by Jacqueline Dodd

Created on: September 01, 2008   Last Updated: January 23, 2010

The first time I ever got drunk was at 16 years old at a friend's cottage. I'd gone up with my best girlfriend and two guys we were friends with from school. A couple of them - determined to turn it into a proper party - had somehow managed to smuggle some bottles out of their parents' liquor cabinets and sneak them into their bags. I sampled a little bit of everything that night. My friend Nick was making the drinks for me and he'd be right there at my side as soon as I drained my glass, asking me what I'd like him to make for me next. Each time I told him to surprise me. I must have ended up having at least half a dozen drinks made from three or four different kinds of liquor that night and I was a wreck. I was laughing uncontrollably one minute and crying the next, climbing on the large rocks by the pond, falling on my face, laying in the grass, running around in circles and generally making a complete idiot of myself. I paid for it the next day, like anyone who goes on a drinking binge of those kind of proportions and though I knew I'd acted like a fool the night before, I liked the effect the alcohol had had on me. I'm normally an introvert, the person in the group who stands by and listens to everyone else tell their stories, laughs and comments when necessary, but shares nothing of their own unless asked. It was nice for once to be the life of the party, to be the one everyone else was paying attention to and most of all to just be carefree.

I didn't think much about drinking again until I moved from Mississauga to my dad's house up north later that summer. I lived in Alcona, which was in Innisfil - a town within a town. Alcona's "downtown" area was one long road, dotted with independently owned video stores, pizza places, convenience stores, a Home Hardware and a Tim Hortons, which was the central meeting point and hangout spot for the high school kids. It was - and still is - a place overrun with bored teenagers who have nothing to do and nowhere to go. The group of friends I fell into when I moved there and started school were all heavy pot smokers. I never really took a liking to that. That's not to say that I didn't smoke, because I did and probably more than my fair share at that, but I could never get the kind of enjoyment out of it that the rest of them did. When I started dating my boyfriend I ended up spending a lot of time with his group of friends, a lot more than I spent with my own. They knew an older guy who was a bit of a hanger-on and

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