When we were thirteen, we read in a women’s health magazine that the human stomach was vaguely the size of a fist, but that it could shrink or stretch according to what you put inside of it. So, if you were a real fatty, it might be because you had stretched your stomach out by eating too much. Logically, then, to shrink your stomach back down, and thus solve all of your social problems, what you had to do was starve yourself. Or not starve yourself exactly, but eat very small amounts, like a cup of cherry yogurt for breakfast and a cup of apricot yogurt for lunch. If you could withstand the pain of this initial reduction, you would soon have a polite, fist-sized stomach and your hunger would abate. According to our biology textbooks, the human heart was the size of a fist as well. That’s a lot of organs of similar size punching around in one torso.  

That was also the year that Kimmy’s hot older brother, De’Ante, got kicked out of Wayne State University. He was suddenly always around, talking funny, walking funny. He even fell down the front stairs of the Ferndale Public Library. Luckily, my mother was driving past at the time. She saved De’Ante from Larry the cop and gave him a ride home across Nine Mile. Our friend group didn’t really understand this incident, but our parents started to pressure us to get better grades in school. They said it had something to do with college. Something to do with drinking.  

     We had heard that people drank a lot in England so we decided to approach our new classmate, Lolita, who had just moved here from there. She was sophisticated, she had a much older boyfriend, her last name started with a vowel. We cornered her in the schoolyard and asked her what she knew. She said that the people who drank the most were very strong, like her mum’s ex-boyfriend back in Hull.  

“He was a brawler,” she said. “He developed a real bloody tolerance!”  

When we asked her what that meant, she snapped her Bubbalicious chewing gum and said that tolerance was when you could “drink a lot in one go.” She was so pretty. We gave her some Sailor Moon trading cards as a thank you and went away puzzled. 

How much drinking constituted a lot in one go? We looked up “tolerance” in the Oxford English Dictionary because Oxford was in England, right? Tolerance seemed to have something to do with endurance, like long-distance running. Maybe this was about stretching your stomach to hold more water. 

We began meeting at night. We did our Math and Language Arts homework right after school. Then, while our mothers were at their night jobs and our lame-o divorced fathers were at the Tiki Lounge searching for their second wives, we had our real study group in Kimmy’s garage. I was nominated to be the official coach because I was the best at math and measurements. I was also the most disciplined. I was the Choir secretary. I did ballet. I had a lot of self-control. I had a little brother who always broke my toys and I didn’t even get mad at him. 

As coach, my job consisted of holding the stopwatch and yelling. My friends stood in two neat rows and I faced them. First, we stretched. We touched our toes and did side bends to open our abdominal walls. Then we practiced balance, standing on one foot then the other. I went down the rows and filled everyone’s measuring cups with metallic water from the hose. When everyone had water in their cups, I returned to the front of the garage and blew my whistle. Then the drinking began.  

We developed exercises, a training regimen. We drank at intervals, against the sonic backdrop of the whistle, pulse gulp pulse gulp tweet. When Shanice’s mother got home from work and yelled at her, Shanice ran to us, pulse gulp pulse gulp. When De’Ante came into Kimmy’s room at night and scared her, Kimmy had us pulse gulp pulse gulp tweet stop drop and give me twenty. We understood why grown-ups stayed out after a hard day, why they all said they needed a drink. Somehow, drinking together made all the troubles lighter, easier to carry with us.  

Every day when I walked down the school hallway from fourth period to lunch, I counted how many gulps of air I could take and tried to sync them up with my paces. I spaced out at the drinking fountain during gym period, as the line grew longer and longer behind me. I thought about math in terms of water (128 fluid ounces in a gallon), history in terms of water (the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States), literature in terms of water (Moby Dick), myself in terms of water (the human body is 50-65% water). Lolita sat in front of me in English class and when she glanced back, her eyes were blue, which was the color of water. Lolita’s hair was long, which was similar to water because water flowed and so did Lolita’s hair. What would it feel like to be that wad of gum she crushed between her teeth, to be a gulp of water, sliding down her throat?  

By two weeks into training, our group had gotten considerably smaller. Chan started soccer practice and Shanice left us for the Science Olympiad. Tiff said she had to go to the bathroom all day long and just couldn’t hack it. Now the group consisted of exactly two people: Kimmy and me.  

One day at lunch, when Kimmy and I were counting how many sips of water fit into  the school water cups, Lolita came by.  

“I’m havin’ a party on Friday ah-fter school. There will be boys there!”  

Kimmy and I never got invited to parties. Kimmy’s mom, Denise, had decreed that Kimmy was not allowed to go to co-ed gatherings until high school. Or else. Out of solidarity, I refused to go anywhere without her, my Kimmy.  

“We have practice on Friday after school,” I piped up.  

“H’what time?” Lolita drawled.  

“After school.”  

     “Pit-ee,” Lolita curled her orange hair around her finger. “I know some-wahn who has a crush on you, Kim.” Lolita winked at Kimmy, who looked down and blushed. Kimmy’s leg was jiggling like crazy. I put my knee against hers to stop it.  

“Come ah-fter if you like.” Lolita ran her hand across the line of my shoulders and sauntered off to the next table. The back of her T-shirt said Pow! in cartoon letters.  

That night, Kimmy and I both broke our personal records for most water drunk in the shortest amount of time. Normally, as coach, I would never dismiss us early, but we had earned a break. De’Ante let us watch The Simpsons with him, but we couldn’t really pay attention. We had to use the bathroom so many times throughout the program. As the show finally finished, I ran out again and had a long, satisfying pee. When I opened the door, De’Ante was standing in the doorway. 

He blocked me with his shoulders and held me there, against the frame, his breath  radiating a fruity-sour mucus smell. He held me there, held me there, held me there. Then he laughed and let me go. I ran upstairs to say goodbye to Kimmy. She was in her bedroom trying on a T-shirt I’d never seen before, a graphic of Oksana Baiul with her ice skates covered in sequins. Kimmy flinched when she saw me, then said “Ta!” in her best British accent. I backed out of the room.  

Kimmy was quiet all week. We didn’t talk about the party or Lolita. On Friday, we sat at the back of health class while Miss Skiptunis explained that “locker room rush” was slang for drugs, and if anyone offered it to us in gym class we should tell a teacher. In our gym locker room, everyone just tried to sneak peeks at each other’s pubes. 

When I looked over at Kimmy’s Trapper Keeper, she wasn’t even taking notes, just doodling hearts with the words, “I don’t care.” Next to me, Abel Wang bounced up and down in his left-handed writing desk and muttered something about hydraulics.  

After school, I ran to Kimmy’s house like always, but she wasn’t there. I sat on her front porch, wicked with climbing roses her mother had trained around the door, like a love-mouth that could swallow you whole. Kimmy didn’t come back. Pretty soon, De’Ante pulled into the  driveway, home from his job at the Party Store. He wasn’t allowed back at college anymore. 

“What are you doing here?” He shut the car door.  

“Duh. Homework.” I had been scratching dry skin off of my knees and wondered if he could see.  

He came closer and that funny smell filled my lungs again, choking me with its  sweetness. I leaned away.  

“Kimmy said you guys were going to your house.”  

In the distance, I saw Kimmy and De’Ante’s mom, Denise, rounding the corner in her Chevy Nova. How could I have forgotten? On the nights when Denise needed to sleep off her nursing job, we practiced at my house. Kimmy would be waiting on my front porch. I started to run.  

Kimmy and I lived just far enough apart that when I ran between houses, I got winded and my joints got hot. Hard flecks of phlegm pooled in the saliva at the back of my throat. This is how I felt when we ran the mile in gym class for the annual Presidential Fitness Test, when they  made us play sports at school.  

I doubled over in the middle of the street. I could see the sewer rushing below me through the small holes in the manhole cover. Niagara Falls flows at a rate of 567,811 liters per second. In 1978, a water-borne vehicle broke the official speed barrier at 317 mph. I tried to catch my breath.  

“Oy!” I looked up and saw Lolita standing in the doorway of a white house. “I didn’t think yew’d come.”  

“What?”  

“My part-ee.” Lolita opened the door. “Everywan’s here ah-lready.”  

  It wouldn't hurt to look inside her house, just this once. I had never been to a co-ed party before, yes because of Kimmy, but mostly because I had never been invited to one. I had heard about them, like that time that Des went over to Lisa’s house and they all hung out in the tulip tree with Anthony and Sean. Or the legendary game of Capture the Flag that everyone still talked about, the one I missed because I was home helping with my little brother.  

Inside Lolita’s house, kids were everywhere, playing video games, and making out. The air was tangy with the smell of B.O. This guy, Joey, sidled up to us. 

“Do you want to do a Statue of Liberty shot?” he asked.  

“Joey,” Lolita drawled, “You haf t’help me with these Americanisms.”  

“You got a lighter, Lolita?”  

“Well, yeah.” She pulled it out. “But no fire in the house, my Mum’s rule.” Joey pulled us through the kitchen door. On the back porch, he poured two shots of whiskey.  

“Okay, Lolita, dip two fingers in this.”  

“Wait a minute,” she said, waving her fingers away from Joey like a prize. “Wha’ d’you think this is? You better tell me wha’s goin’ on first.”  

“You’re such a baby.” He laughed. “You stick your fingers in the shot, then I light them  on fire. You hold them up like a torch and do the shot at the same time.”  

  “You ligh’ my fingaz on fire?”  

  “The alcohol on your fingers. It’s cool. It’s science.” Joey held the shots out. “Let’s make you an American, Lo.”  

We drank, we drank, and it wasn’t anything like practice, there was nothing to measure and nothing to count. When we were good and drunk, Lolita pushed her tongue into my mouth. I tasted her burnished spit, felt her shell-pink gums with my tongue, licked the salty snot running down her beautiful lips. I could smell her breath, that same fruity-sour stink that I’d smelled on  De’Ante, mingling with her melon shampoo. Then the boys were clapping and Lolita was curtsying and I realized her eyes had been open the whole time. Only mine had been closed.  

I swam through the rooms in dark slow-motion. I floated through the kitchen with its piles of clinking beer cans, back through the living room, past the mechanical screams of Mortal Kombat, past Nick and Marge hooking up on the couch and towards the front door. There, in the hallway, under the umbrella stand, was my Kimmy, in that stupid Oksana Baiul t-shirt, half passed out on the rug. I grabbed her by the arms and dragged her body onto the porch and across the lawn. I smacked her for getting dressed up and going to the party without me, for ever thinking we could go anywhere not together, and I tried to get her to smack me, too. And then she was awake and puking in the gutter and the smell of her puke made me puke, too. We puked a good long time and no one’s mother came out of the house to rebuke us.