by Jacquelyn Mitchard

1. Start drinking early in the afternoon on Christmas Eve. Come out of the bedroom in a Santa Claus bikini at midnight. After you pass out, forget Santa. Send the kids back into their rooms until noon and tell them Santa was hung over. Laugh. When the kids beg you to stop, tell them to grow up.

2. Pretend it never happened. None of it – the weeping-clown eyes, the shouts and fights, the makeout sessions on the coats in the bedroom with the lady from down the street – never happened. At all.

3. Go out on New Year’s Eve – for three days. There are plenty of Good Humor bars in the refrigerator. And Grandma and Grandpa didn’t leave for Florida yet? Or did they?

4. Nuzzle a waitress’ boobs, even after your friend, the owner of the place, asks you to stop, until your wife and kids get up and walk home. Six miles.

5. Tell your kid he better start on the team. When he does, show up for one game.

6. Talk about how much you drank on vacation the way other people talk about vacation.

7. When your son asks what you’re going to do tonight , say, “I’m going to drink. And you’re going to stay home.”

8. When your daughter, who’s 11, calls you at a dinner party from home to say that someone has broken into the apartment building, tell her to call the cops.

9. When your best friend suggests you slow down, on the night of your birthday, wait until he’s facing the other way and kick him through the TV.

10. Show up at eighth grade graduation, drunk. Show up at high school graduation drunk. Explain that you can’t make it to college graduation.

11. Shout out your requests for Trini Lopez songs so loudly that the bandleader refers to you as “Lawrence Welk and Mrs. Robinson.”

12. When one of the kids is seventeen and gets drunk for the first of three times in her life, throwing up until she’s weak and sobbing, tell her not to worry – everyone feels this way.

13. Be beautiful and charming and funny and complex and inquisitive when you’re sober. Be diminishing, surly, humiliating and cruel when you’re drunk.

14. Die young.

Jacquelyn Mitchard is the author of the number one New York Times bestselling novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, chosen as the first book for Oprah’s Book Club and named by USA Today the second most influential novel of the past 25 years. She has written four other bestsellers and is a contributing editor for Wondertime magazine as well as the author of four novels for young adults. Her new novel, No Time to Wave Goodbye, comes out this week.

by Leah Odze Epstein

I waited a long time for my first drink. I’d had a few sips, swigs, and nips–Manischewitz, at Passover; a wine cooler on a camping trip with friends; whiskey, at an eighth grade sleepover. Still–I never had a proper drink until graduation night, senior year.

Why was I immune to peer pressure–a paragon of willpower who tagged along with her friends while they drank, got drunk, and let loose?  In high school, I mostly avoided parties and I stopped kissing boys, since kissing boys was something you usually did at social gatherings, with the help of alcohol. Did I enjoy standing in the corner at parties, observing the other humans at play? I was shy to start with. I could have used a boost.

But I was petrified I’d end up an alcoholic–like my mother. Or that my parents would send me to drug rehab–like my older sister. As soon as my mother stopped drinking, my parents didn’t let one drop of alcohol cross the threshold of our house. My mother felt that being around alcohol would cause a relapse. She told me about the dangers, for an alcoholic, of having vanilla extract in the kitchen cabinet.  

How did I know I wasn’t a potential alcoholic? What if I had too much, and lost control? Alcohol might make a person go Helter Skelter, like Charles Manson; or it could kill a whole family, like the pair of murderers in Capote’s ”In Cold Blood.” I did not want to fall prey to that serial killer, like my wild-child sister, who pretty much failed high school; or my mother, who spent years trying to get her life back on track. No–I would not veer off the path, a happy idiot, tempted by alcohol’s crooked, beckoning finger. All I had to do was lay low, get good grades, and get into an Ivy League school. Then, I’d be safe.

At my “sibling interview” for the rehab where my sister ended up, they asked me if I drank. I confessed that I’d had a “sip of beer.” They told my sister, who expressed her deep concern. I remember thinking: I might as well have been drinking, all those years. They still suspected me. I knew if I didn’t watch myself, I’d end up in Florida, too–seventeen hours by car from our house in the suburbs of D.C.

Graduation Night, Senior Year: That morning, I’d cut my waist-length hair off, up to my ears. My mother cried, but I was ready to start fresh. The week before, I’d gotten my braces off. At one of the graduation after-parties, I finally allowed myself my first full drink: a bottle of beer. Hadn’t I sailed through high school near the top of my class, gotten into the Ivy League, and escaped the drug rehab? For all that, I deserved a reward.

One beer. Just one.

The first sip tasted bitter but cool, refreshing on a humid June night. In the center of the room stood the boy I loved. I’d always loved him, but he’d never loved me back. I was tame. He was wild. He had a sexy blonde girlfriend who drank and smoked.

I eyed the boy I loved and took one sip of the beer, then another and another, until I tilted my head back to catch the last drops. The beer gave me a pleasant, floating-above-it-all feeling. My body tingled–alive–as if one beer had fertilized all the seeds inside me, and I could finally flower. My secret thoughts gave way to impulses that could finally be acted upon. I walked up to the boy I loved and smiled: Courage in a bottle.

I must have spoken the ancient language of “beer,” because somehow, he and I ended up on the front lawn, my face tilted toward his, poised for a kiss–

Just as he leaned forward to kiss me– his eyes fusing; his face, a dizzying blur–his girlfriend drove up in her car and honked the horn, startling us. “Come on, K!” she called out.

He shrugged his shoulders and off he went. I stood there, alone on the lawn as the car pulled away, my beer buzz crashing down. Later, at our diner hangout, I sobbed to my friends. I thought I was crying about the boy, but now I know I was probably crying about the beer. I didn’t know then the merits of two beers, or that three beers might have erased the disappointment, the humiliation. Blotted it out.

That I learned with my second, third and fourth drinks, only three months later, as a Freshman in college, Night One. I went room to room–greedy–drinking everything I could get my hands on: gin & vodka & rum & beer–until I blacked out.

As the daughter of an alcoholic, I had no concept of moderation. It was either none, or ten. But that’s another story…

Leah Odze Epstein is the co-editor of DRINKING DIARIES.