Is there a private
revolution not worth attention? Since
my cup’s not smaller. Since a cat encircles
my legs. Since I get all human on the couch….
–Samuel Amadon

For the first time in my life, i wasn’t doing so well in school. Weekend binge drinking had ambled into a disappointing but moony introduction to sex, and before i knew it i was about to cross another first off my list. Poster children for the “gateway drug” theory we’d read about in our required Life Management Class, my two best friends and i were flopped in bed, staring at a ceiling mapped in glow-in-the-dark stars, waiting for the acid to kick in. The ugliest guy we’d ever seen had sold us some weed earlier that evening, throwing five tabs of acid in for free. i had spent most of my early childhood walking in and out of the tiny numbness of contact highs brought on by the nightly marijuana plume blanketing our “living” room, but i’d never intentionally tried to smoke anything. In other words, i was already nervous of the grass, but acid was completely out of my league. Repulsive, naive associations came to me, and, for a second, they were as convincing as a little red devil appearing in a puff of smoke on my left shoulder might have been. The metalhead from my AP history class who had the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Johnny Got His Gun on permanent rotation, cig breaks in the woods behind the portables, Trapper Keepers emblazoned with hand-drawn band art, tie-dye, androgynes: these things were acid. i was not acid.

i wanted to know what the goth girls were doing on nights like this? i imagined they were drinking tea and smoking clove cigarettes and pulling on yet another lace petticoat as they read T.S. Eliot to each other and combed their long, silky, magenta pigtails. Sick of Saturdays at the beach and bikinis and mini skirts, i secretly idolized their tiny coats that buttoned all the way up to the chin and i just knew they hated orange juice from the carton and sweat pants and Sam and Libby ballet flats as much as i did, even though i was still shopping at Contrampo Casuals. Those girls were on my mind as i palmed the tab of acid, but i knew i would never be like them. My favorite book was the Scarlet Letter and i still liked hip hop. And yeah, i liked the dirty look in my occasional boyfriend’s eyes when he sat down next to me at the campfire behind the abandoned house and passed me a diet Cherry 7up and vodka. When he drove me home from school, the only thing we ever listened to was Don’t Be Cruel, (That’d be the Bobby Brown iteration–not Elvis). i just assumed i was lucky that it wasn’t the Steve Miller Band or Bob Marley–a capitulation so dissatisfying that music has forever become the delicate, punishing, yardstick i wield in my private life. Someone who was otherwise perfect once joked that our split on art school vs rock n roll would probably be the end of us one day, which i immediately dismissed, but his words did conjure a sick prophecy basically along those lines. i’ve left others for much smaller infractions, but how can it not matter? Like tepid sex, it only gets worse.

After what actually had been a lifetime of hoping that a clean toilet or good grades would finally give me the unwavering parental support i craved, i had found a different path to validation. i was also discovering that i liked secrets and trouble, exclusive pacts and passwords. i relished lost time. My best friend and i each had a shoebox full of passed notes hidden at home under our beds. Pages of notes scribbled quickly as we pretended to conjugate verbs or take down new assignments–and i wonder why i still don’t know how to ask the porter to bring up a few more buckets of ice after having taken four years of Spanish in high school. Notes folded up like Turkish wedding rings–secret patterns no one else could reset or unlock. We loved each other like magnets: with the intensity only latchkey kids could summon. Years later, i would find other sisters of the moon–sometimes they were boyfriends or co-workers, sometimes they were books.

Having no idea how acid was supposed to work, we were convinced that he’d given us duds when, five minutes after having taken it, nothing happened. We all fell asleep, and some time later, we all woke back up. Giggling. Understanding for the first time what glow-in-the-dark stars were actually for.