation, paranoia, DEATH. Heroin (boy, horse, smack): euphoria, convulsions, coma, DEATH.

For the next few years, you basically assume that you’ll drop dead the second you’re even in the same room as someone drinking a beer, and you solemnly swear that you’ll never be that stupid. But then in eighth grade you’re hanging out at the park shelter, waiting for something interesting to happen, and your best friend pulls out a cigarette she’s stolen from her mother and dares you to smoke it, and you do because the cute boy from your math class is there watching, and you feel brave and strange and grown up, even though you’re half convinced that you’ll be addicted within seconds of your first puff. If not dead. But nothing happens, except that the boy’s eyes widen slightly and your best friend looks at you with new interest, like you have all kinds of potential she never saw in you.

And then maybe you have another cigarette at a party later that spring, standing out beyond the lights of the back porch, talking to a different cute boy, and he offers you a sip of his beer, and you don’t die, you just giggle a lot. And you start to suspect that all the stuff they told you in fourth grade was a little exaggerated — not that you’d ever do
heroin,
but maybe shrooms or something — because you probably wouldn’t die. Your teacher made you believe there would be trench-coated junkies hanging around the school yard, but then she always used articles with drugs, like “the marijuana,” and belted her polyester pants just under her ribcage, so in retrospect she maybe wasn’t the best source of information about illegal drugs.

But obviously you shouldn’t drink and drive. They start telling you again in high school, making you watch videos in driver’s ed where a kid piles fifteen of his best friends into a big yellow van and then drinks half a PBR and drives off a cliff, killing everyone but himself, and then lives with that guilt for the rest of his awful life. They tell you that you shouldn’t give in to peer pressure, and they make you role-play ways to say no when someone hands you a joint. You can throw your hands up and say, “No, thanks, I’m cool.” You can pass it to the next person in the circle without saying anything. Or you can make some snotty remark that only works on sitcoms, like “I get high on life.”

What they don’t tell you is that sometimes you might not care about the side effects, that they might not be such a bad trade-off if it means you get to get the hell out of your own head for a little while and let go of the breath you’re always holding, the tiny bit of pudge on your belly you’re forever sucking in, if for one stupid night you can stop worrying about what people think about you and stop watching every word you say. And maybe that night, as you’re holding an ugly plastic cup and listening to everyone have the exact same conversations as last weekend and you’re inside your head thinking all the same thoughts, and sometimes you kind of hate your friends, sometimes you really kind of hate
yourself,
and maybe you wouldn’t mind getting hurt or going into a coma or something. Something.

And what they don’t tell you in fourth grade is that if everyone’s drunk and the least drunk person offers to drive, it will make a kind of crazy sense, and everyone might even congratulate themselves on how responsible they are to make the car owner sit in back and not drive her own car. They don’t tell you that the whole impaired judgment thing means that you’ll make decisions you’d never make sober and you’ll think they’re good ones, or maybe you’ll know they’re bad, but you won’t even care anymore, because it was such a stupid night and you just want to get home. Because maybe your best friend was making a total slut of herself with a college guy and then disappeared for an hour, leaving you to make small talk with her brother and drink the rum and Cokes he keeps handing you until you can hardly see straight and you can’t stop thinking about what a stupid whore your best friend is, and what if you’re actually no different because you’re the one who agreed to go to a college party even though your boyfriend had to go to a funeral in Kansas this weekend and what if he comes back on Monday and hears rumors about what happened at the party even though nothing did, it was a total bust, you sat there and talked to your best friend’s brother while everyone else paired off in dark corners and you sat on the couch getting drunker and drunker and listening to him talk about some Boy Scout trip he went on in ninth grade, no kidding, he will not shut up about hiking in Philpot or something, like anyone seriously cares, and about how he found God or something, though actually when you think about it, it’s kind of sexy to hear a guy talk about God, and the way he’s describing the desert sky at night is amazing, seriously, just beautiful, and you really don’t mean to kiss him but it just sort of happens.

And then suddenly she’s standing over you with this look of horror, gleeful triumphant horror, and she’s your best friend but what if she calls your boyfriend to tell him what she just saw, even though it was seriously nothing, it’s not like it meant anything, but she saw it and you can see it in her eyes, she’s going to tell him, because she’s always had a crush on him, even though she denies it, and then you’re running through the house to find your other best friend because you are not going to stay in that house a minute longer, and when you finally find her, your other friend, she’s half dressed and barely conscious and you grab her purse and keys and shirt and drag it all out of the frat house with your other best friend, the bitch, at your shoulder, saying, “What about Jake? How could you do that to him?” and obviously you shouldn’t drive,
of course
you shouldn’t, you’re all drunk, but you don’t even care anymore, you just want to get home, and if you all die in a horrible fiery crash then fine, great, because you cannot let her tell your boyfriend about what did not just happen, and it’s all so fucking pathetic and tedious and awful.

They don’t talk about that part in fourth grade.

But maybe they should.

I didn’t want to go to Paris. Not that I had a choice or anything, but if someone had bothered to ask me how I wanted to spend the summer before my senior year, I would have voted to take all my closest friends to an amazing beach house in California or Florida or something and spend the summer lying out and having fun. Realistically, though — because while my family is comfortable, we’re definitely not beach house comfortable — I would have opted just to stay with my best friends in Willow Grove. Lacey, Nikki, and I would spend our days in the good chairs at the pool (now that we were seniors, we could claim the best spots) and nights hanging out together with our group of friends. And on the weekends, when he was free from his internship at his father’s law office, Jake and I would go anywhere we could be alone, whether that meant hanging out in his basement or on the golf course behind his house or even just driving around the dark country roads. Because even though Iowa isn’t the most exciting place in the world, I would rather be with my friends at home than be all alone in stupid Paris, where I’d been treated like slave labor and everything smelled bad.

Seeing as how I wasn’t given a choice, though, I have to admit there was a tiny part of me that had hoped Paris would work its magic on me, and I’d come home at the end of the summer all Sabrina-ed up, transformed from prom queen runner-up to elegant, worldly Audrey Hepburn–esque homecoming queen. Not that I was mad at Lacey for winning prom queen last spring — we were best friends, so her winning was almost as good as me winning. I just figured that it was my turn to be in the spotlight, and if Paris could help, then at least I could get one good thing out of my summer.

But even though the only fashion choices I had made involved choosing new clothes for the baby after she’d pooped through her diaper, up to that last morning in Paris, I kept a small shred of hope that the city would transfer some of its elegance and allure to me.

Ten minutes into my triumphant return to Iowa, that plan did not seem to be working.

Instead of sweeping across the jet bridge into the airport as I’d imagined — fresh, cool, newly adult — I hobbled behind an old man who had smashed my toes with his cane. The flight from Paris to Chicago had been bad enough — I’d been pinned between the window and an enormously fat man, my shoulder pressed against the plastic airplane wall in an effort to make myself as small and contained as possible to avoid any further contact with the masses of flesh hanging over our shared armrest. Our plane circled Chicago for almost an hour, sweeping out over Lake Michigan and back, due to traffic on the tarmac or who knows what, but by the time we finally landed, I had to sprint across the airport in four-inch heels, push my way through customs, jump on a stupid train thing to get from the international terminal to the whole other side of the airport, and then run all the way to the end of the concourse. I arrived sweaty, panting, and bruised from where my bag kept hitting me as I ran, only to be seated directly in front of a screaming baby whose every breath gave me PTSD flashbacks to the summer, with Mrs. Easton crying and Mr. Easton yelling and the baby screaming its red little face off. Getting stomped on by Gramps was a fantastic finale to the whole hideous thing.