• Kids struggle to break alcohol's grip
• Maine kids and alcohol
• The parent's role
• Schools arm children with arsenal of 'life skills'
• Wounded adolescents find Focus
• Program extends hand to hardened youth
• Alcohol-related deaths in 1995

When confronted with their drinking, most kids respond with denial, with some version of, ''I don't have a problem, and if I do, so what?''

Precisely, says Ashley Miles, 16, of Pittsfield.

Miles started drinking when she was 14. She started with whiskey, moved through a vodka phase, and now drinks beer or Captain Morgan spiced rum.

She throws up almost every time she drinks, she says, ''but it doesn't bother me.'' She prefers throwing up to blacking out, when you're ''missing everything,'' and besides, she adds proudly, she's never hung over.

Now and then, she concedes, she wonders, ''What am I doing to myself?''

''But then I think, I shouldn't have drank that last one, or, This is gonna be over soon. I don't ever think, Wow, I'm not gonna drink again.''

Last fall, Miles was caught drinking - an iced tea bottle of whiskey - in school. Because she was on probation for an incident stemming from an argument in which she threatened to kill her mother with a knife, she was given two choices: rehabilitation or jail.

She chose rehab. It lasted seven days. On the eighth day, she drank. She says she knew she would while she was still in rehab, just as she went back to drinking the day after she was caught in school.

''That's how I am,'' she says. ''If someone tells me I can't do something, I have to do it. I kinda have a problem with authority.''

Now, she says, she drinks only on weekends, and not in her house. She and her mother, Holly Miles, used to drink together, but her mother is now in recovery and doesn't want her daughter drinking at all.

''She says the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree, that I'll end up like her,'' says Ashley. ''I say that maybe I will stop drinking later on, but for now I don't want to. It's just not gonna happen.''

She believes she probably can't keep drinking without eventually having a serious problem with alcohol. But she insists, ''I don't want to control it, so I don't try.'' She adds, ''Also, I don't think I can.''

Why drink? It makes her ''feel happy,'' she says. It makes her ''not shy.''

And nothing else matters.

''I'm only here for right now,'' she says. ''I don't want to think about down the road. Anything could happen. I could get hit by a truck. I'm 16. Why should I even think about it?''

Holly Miles says she both fears for her daughter's future, and knows she must let go of believing she can shape it.

''I'm not going to change her mind, no matter what I say,'' she says. ''Teen-agers don't want to listen. They have to make their own mistakes.''