Sometimes it helps. It sort of breaks the ice and you can be what they all want you to be and what you imagine yourself to be. It changes you, see. It makes you braver than soldiers and you can take on the world with a drink or two in you. Like at Kitten’s party that time and there was this boy I liked and I told Easy Barbara and she said he was so goddam pretty she wanted to lick him all over. I couldn’t compete with that, so I necked a couple of bottles of beer and I undid a few buttons on my blouse, just enough so you could see the lace edge of my bra, and I went right up to that boy and I kissed him without any warning. I couldn’t have done that without the beer.
‘Course, when I woke up and the morning was hurting my eyes, and the boy was laying beside me in the bed and he wasn’t wearing a stitch, well then I regretted what I had been. I made him come with me to the clinic and I got the emergency pill so I wasn’t pregnant. He didn’t look so pretty sitting in the clinic waiting-room with all the lights so white and so bright it was like the day was sheltering there.
And there was that time after school and we were up at Markie’s pool and this boy just stripped off and dived in. I was four or five drinks down and I just laughed and I shrugged my shoulders and then did the same. There’s pictures I don’t recognize and you can see everything and there’s me and a dozen boys all punching the water and laughing and me in the middle with nothing to cover who I am.
I’ve got one of those pictures on my phone. It was sent to me by this boy called Tommy. He’s a bit of a jerk, but in his message he says I am the prettiest girl in all of Hatton, which is where we live. And though I know it’s me in the picture, it doesn’t look like me. I’m laughing and you can see my tits, and there’s water all foaming about me, and I do look pretty like Tommy says.
Then Tommy tells me his parents are away for the weekend and he sends me a picture of beer in a box, maybe two dozen, and he invites me round. I go for the beer, and to be that person in the picture Tommy sent me. I go to be brave and stupid and not care. We’re both a little quiet to start with and he’s got nothing to say and I almost leave right away. But I like the taste of the beer. It’s a little sweet and it’s so cold it burns as it goes down, and it’s smooth, too. I drink the first beer in one slow tilt of the bottle and then move onto a second and a third.
Tommy’s got music playing by this time and he’s turned it up loud and all the lights in the house are out. He gets me up to dance and he’s got things to say then. And he talks like he’s had things to say all along and he’s been holding back, and now all his words come pouring out of him. And he makes me laugh and the dim yellow light from the street falls into the room where we’re dancing and in that light he doesn’t look like the jerk that he is and I reckon the light changes me, too.
Then he just comes out with it. Stuff like he said on the phone before. How he thinks I’m the prettiest girl in all of Hatton, and he says he loves me, he really does. More than beans and rice, he says. More than money or cars. He says things to make a girl’s legs weak and in that moment I want him to be always saying those things and I want to remember everything in the morning when I wake. I want this all to be real and not just the drink talking, but I know what’s what and I give myself up to the music and the beer and to Tommy’s clumsy hands and to not remembering anything.
Patricia Ann McNair 
Sometimes it helps. It sort of breaks the ice and you can be what they all want you to be and what you imagine yourself to be. It changes you, see. It makes you braver than soldiers and you can take on the world with a drink or two in you. Like at Kitten’s party that time and there was this boy I liked and I told Easy Barbara and she said he was so goddam pretty she wanted to lick him all over. I couldn’t compete with that, so I necked a couple of bottles of beer and I undid a few buttons on my blouse, just enough so you could see the lace edge of my bra, and I went right up to that boy and I kissed him without any warning. I couldn’t have done that without the beer.
‘Course, when I woke up and the morning was hurting my eyes, and the boy was laying beside me in the bed and he wasn’t wearing a stitch, well then I regretted what I had been. I made him come with me to the clinic and I got the emergency pill so I wasn’t pregnant. He didn’t look so pretty sitting in the clinic waiting-room with all the lights so white and so bright it was like the day was sheltering there.
And there was that time after school and we were up at Markie’s pool and this boy just stripped off and dived in. I was four or five drinks down and I just laughed and I shrugged my shoulders and then did the same. There’s pictures I don’t recognize and you can see everything and there’s me and a dozen boys all punching the water and laughing and me in the middle with nothing to cover who I am.
I’ve got one of those pictures on my phone. It was sent to me by this boy called Tommy. He’s a bit of a jerk, but in his message he says I am the prettiest girl in all of Hatton, which is where we live. And though I know it’s me in the picture, it doesn’t look like me. I’m laughing and you can see my tits, and there’s water all foaming about me, and I do look pretty like Tommy says.
Then Tommy tells me his parents are away for the weekend and he sends me a picture of beer in a box, maybe two dozen, and he invites me round. I go for the beer, and to be that person in the picture Tommy sent me. I go to be brave and stupid and not care. We’re both a little quiet to start with and he’s got nothing to say and I almost leave right away. But I like the taste of the beer. It’s a little sweet and it’s so cold it burns as it goes down, and it’s smooth, too. I drink the first beer in one slow tilt of the bottle and then move onto a second and a third.
Tommy’s got music playing by this time and he’s turned it up loud and all the lights in the house are out. He gets me up to dance and he’s got things to say then. And he talks like he’s had things to say all along and he’s been holding back, and now all his words come pouring out of him. And he makes me laugh and the dim yellow light from the street falls into the room where we’re dancing and in that light he doesn’t look like the jerk that he is and I reckon the light changes me, too.
Then he just comes out with it. Stuff like he said on the phone before. How he thinks I’m the prettiest girl in all of Hatton, and he says he loves me, he really does. More than beans and rice, he says. More than money or cars. He says things to make a girl’s legs weak and in that moment I want him to be always saying those things and I want to remember everything in the morning when I wake. I want this all to be real and not just the drink talking, but I know what’s what and I give myself up to the music and the beer and to Tommy’s clumsy hands and to not remembering anything.