More of Koren's revelations
Even though I'm no wild child, I can't imagine a goody-goody world in which how closely a person adheres to the rules is a measure for how well she lives.
Later, I'll be able to see that this is how it all starts. I concede to shifting my personality, just a hair, to observe the standards I think the situation calls for. From now on, every time I drink I'll enhance various aspects of myself, willing myself intoa state where I am a little bit brighter, funnier, more outgoing, or vibrant. The process will be so incremental that I'll have no gauge of how much it will change me. I will wake up one day in my twenties like a skewed tV screen on which the hues are all wrong. My subtleties will be exaggerated and my overtones will be subdued. My entire personality will be off-color.
That's the thing about social drinking: In the end, it's the drinking that creates the scene, not the other way around. You grow to relish the buzz, regardless of the situation. Once you're there, really there inside that moment, with its neighborly warmth and conversation, it's hard to tell what's responsible for producing emotion. What's responsible for the light-headed feeling? Is it the Molson, or the boy who is running his fingers through the ends of your hair? Are you chatty because you're drunk, or because you're connecting with someone on a level that you have never before experienced? To an outsider, the distinction is an easy one to make. But when you're fifteen and female, when you experience these feelings first and later only when you are drinking, it becomes a question of which came first, the liquor or the [Greg]?
I ask [Natalie] if she's okay, and it's a leading quetsion. I am trying to make her agree so I can stop my own nauseous feeling, the one that tells me this is my fault. I say, "[Natalie], nobody did anything to you, did they?" "I don't think so," she says, and her forehead crinkles up, as though she's considering the possibility for the first time. "But, then, I don't remember everything." It will be years before I know the horror and shame that make [Natalie] cringe. I will have to experience it myself before I can understand that there are two parts of the mind that constrain memory after nights like this: one that wants to dig it up, and another that wants to push it deeper down. In college, I will learn about boys and blackouts firsthand, about the way the thigs you can't remember can terrorize you.