Stray: Memoir of a Runaway

by Tanya Marquardt

Starting on my fourteenth birthday, I wrote “#1” in the upper left-hand corner of the space reserved for Fridays and Saturdays. On the inside of the back jacket, I kept a running tally. The numbers in the Friday and Saturday boxes kept track of how many drinks I’d had each weekend, and the tally on the back page was of how many times I had gotten drunk since my fourteenth birthday. I wanted a very high number, proof that I was hardcore and could out-drink anyone, including my friends, strangers, old rednecks, and high school seniors. Drinking booze became a marathon, and each vodka poured down my gullet felt like a lifesaving elixir, making me feel intensely, tricking me into thinking I was getting in touch with who I really was. I didn’t know it was a lie because it felt good, and I never wanted that good feeling to stop. All I wanted was escape, and I didn’t stop counting until I went to high school. The last number was somewhere near a hundred.

Kyle grabbed Jack’s hand and sat him on his lap. Jack looked awkward but open, looking around with a child’s curiosity. Then, right in front of Mom’s potential in-laws, he said, “Jack, that guy’s not our grandfather. Don’t be calling him shit like that.”

Hamlet’s girlfriend Ophelia drowned herself, “her garments, heavy with their drink . . . to muddy death.” The moment I read that passage I knew. I wanted to die.

The first drink was the best one. The glug sound of the vodka pouring into the huge plastic cup mixed with the fizzing cola sent waves of anticipation through my body.

Liz wiggled out of her bra, her large nipples and massive breasts flopping in the half-light and the pot smoke.

I told myself that it was freeing to live this way, and in a way, it was. I answered to no one. But every Sunday, when I looked down at the meager amount of food that I had scrounged together and laid it on the living room table, I had to talk myself out of a panic attack.

The morning after Sam was expelled, Garret came to school in knee-high boots, black fishnets, a velvet dress, and a cape. His nails were painted black. They matched his lipstick, and his mascara.

And even though I didn’t know what I was doing, and even though I had never been there before, and even though I didn’t know anyone or how to dance at all, I let myself be pulled down the stairs and onto the dance floor. I swayed and reached my arms above my head, the velvet sleeves of Lana’s dress falling against my skin, and turned in a circle and looked up at the neon-blue light tracking across my face. And, just like that, I was in love.

I loved alcohol, craved alcohol. But I hated drugs. The few times I had smoked pot, I had become incapacitated, lying immobile on the floor while shoveling Oreo cookies into my face before passing out. My friends thought it was great, but I didn’t like the idea of losing control of my body. I preferred to be wild with a belly full of booze instead of remembering what happened when I was high and unable to move.

At the end of Adam’s set, he would play my favorite Björk song, “Hyperballad,” as I walked out onto the dance floor, the strobe lights flashing across my face. Björk’s voice would wash over me, and I would tilt my head back and open my mouth, curling upward in absolute joy, the way a turtle opens its mouth to gulp up the rain, drowning in the ecstasy of sensation.