Where It All Began

My introduction to hard alcohol was when I was about 14, freshman year of high school. Much of that first alcohol blitz is a blur actually. It wasn’t the first time I had drank at all; we sipped wine at various family holiday dinners etc.,  as many kids do, but this was the first time of setting out to drink with a peer with the intention of getting drunk.

I don’t know how Shannon and I even got on the subject of drinking, we weren’t even very good friends. We had never hung out much in school or outside of school, never chatted on the phone, never went to each other’s house; I can’t even remember her last name.  I do recall Shannon had said she’d bring some sort of booze to school the next day. Her dad was out of town, so she was basically stealing it from him. I don’t even think she asked me for money; I guess since she didn’t have to pay for it, she wasn’t worried about it.

The next image that I remember about the whole incident is us in the girl’s bathroom of our high school, passing back and forth this bottle of…..funny, I haven't a clue what it was we were actually drinking-I just remember it went down quite warm and I tingled, allot.

I liked that tingle, it felt good. I felt I was doing something very adult, and boy that feeling, almost like a cross between a tickle and a quiver  both running through my body as well as my brain; it was a feeling that  I knew right then I would want to experience more than once.

I recollect it being just a half day of school; mid-term finals, I think.  The only class that comes to memory is the Algebra class I attended after we had our little mini party in the bathroom.  It was my worst subject, I wouldn’t have done much better that a “C” on it anyway, and was quite surprised later to find that I actually got a “D” rather than a fail.

What’s even more amazing, is how a fourteen year old girl could get drunk for the first time, drunk enough to even throw up at some stage (in the bathroom fortunately), and be at school, attending classes, taking tests, probably conversing with people and to not have a single teacher notice. Turns out this was setting some sort of a pattern for me, though I never drank on school premises again, I did manage to get away with skipping a few classes, cheat on a few tests during my years at high school and then in later years did various other drugs and much alcohol without getting caught. I was good at hiding my addictions, and I learned I was good at it at the age of fourteen.