Bad Girls Don't Cry

Chapter 2

As soon as I turned 18, all my demons were unleashed. That was the legal age of adulthood where I'm from. In retrospect, I was much too young to manage all that freedom. I moved into a sublet apartment across the street from my Cegep, which is the name for the school in between high school and university. It's a French thing. I was studying psychology. I was very interested in how the mind works, mostly to better understand myself, and the thoughts I deemed too crazy to share.

I made friends with a group of misfits that sat in the corner between two staircases in the lower atrium of the school. They were the loud group that yelled randomly at passers-by, and who would film themselves doing silly things like tumbling down the stairs in competition to see who would land farthest from the staircase, or sticking 'I❤️Cock' magnets in the vents all across campus. I was going through a phase. I gelled my hair in front of my face, wore dark makeup and black clothes, listened to power metal; I basically tried assimilating into this group that I couldn't really connect to. My sister had introduced me to them so I felt a certain level of comfort going into it, but then she graduated and went to university and I was left alone there trying to be someone I wasn't.

One of the guys in the group was a loud-mouthed, classless loser that enjoyed intimidating people to feel a sense of superiority. He had heard about some of my sexual escapades and confronted me while I was surrounded by a group of his friends, laughing arrogantly in my face about how I was a whore. I raised my hand to slap him.

"If you slap me I will beat you," he said, laughing as my hand lingered in the air. I was so enraged and embarrassed that I hesitated only a moment before I failed to listen to his warnings and I slapped him in the face. He wasn't the first guy I ever slapped. But this was the first time someone hit me back the way he had.

He punched me in the stomach and yelled, "abortion!". That was his thing. He used to yell that a lot, like he had turrets or something. I remember bending over and falling to the floor holding my stomach ready to throw up, in the middle of a circle of grown-ass men laughing at me as I cried. I felt true fear and panic in that moment; a feeling that's hard to shake, but that never really slowed me down when it came to instigating reactions in The Game. I actually ran into that guy recently. He pretended like nothing happened and asked how I was doing. That truly blew my mind.

Anyways, the apartment was my first time living out on my own. I had a roommate, and I feel rather bad now for her having to live with 18 year-old me. I wasn't very clean, didn't take out the garbage or do the dishes. Plus, I adopted 2 kittens while I lived there against my parents' wishes, of course. I named them Harry Potter and Loki. They were my little loves and they ended up living between my and my parents' place over the following 10 years. Anyways, this apartment became a haven for me to bring guys home, but also for me to be closer to the bars. It was a downtown apartment, after all.

I went out drinking and partying pretty much every night. I felt those bars were my home-away-from-home. In my late teens, I had the energy to go out to bars every night with no physical constraints on my body. I actually had a fantastic time; what I can remember of it, anyway. There was something comfortable about being familiar with the staff and the other patrons. I always loved being able to go to the same places and know most of the people there. It's a feeling that is hard to describe; almost like a power, knowing you have a lot of people around you to talk to and never get bored. I was so easily bored. I didn't know how to be alone in my thoughts for extended periods of time. I think I was afraid of myself because I considered myself so different from everyone else I had ever known. But the people I met in the bars were very interesting characters and they felt familiar. They were the regulars: the people who spent all their money and time trying to forget something, though I'm not sure what. All I knew was that I was a twisted soul and I felt a kinship with them.