- Lemonade
Maybe you’re ten years old and manning a lemonade stand with your best friend. You’re wearing a rectangle-shaped lavender sundress you love that will not fit by next summer, because you’re at that age when growth is suddenly relentless and in all the wrong directions. Did you lug your boom box—one of your prized grown-up possessions—to the corner to liven up the scene, turn the radio to Kiss 106.1 and hope they played your favorite Sugar Ray song, the one that sounds like summer in sepia, sickly sweet like lemonade left in the sun? Maybe you let the sounds of summer speak for themselves: the splashes and shouts down at the lake, the gut-lodging bass of passing car stereos, the sputter and buzz of weekend yard work. The background noise, the sleepy-warm sun, the smells—barbecue smoke and stagnant shallow water and overripe blackberries and cigarettes mixed with a sour earthy drift you can’t yet identify as marijuana—it all makes you thirsty. You could run back down the block to your house and fill a water bottle. But the rush of commerce, that dopamine zing of each coin’s plunk, keeps you tethered to your post. So instead, you sip from your own supply, restrained slurps from a tiny paper cup growing mushy in your hand. Back in the kitchen, you must have mixed the lemonade from cans of frozen concentrate, filled plastic pitchers with all the ice cubes available. All afternoon it sits there, the beige plastic sweating, testing your commitment to profit: each dixie cup you fill for yourself is two fewer quarters in your jar. You watch the sun sinking toward the top of Orcas Street, the hill up which you will trudge to catch the bus to middle school a year from now. Already you can see yourself as if from up there, lemonade stand and lavender dress and lake far away and glowing in the late-afternoon light.
- Vodka
Maybe you are fifteen and awkwardly dolled up for a school dance in a dress you know is wrong, but maybe it won’t matter because a friend of a friend somehow procured a handle of watermelon Smirnoff around which a handful of you now huddle in Conor Anderson’s basement, your bodies circling the bottle with fascination and itching greed. No time to bother with soda or juice or even cups, you take turns swigging until Conor’s mom, your ride, calls down the long tunnel of the stairs. The taste isn’t what matters; it’s the feeling you are thirsty for, the warm flood that dissolves brittle boundaries in your brain, remakes your whole being, mind and body melding into one porous swimming thing. At the dance, R&B oozes under your skin, Usher’s crooning melodies, a concentrate of teen horniness melting and spreading in a dark room. In the bathroom you blink at the mirror and try to recognize your face. The theme of the dance is “Lovers and Friends.” You are thirsty to be someone, something, anything else.
- Coca-Cola
You’re not a big soda drinker—your parents never buy it, and you never developed much of a taste for carbonated sweetness—but at your first restaurant job you discover the magic of a few cold gulps of Coke three-quarters of the way through a brunch shift.
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