The Things We Share

My sister Olivia and I black out together, two hundred miles apart in West Virginia. I, in Morgantown. Her, in Hurricane. She sneaks a water bottle filled with vodka into the first high school football game of the school year. A trick I never taught her but did all the same. She takes shots before it starts in the front seat of her best friend’s car. She decides to pass on the blunt he and another guy are smoking. Her mouth is already half-numb. I lounge on a friend’s pee-stained couch, throwing back shots, nodding to the song I’d been begging to hear all night. The room smells of maple syrup and dog hair. Of motionlessness. Of something stuck. August air in Morgantown is hot, sticky, like half-eaten candy left in a car. I’m wearing next to nothing, my bare legs covered in bruises. A fall here, a fall there. 

Olivia stumbles into the stadium. The night air is crisp. Cop cars chirp, flash warning lights. Students moan in the stands, proud parents shouting their kid’s names around cupped hands. The air is saturated with fried dough and fake sugar. She’s still tan from her summer runs. She wears two French braids and a red sweatshirt, her cheeks rosy with drink. Parents huddle beneath plush blankets and ring cowbells. Her friends hold her up, laugh, and she laughs with them. Red-painted stomachs and faces line the stadium. A wall of bodies. She puts her hands out for balance when she finds a place on the crowded bleachers. She grasps at the air, finds nothing.    

Beats pulse. I drop to the ground, twisting my waist in a way that screams, Look at me. I spin, moving my hands around as if pushing off gravity. The voices of college students, walking from house party to house party down the college street, rise and fall. A frenzied symphony. My friends laugh. I laugh with them. I fall into a recliner, reaching for my drink. My red lipstick has started to fade. I wander into the kitchen. I want another drink. I don’t want my vision to return. The walls are fuzzy. I hold out my hands for balance, find nothing. Olivia stops breathing.

* * *

I was sixteen when I had my first drink. I wish I knew what compelled me to try it, but I do know that I sought it out. Most of my friends weren’t ready to venture into the realm of partying yet. They were content to play spotlight and go swimming all summer; I was desperate for a taste of danger. At the time, it was Smirnoff straight from the bottle with a Dr. Pepper chaser in a friend-of-a-friend’s apartment while his family wasn’t home. I was tired of being seen as a goody-two-shoes. I was tired of trying to count on God to get me out of my parent’s house. I don’t know what I was thinking; perhaps, I tried my first drink because I was tired of thinking, too.  

* * *

My father texts me the morning after the football game. I nurse a strong cocktail, hoping to combat my ongoing hangover. My friends crack eggs into a hot pan while I sit at their small, wooden table, looking at my phone. My anxiety is high, heart palpitating. My hands shake. My body is not built to hold the things I demand of it. One drink turns to three. I lose attention in the process of getting lit. I’m not good at leaving things alone. Self-control. But today has been especially difficult. My breathing is labored. My head is foggy, thoughts leading and hard to quiet.  

How r u doing? he asks. Did you get your mom’s text about Livie?  

There’s a lump in my throat. No. Why?  

I’ve heard time decelerates before we die. Research says the sensation stems from panic, our heart rate slowing. Stops. 

The whole bottle. 

I imagine: saltwater taffy being turned and worked like new muscle over steel limbs. 

ER. Ambulance. 

Stretching out an adjusting body in a hot bath.  

Suspension. Rough night.  

My body buzzes. I try to register what’s happened while I wasn’t paying attention.  

She’s okay.  

His words register at a snail’s pace, my reaction the same. I think of my father, a man whose main goal in life was achieving comfortability, stability, how in becoming the women my sister and I turned out to be, we make his peace impossible.  

Are you? I ask.  

The clouds are gray and heavy. A father bikes his daughter in a sidecar over a pothole-riddled road. Outside, a dog yelps. 

* * *

Drinking, unlike most things, is easy to predict. Here is what I know: Nine beers will put me on my ass. After polishing off a bottle of whiskey, I can plan on scarring both knees. Maybe sprain a wrist. Wine nights mean puking early into the morning, the color so close to blood that it almost scares me.  I do it anyway, ask my body to take it, because I know what waits on the other end of sober: Nowhere but a place I do not want to live. Nowhere but a place I live in alone. Nowhere, which is to say, here with myself.  

* * *

“Are we drinking tonight?” I ask my friends.  

A question, but permission, too. It’s a holiday, I plan on arguing. A bottle of cabernet is like, aesthetically necessary for autumn. It’s been a long day, am I right? When I hear yes, I am relieved. I am ashamed to know I would have still done so with a no. It’s Thanksgiving season in Morgantown, finally November cold after months of unnaturally warm weather. Me and my friends keep wondering what we did to deserve such blue skies. Two months have passed since my sister collapsed in tandem with me, so far away. In one week, we’ll be together again, both her high school and my university out on break. I try not to think about how she’s doing. I try not to think about how we will spend our time together without drinking.  

The process of preparing the food for Friendsgiving, I reason, will require at least one glass of wine, so I pour one. Olivia’s been on house arrest all holiday, growing angsty and bored. Our mother wields a tight hold over who Olivia can see and when. My cup fills. I can’t help but think my sister deserves this. I can’t help but remember the holding cell where I slept freshman year after stumbling down frat row, wasted. I can’t help but remember the ER, the SANE nurse, the photos and statements I gave months earlier. How they asked, “Had you been drinking?” like it was a trick question. I’m afraid for her. I’m afraid for myself. 

It smells of garlic and rosemary. In the oven, the loaf of bread I folded by hand starts to brown and rise. Swirling the glass, I imagine a chorus line of women in red fishnets, hiking up their knees as if to say, Look at me. When I sip, I do so carefully. I try to remember my last high school football game. I can’t. I wonder if I’d been drinking. My teeth and lips stain almost immediately. I’m hungry.

* * *

The first time Olivia drank, she was thirteen. At a sleepover, she and her friends mixed vodka and juice, laughed about how bad beer tasted. I imagine her and this group of girls practicing cartwheels in a carpeted basement, playing hip hop they picked up in their older sibling’s cars, shushing one another with pink-ringed mouths and bright eyes. When I ask Olivia to describe that night, she tells me she doesn’t remember much. I push, afraid. Can you tell me why you did it? Please, I think, don’t let it be me. It was, she says, just something we’d seen people do and it seemed fun. I stiffen in my seat. Seen people like who? She replies quickly. Older friends who ran cross country with me and what not. I resist the urge to cry. So, I ask, it wasn’t me? Her response both relieves me and breaks my heart. No, Manda. I was always going to drink. I tell her I love her. I let her be.

* * *

My father lies sprawled across his bed on his stomach, face pressed close to an iPad. The sound of virtual warriors vying for control of an online fantasy kingdom fills the hall. He lifts his head when I walk past his room.  

“Hey,” he says. “Don’t drink anything when your mother and I leave you alone with Olivia, okay?”  

It’s Thanksgiving break. I’ve been back home for two days.  

“Jesus,” I reply. “I wasn’t going to.”  

It’s been two days since my last drink.  

When my parents leave Tuesday to pick up our other sister from college, Olivia and I are left to occupy ourselves. We decide shopping is a good way to pass the time. Despite the cold, I keep the window ajar, smoking as we wind down back roads to town. We nod our heads to blaring rap on the radio. Tire-less trucks and cows rest alongside our one-lane road. A forest of naked trees blur beyond our windows. A church sign promises salvation. Olivia glances at me and adjusts in her seat. I can tell she’s waiting for me to offer her a drag.  

She reminds me of someone, our mother tells me often, wiggling her brows in my direction. I wave her off.  

Olivia taps the window switch. Her baggy blue jeans pool at her sides. She tucks a loose curl behind her ear. Her tight brown curls erupt in a mass around her shoulders. I ask her to tell me about school. I want to ask, “Are you okay?” But I don’t.  

“I can’t stand being here,” she tells me. “Last summer I was never home. It was the best time of my life.” 

“Yeah, and you ruined it by getting in trouble,” I reply. “I went all through high school without mom ever knowing about anything I did.” 

“I haven’t done anything in two months,” she says. “Chill.”  

“What, two months? Big deal. You’re not supposed to do that at all.” I can hear my voice rising. I recalibrate.  

“I’m just saying,” I try again, “don’t be stupid.”  

She pulls on her seatbelt, turns up the radio.  

“I could say the same to you.”  

* * *

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I polish off a liter of wine before nine. Olivia hides upstairs with her boyfriend. I found out hours earlier that he was the same boy she’d gone with to that first game.  

Earlier, she’d angrily slammed a door on me after I told her I wasn’t going out, which according to our father, meant that she, too, wouldn’t be leaving the house. By the time she convinced our parents to let her boyfriend visit and had come back from picking him up, I was sloshed.  

My mom and dad are in their bedroom, watching a sitcom on my father’s iPad. Holding the last of my bottle, I waltz in, head swimming. My grin  sloppy, wide. Like I’vfe just fallen in love. But I’m out of alcohol. I tell my parents that I’ve decided to meet a friend for a drink in town.  

“You can’t drive,” my father tells me.   

“Olivia’s taking care of me,” I tell them. “Aren’t you, Liv?” I yell.  

I hear my sister groan through the floorboards.  

“Fine,” she grunts.  

She never tells me no.  

* * *

Olivia’s boyfriend sits quietly in the passenger side of our mother’s car. I routinely reach across him to blast the radio to full volume while dancing in the back seat. I don’t want him to forget I am here. That I am, despite my fuck-upness, watching. I poke at my sister, belting out lyrics to songs we both love in her ear as she drives. The sky is clear and dark. The car’s headlights illuminate lines of saplings and stray deer between them like a spotlight moving through a sleepy crowd. The next home won’t come for miles. She smiles unwillingly until breaking into laughter. I pass her a smoke in good faith, wondering if she is truly happy. 

* * *

Olivia’s sophomore year of high school. My first year of graduate school in Morgantown. I was visiting home for Christmas. We were drunk on Kool Aid cocktails, cheap vodka, and champagne. Olivia rolled on the ground, curled like a pill bug, cackling at impressions I made of our family. We spilled popcorn on the couch, playfully shoving each other for control of the bowl.  I pulled pieces out from the dirty cushions, and she ate them. We built a fort from our mother’s quilts leading up the stairs that connected her bedroom and the rest of the house. Family photos taken ten years ago lined the walls. My mother’s devotional was open on her desk. We strung up a thin sheet to cover us that kept falling down. Our limbs were slow and haphazard trapped beneath the white. We’d scoured the house for pillows quietly so our parents wouldn’t hear. We fought for our tent’s little leg room. Side by side, we watched a soused, flustered Miriam disparage her husband and family for the first time on a stage in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Olivia’s small computer. We shared a glass of wine. I fell asleep first. She prodded me gently.  

“Come on,” Olivia whispered. “It’s time for bed.”  

I followed her lead to her room like I had so many times before curling under her comforter. We slept side by side through the night. 

* * *

Olivia turns down Sam’s Fork Road expertly, as if she’d never failed her driver’s test. Her elbow sits close to her boyfriend’s. I think of all the baseball hat and hoodie wearing boys I’d driven over this road with.  

“I barely remember you growing up,” Olivia said to me earlier that day while out, trying to kill time.  

We’d pulled into a Goodwill. The sky had been gray, heavy with rain. Downtown Charleston storefronts were mostly abandoned. Homeless stragglers wandered the streets, plastic bags attached at their hips. Just a few miles north, a second-rate metropolis buzzed, neon lights and new cars flashing between plazas. 

“When you finally came home from friend’s houses, it was such a thing. Your incense burning, art all over the walls. You were always in your room, a great mystery.”  

Those words hurt. I loved her even in my solace. “Don’t you remember all the times I sat with you in time out? I was always on your side.” 

“That doesn’t count,” she snipped. “I was a little kid. I wasn’t a person yet.”  

I try and fail to keep my head upright. The potholes on Sam’s Fork bounce us up and down. I imagine my sister driving alone the twenty odd minutes home, on dark roads after dropping me off. Eight years stand between us. It was always easy to forget who was the youngest. Until that football game when she passed out, sisterhood always seemed straightforward. What’s mine is hers: an oversized T-shirt, long legs. What’s hers is mine: restlessness, a glass of wine.  

My sister pulls into the empty church parking lot. My friend will be here to pick me up soon. Streetlamps glow, a portent. Her boyfriend gets out of the car. He kisses her goodbye. I screech at the timid spectacle of it all. I beat the dashboard and he hurries off. His baseball cap gets smaller and smaller as he walks off into the night. I tell my sister I like him—a lie. I have the virtue of experience, the kind of knowledge one only can learn through time. He will hurt her, and I will not be able to help. She smiles sheepishly. She wants my approval. I need hers.  

The air hums with quiet static, a radiator left on too long. Our road home ribbons south of where we sit. Construction trucks idle across the road. We wait in silence for what feels like forever. The sound of gravel crunching under tires stirs us. Headlights like owl eyes stare us down. We’re momentarily blinded and for a split second, I contemplate ditching my plans, in going home with my sister, in asking for permission to listen. There’s never enough time to know all the things I want to know. There will always be gaps in our memory, parts of each other we will never be able to access fully. I like to think so long as we’re both here, we will keep striving to find ways to fill those spaces, to respond when called upon, to call when we hear no response.  

I pray that the car pulling up is not my friend who’s come to get me. Let him forget, I ask the wind. Let it be someone sent from the church for trespassing. Give me an excuse to do the right thing while I want to do it, too. I imagine a wiry woman pushing up her glasses, a gold cross glinting against a wool flannel, tapping on our window.  

What are you two thinking, she’d ask us, sitting out here alone?