Once when I was twenty years old, my cousin, sister and I decided to go dancing. The Brazilian bar we haunted at the time was on the other side of town, but it was summer and we set off walking, along the dark deserted roads. We chatted and laughed and joked to keep the darkness at bay.
“Ha ha ha we are so safe keep walking”
At some point, of course, we realised we were not alone anymore, as 4 very loud and very drunk young men started following us, making jokes we couldn’t quite make out, until one of them shouted “EH DO YOU LIKE IT UP THE BUM?”
Time for a poll. Did I, option 1: do the safe thing and keep walking with my head down, or option 2: absolutely not do the safe thing? yep you got it. I turned around to face them, and said “Do YOU like it up the bum mate?”
The primary offender walked up to me going “what did you say bitch what did you say”, grabbed a handful of my hair and propelled me against the wall, then used my hair to lift me off the ground. Thus started a very interesting debate on morality and religion, personal accountability and the consequences of your actions. They argued that what I had suggested was deeply offensive and contrary to their religious beliefs, while I argued that he had said it first without wondering if it might be offensive to me. My feet were not touching the ground during the debate, but I wasn’t in pain, my scalp is relatively insensitive. My cousin argued that he started it and only got what he deserved, my friend argued that using his muscles to win the debate was cheating, then I piped up to make the point that, in the spirit of personal accountability, it would be only fair if I used my time hanging up the wall to kick him right in the nuts, and yet, I hadn’t done it, even though he was “hurting me a little”, so he could see that I was charitable.
I think the guy came to his senses then and let me down, we set off together talking about their religion and my not being a slut, and parted ways when the streets allowed.
I still don’t know if he likes it up the bum, but judging from his reaction, probably, yes.
When I was about 13 or 14 years old, my mother took my sister and I to the birthday of a friend of hers, which happened to be celebrated with a barbecue on a beach, music, dancing, and lots of drinking, like most parties. There were dozens of people present, some I knew, some I didn’t. As the adults did their own drunk and noisy thing, us cooler younglings gathered a little way away from their noise, and a very handsome hippie dude played the guitar while we all sang.
Are we far enough away from the uncool adults you think?
Time passed and adults took their offspring home one by one until I was alone with the cool hippie dude whose name I forget, but who was telling me his life story as people do tend to do. He was explaining in elevated terms that his life at the moment was turned towards the ocean and the living, and that he loved every little being roaming on the planet, including ants, or something. He was clearly high, but I smiled and nodded because, well, he was really cute.
He gave me his sweater when it got fresher as the night advanced and I think we both fell asleep at some point on a blanket that he had because he was sleeping on the beach that night, and at around 3 in the morning, my mother woke me up to tell me that they were going home and that they would see me the next day. She was holding my half asleep sister’s hands and using her as a sort of walking frame.
A little bit disoriented, I asked why I wasn’t going home, and she told me that I was ok there and that I could just sleep on the beach if I wanted to. I told her that I did not want that really, that I preferred going home where I had a bed, but she insisted. She asked the dude to convince me, to which he reacted with mute bewilderment. I had to basically ignore her and walk to the car (after saying goodbye to my new friend) so that I could go home. She spent the trip back telling me that I was a repressed prude and that she would have been really glad to have had a mother like herself, that she could not understand why I had to always be so serious about everything (See? I told you she was drunk) and that she would never have been that stupid at my age.
Basically what came out of her harangue was that, metaphorically speaking, the little dude looked like a delicious piece of cake, that I was an ungrateful child and that if I wasn’t going to finish it she’d do it. Him. Basically.
One day when I was around 15, I pretended to punch my sister. It was supposed to be a very impressive punch and so the draw was very forceful, and when the sensitive part of my elbow just between the bones collided with the corner of the walls behind me, the pain made me slide down the wall silently, like sad people do in movies, except I wasn’t sad.
Like this.
Mother took a look at my elbow, said she had just the thing for it, and covered it in clay which she wrapped up neatly. Mother was a nurse, so I assumed she knew what she was doing. The fact that shooting pains through my hands and down my fingers didn’t go away and that my left arm was basically paralysed wasn’t anything to be concerned about, according to Mother, because of course the elbow is a sensitive spot and it would all go away if I only remembered to Put Clay On It.
Now, since in this day and age we have the Magic of Google and I don’t have to rely on a parent to know what’s wrong with me (or a Doctor, which in this particular case would probably have been appropriate) I know that I had, in fact, probably pretty badly damaged my ulnar nerve, which is a pretty painful experience. Here’s what the Highly Scientific Review Men’s Health has to say about it in this article about the most sensitive body parts:
5. Your funny bone
The funny bone is actually not a bone at all—it’s just a playful name for your ulnar nerve, a huge nerve that runs on the back of your elbow. This nerve sits next to the bone in your upper arm called the humerus. (That’s where the “funny” name comes from.)
Since there’s barely any padding to protect the ulnar, the nerves fire off more easily when the area is hit. “Nerves are composed of different fibers, some of which respond to touch, and some of which respond to pain,” says Dr. Spiel. You guessed it: Your brain interprets a funny bone blow as intense pain.
And because the nerve also sends signals in the other direction, towards your hand, you might feel pain all the way through to your fingers, too, Dr. Spiel explains.
I remained completely paralysed for at least a few months, then started to recover more fluid though still painful movement in my arm, and then finally in my hand. Closing my fingers into a fist is now something I can do in one uninterrupted motion, which wasn’t the case for a few years.
I continued to Apply Clay for a while and then stopped. My mother from time to time asked me odd questions such as “Why don’t you play the guitar anymore?” to which I responded by showing the mechanical way my hand closed in three brisk steps, and she’d cock her head to the side and say “Have you been Applying the Clay?”
I’m not sure it’s working, Mother
It’s too late to see a doctor about this now, I’ve given up on being the next Slash. But I could have been! Probably.
I haven’t been bitten by a flea since I reached adulthood. I haven’t had lice once, either. This might seem like a strange thing to say to you, but to me it is one of those little comforting thoughts that you can conjure up when you want to feel grateful about your life: I don’t have lice, I don’t sleep with fleas, I’ll never have to give birth ever again, nobody can force me to get into a car with someone who is too drunk to drive because I am an adult and I can say “no”. I haven’t told you about that yet, have I? I have mentioned, I think, that my mother and step-father were drunks, but I haven’t told you the story of all the parties we were dragged to.
When I was very small, my parents didn’t drink too much, and we used to be parked on sofas or bedrooms if available while our parents partied. But in the West Indies, our mother drank way too much and our step father was an absolute pisshead.
We were dragged to parties, left in a corner to sleep, then put into the car to have accidents. I don’t even know how to tell those stories to make them believable, so you’ll have to make do with the short version: for the first few months we spent in our Caribbean island, we had an accident a week. They were pretty minor, we ended up in a ditch, or slid across the road because of speed and gravel, or bumped into the side railing. One day though, as we were going home after one of those parties, we turned a corner at high speed and another car’s front lights jumped at us. My sister’s head banged against mine and against the window, then the car stopped. My step-father’s leg, already broken from a motorbike accident, was slightly bent, and my mother’s wrist wouldn’t move.
Barely Exaggerated
I was designated as driver for the rest of the trip home. I was 17 but I knew how to drive from having driven half my life, the fact that it was illegal as I didn’t have a licence (or, indeed, the age required to even have a licence in my country) didn’t bother anyone present. This became a usual occurrence. Our parents would drive to parties and I’d drive on the way back. I think it only stopped when I left the house to live in a squat.
I think after I left my sister had to do it a few times as well. I don’t think they really considered us, or the dangers involved. I saw a tweet just yesterday. It said “Your parents could have afforded the name brand cereal. They just didn’t love you”.
My parents could have treated us for lice. They could have treated the houses and boats for fleas. They could have kept us safe. It just didn’t occur to me at the time that they could have.
The year I graduated, I was still living in a squat with my drug-dealer friends. Jack was in my class and while we were naturally quite bright students, we were also quite disruptive. The group of friends we had gathered in this class was a mixture of half-homeless kids like us, abused kids, basically all the ones who felt more at home away from home. 20 years ago, in the West Indies, there was an awfully high number of us relative to the general well-fed and well-cared-for population, compared to what you would see in a European classroom today. Most of our teachers knew, most of them were genuinely fond of us and took our personal problems into account. And then one day, our English language teacher fell ill and was replaced. They sent us a white lady straight from France, someone whose life experience was close to none, someone with the pedagogical skills of a mule. She dressed in yellow onesies. We dubbed her “Chick-lady”.
Repeat after me: Chi-cken
She was utterly lost and ridiculous, and as much as we did try, at first, to make her comfortable, her abruptness, her rudeness and her constant whining about the fact that there was “no ventilation in this horrible place” got the better of us.
On one of her first days, she pushed us over the edge by screaming “I WANT TO HEAR ONLY MYSELF IN THIS CLASS!!”. We collectively (yes, the idea came from me…) decided to give her what she wished for and stopped answering any of her questions. Her questions, in turn, became easier and easier, and she sweated as she scanned the room after asking the most basic things while we all stared motionlessly: “no? nobody, really?”. She took this treatment for a few days until she suddenly yelled something about being stuck with a bunch of morons and left, slamming the door behind her.
We might well have chuckled for a bit after she left, but of course, I was always quick to incite revolt, and Jack was a principled young drug dealer, so we started a speech on respect and the intolerable lack of self-control in the adults around us in general and before long, the whole class was pumped with vengefulness.
A group of girls in particular, who already felt self-conscious about their intellect, were very miffed. The next class was pretty bad. Mrs Chick sat down and announced that since we were too retarded to do anything productive, we would be singing songs. She played the ABC song at us while we stared and collective anger rose. When the song was over, one of the girls stood up and asked her if she thought she, as an individual, was a moron. She made it personal, and Mrs Chick should have known better than to reply “You’re not showing any sign of understanding that you should raise your hand before speaking, after all those years of schooling”.
She said what now…?
The next day, we heard a rumour that Mrs Chick’s car had been damaged, or rather, that the words “colonial bitch” had been carved into its paint. There were secret meetings with the principal, in order to discover who the culprit was, even though everyone who needed to know already knew. Mrs Chick tried to get the girl in question, a girl whose parents beat her badly, expelled from school, and this escalated things right into death threats territory. As I said, Mrs Chick had none of the skills needed to be put in front of a class like ours. She packed her bags and went back to France before the Christmas holidays.
I haven’t told you about my needy boyfriends yet. There was this boy, when I was around 20, who was part of my circle of friends. I was absolutely not attracted to him, but my friends all insisted that he had been in love with me for months and that I hadn’t noticed and that it would be heartless not to give him a chance. I am pretty sure I should have put some thought into accepting to go out with someone who apparently had feelings for me when I had none, but I don’t, generally, think about things I don’t fully understand. Otherwise I would perhaps understand them. Makes sense, doesn’t it.
Anyhow, I agreed to go on a date with him. We went out dancing and then back to my place because of course. We had sex, I think. I say “I think” because all I remember was that he spent a lot longer fumbling with the condom than actually touching me. I asked him if he was a virgin and he acted hurt and I had to coax him into giving that sex-thing a try even though I was not nice. It was over in perhaps 5 minutes, and then lo and behold, he then, out of the blue, asked me if I loved him. I chuckled and answered “of course not!”
Stock photo of him as a white man
Please don’t throw rocks at me, I was young. I honestly thought he was kidding. I honestly thought he realised just how awfully awkward what we had just been doing had been. Well he did not, and he started crying. He cried in my arms about the fact that “nobody loved him”. I consoled him and then told him that, of course, I was sure he realised that after a night like this, there was no point in trying to go any further, and that obviously we were going back to being just friends because it was a lot less annoying. So he cried again.
Then I had to hold his hand in the street for a week, “just the time for him to wrap his head around the fact that I didn’t love him”, which I did, until such time as I had to stop because I was interested in someone else and it made things weird for me. I was, at the time, a mixture of nice and nasty that I am sure I still do not fully comprehend.
He remained “in love with me” for the following two years, at least. Every time I had a boyfriend or a fling, my friends would tell me all about how heartless I was to be flaunting it in front of this poor guy. I went on one date with him, we had half-sex once.
There was this other guy, whom I dated for a month or two until he suddenly decided to propose to me, despite the fact that our relationship was boring and clearly not going anywhere. I said yes. It just seemed more interesting to say yes and then witness what would come of it at the time, I suppose. We’d been living together (in my house) for a little bit when he once told me that my skirt was too short. I told this story somewhere else, so let’s just shorten it into “I left him because he said I should change clothes”. It’s basically what happened. When I told him it was over, he got on his knees and cried and hugged MY knees and begged me to reconsider because I was the love of his life. Some people are incomprehensible to me, but this one, when he did that, just morphed into something I had to get rid of as fast as possible, which I did. This was 16 years ago, and last year he found me on facebook and has been harassing me ever since. He says that I deserve the best, because I am just perfect in every way. I don’t answer, because I am neither as nice nor as nasty as I used to be.
There was, also, the rich dude whom I found repulsive (even though he was honestly physically quite ok, there was just something about him that made him fundamentally unkissable). The same group of friends set us up, once again for whatever reason I agreed to ONE date because I didn’t want to be the cause of him harassing them to convince me anymore. We went to a restaurant. That’s all I remember. The next day he sent a huge bouquet of flowers to my house. I never saw him again. One day, the friend who set us up asked me why I had never called him again, and I was genuinely surprised by the question. My answer was the logical one: “I had agreed to one date hadn’t I? Well that’s what I did. Do I seriously have to do it again?” He did not harass me but I never met him again. He stopped being friends with anyone who knew me.
Even before starting this blog post, I think I did not understand what had happened. Feelings. Feelings are a real thing and those guys probably had feelings for me, as incomprehensible as this seems to me. What I learned is that I should never give a man what he wants out of pity, because if you do, they are never grateful: they only expect even more. I suppose we all learn different things from life.
Once upon a time, when I was 17 and living in the Caribbean, there was a hurricane. I’ve been through a few hurricanes since, but this one was my first. Well, my two firsts, because we had two hurricanes one after the other that year, one was just a lot of wind with a little water, and the other one was a lot of water, with a lot of wind.
The one that interests us here is the wet one. At the time, we lived in a house across the road from a large enough river. My parents were a little nervous about the river overflowing, but not too much, because Europeans who aren’t used to natural disasters really don’t realise what could happen until it has happened. When the electricity went off, my sister and I sat on my bed and read books. They had covered the windows with cardboard and duct tape on the inside, blocked every little airway, and we sat in the stuffy atmosphere of tropical heat, candles and kerosene lamps. And waited. For dinner, while the wind was starting to get stronger and whistled around the electric cables, we had sardines and bread. Our cooker was on the veranda, out of reach.
It was raining. A lot.
It rained and it rained. My sister and I went back into my bedroom and read some more, until my sister fell asleep. At some point, through the sound of the howling wind, I heard duct tape being torn off. I’d heard branches breaking, and other things, but duct tape being torn off was “a thing happening”, insofar as my parents had been extremely insistent about the importance of sealing the house entirely. I got out of my room and into the front room, the whole place was a muddy mess, my step-father was hauling rope from the garage and tying it up to the veranda’s barrier. My mother screamed at me so I could hear her “The neighbours are in trouble, come, we need to help!!” ok, I thought, shoes. I put on my Converse (you guessed it! 1995) and stepped onto the veranda. It was insane. I actually saw pieces of a corrugated sheet roof flying by, along with branches and a bicycle was floating along the road. The river had overflown by a lot, it was reaching our house, which thankfully had a few steps up. Our neighbour’s house, about 50 meters away (164 ft), on the other hand, had a few steps down, into a sort of basement. The neighbour’s mother lived there, and apparently, it was entirely flooded. My step-father held on to his rope and grabbing every tree managed to reach the neighbour’s house. He then tied the rope to their barrier, and my mother and I used this to cross over, knee-deep in water, branches flying by. When we arrived we went downstairs where my step-father was trying to lift a big dresser with the man of the house. Under the dresser was a bed, barely visible, almost entirely submerged, and pinned down on it by the dresser and in great danger of drowning was the grandmother. It took some effort, but we managed. My mother and I grabbed the lady as soon as she was free and took her upstairs, where she sat on the sofa. We then had to cross back to our own house, where my sister was still sleeping, alone.
We sealed the house again, and I went to bed. In the morning, the view was absolutely amazing. Our entire neighborhood was transformed. Trees were missing, and there were cars where there weren’t cars before, washing machines had been blown into the street. There was still water and mud and branches everywhere, the electric cables hung sadly, and we were instructed not to go out until the news had come that the power had been cut for sure. We still went out. Other people were walking around, and clearly they weren’t dying. My sister and I went to check on the neighbours, whose two daughters went to school with me, and it was decided that we would be in charge of “the river” while the parents would go around helping the neighbours clean up the mess.
The river duty consisted in washing the laundry and the dishes there, and bringing back buckets to flush the toilets (yes, hurricanes are glamorous). We didn’t have running water for a while after that, the power took perhaps a month to be reestablished.
Tropical Paradise
This wasn’t to be our last hurricane, but it was by far the most memorable. And still, after all this time, every time I smell the thick, still air that one gets when the alert is red and one should already be hiding inside, I get that same feeling of imminent freedom from the rules of normal life.
This story takes place in a squat, on a Caribbean island. Follow the links for context if you don’t know what I’m talking about. I had been living in this place with the boys, which we called “Auntie’s”, for a while by then, when one day I met my mother in the street. She was quite pleasant and I thought we might be able to reconnect a little, I also wanted to know how my sister was doing at home without me, and so I asked her if, one of these days, I could stop by for dinner. She seemed pleased with the idea, and so we arranged for me to visit her later that week. I went back to Auntie’s and told the boys about this, and was met with skepticism. Jack told me in no uncertain terms that I should be careful about not getting my hopes up.
“I’m not getting my hopes up”, said I. “I just want to know how my sister is doing” “My mother and step-father are also drunks”, said he. “I would never just “visit them”. If you’re going, we’re coming with you.”
Please, help me, biceps-man!
And so we went, him, me, a boy we called “shark” because an accident had left him disfigured and with broken teeth, and Auntie’s actual nephew. When we arrived, my mother was quite surprised to see that I had an escort, my step-father wasn’t home. My sister was happy, though. She had met the boys a few times as she did stop by on the way from school when she could, and they liked her a lot and enjoyed teasing her. She was 11 years old at the time. We ate pasta, which was immediately dubbed “White people food” by the nephew. Jack kicked him under the table and told him that he was a guest and that he’d better be polite. My mother was absent from all conversation, and I didn’t get to reconnect with her that time. We went home, and as I lay in bed I decided to try again the following week, without the boys.
This time I took the bus. My mother’s house was an hour’s drive away, and when the bus reached the little town just before the one where she lived, it stopped. The driver was going home as it was the end of his shift, and he wasn’t going any further. No more buses until the next day. (If you haven’t visited the Caribbean twenty years ago, this might sound “exotic” to say the least… but this is how things were).
As I stood there by the side of the road while the sun fell into the sea like a bright red seagull, I racked my brains for the name of anyone I might know in this tiny village. I remembered that, indeed, a friend of an acquaintance had once said that he lived here, and so I knocked on the first door and asked for directions. The nice lady pointed to a field, and I started walking. When I reached the bottom of said field, there — barely — stood a wooden shack, and I knocked.
Stock photo of the actual place, probably.
Jacob was a skinny, not too unattractive Rasta. He opened the door half naked, hugged me tightly and asked me what I was doing there. I explained the situation, and he told me to sleep in his bed, and that I could take the bus the next day. The inside of the shack was, even for one as used to poverty as I was, very bare. His two bowls were halves of a calabash, and he had a self-made bed.
In the morning, we ate fruit, and then I took the bus to my mother’s. My step-father was there this time, and once again, I left without having reconnected with my mother. If anything, she looked like she was eager for me to leave, because my presence was annoying her husband. So I took the bus back. When I reached Auntie’s house, the boys all stared at me silently. I could tell that something was up, but I smelled like a skunk and the first thing I did was to take a shower. Then I had breakfast, while the boys still passed me without a word, until Shark sat next to me and whispered:
“When you’re done, you should go and see Jack. He wants to speak with you.” The ominousness didn’t escape me, but I couldn’t figure out what on Earth I might have done to deserve this. I finished eating, and went outside, where Jack was sitting in the spot he reserved for “serious-talking-tos”. I sat next to him and waited, as this was obviously not the time to be rude. He remained silent for about ten minutes, as the sun beat down on us and the boys carefully avoided the area. Then he turned to me and asked: “Do you have anything to say to me?” I couldn’t figure it out. I shook my head and told him I had no idea what I had done wrong. So he asked: “Where were you last night?” I answered truthfully, and said that what I was trying to do was to see my mother alone, hoping that perhaps we could reconnect a little better that way. I explained all that happened, and told him that I really didn’t see what was wrong with what I did. He stared at me silently for what felt like months, and then said:
“You don’t care about the fact that we worry about you, do you? It didn’t cross your mind to warn us? Do you realise that we spent the entire night looking for you, and that we thought you might be dead?” I stared back. No, that type of thing never crossed my mind. If I had had the hindsight that I now have, I could have explained that no, nobody had ever wanted to know where I was, or ever worried about me and my safety. I could have told him that I was hearing what he was saying for the first time in my life, and that no, I hadn’t been raised to think about things like that. But I didn’t have the hindsight at the time, I was very confused, and for the first time in my life I didn’t know how to react to what was happening. And so I cried and apologised. And he hugged me, and said that I was forgiven, but that I was punished. I wasn’t to go out after dark for a week, alone or accompanied, just the time for him to stop feeling like he was going to find me dead in a ditch if I did.
We were exactly the same age, and yet he was my parent that day. And though I didn’t enjoy it at the time, I now look back on this memory with fondness. My first experience of parental care…
Once upon a time, when I was a teenager living with a friendly group of drug dealers in the Caribbean, we went out one night with the objective of hijacking a car. This was something that the boys did occasionally, I seldom accompanied them but this particular time I came along because we were going to a party later that evening. The boys sat in the darkness along a wall, invisible thanks to the terrible street lighting . Of course I was the one with my thumb in the air, and being a not-too-unattractive young lady, it wasn’t long before a middle-aged man stopped for me.
He smiled and asked me where I was going, and as I climbed in, my three friends came out of the shadows and followed me. I don’t know if I told you about Jack. He was the one we all turned to when a choice had to be made. He was a naturally dominant, very charismatic young man with an even temper and quick decision-making skills. He sat in the front while we sat in the back. (I mean this literally, for the purpose of this anecdote).
The man smiled on, chatting with Jack as the two other boys passed the time by cutting little holes in the back of the seats. I was listening to the conversation and I could tell that the driver either wasn’t afraid or simply knew how to conduct himself, because his conversation was very pleasant. Jack turned to me and we made eye contact briefly, and I could tell what was going through his mind. He liked the guy in the driver’s seat. I put one hand on each of the other boys’ knives to stop them damaging the car too much, the situation was less clear than it should have been. They looked at me as if to ask what the matter was, and I pointed towards Jack with my chin, so for a few minutes more, we waited and listened. The driver was asking where exactly we wanted to stop, and Jack said “here would be perfect, thanks man!”
As we got out of the car, the man told us to be careful out there, and drove off. We all turned to Jack with our eyebrows questioningly raised, and he pouted for a minute, looking at the disappearing car, then he said in a baffled, slightly embarrassed tone:
“He was too nice, man! The fucker was just TOO nice!”
So since we had been dropped off at the location of the party, we went to the party, and made money in other ways. Of course, this episode was the cause of much banter among the boys, of course Jack’s kind heart was likened to that of a little girl, which earned him the nickname “little Suzy”, but I could tell that I wasn’t the only one thinking that this was exactly the reason why he was the one we trusted.
When I was around 13 and in your equivalent of junior high (I’ll just presume everyone is American), I went to school very close to where a couple who were friends of my parents lived. They had three little boys who were much younger than I was, and a cat. At the time, I had lunch outside school, and so one day I decided to pay them a visit during lunchtime.
When I arrived, only the father was present. He seemed very happy to see me, and yes, of course you can see where I am going with this story can’t you. Well that’s not exactly what happened. He did pat the couch next to him in an inviting way as you probably were expecting him to, but I did sit, as you probably weren’t expecting me to.
“come sit next to me!”
He started speaking to me about school and life and boys, and I remember listening just enough to be able to answer while remaining ready to dash for the door in an emergency. Fortunately for me, he wasn’t the pouncy kind of pedophile. He was the type of guy who tries to convince you that you will love the game he wants you to play.
“Have you ever kissed a boy?” he asked. I smiled “no, not yet”. He said: “do you want to play a game, it will be our secret, we don’t have to tell anyone about it”. His hand was crawling a little too high on my thigh. I said “ok, I know a fun game!” he smiled, too, and asked: “oh really? which game is that?”
I got up as if I was getting animated with the conversation, but I was simply a little closer to the door this way. And I told him:
“It’s a great game. We don’t have to tell anyone about it if you don’t want to. I mean, obviously you won’t, but *I* won’t if you don’t want me to. To show me that you don’t want me to, you’re going to start by giving me lunch money right now, and then I’ll make it up as I go.”
Do you want to play a game?
He stared. He apologised, I think he was even trying to make me feel sorry for him.
I don’t remember how long my parents remained in contact with this particular couple, but every time we had dinner with them I got to enjoy the fact that he couldn’t look me in the eye. I tortured this man in so many interesting ways, from telling him that he seemed to love his children very much when he hugged them, to lightly flirting with him in front of everybody. He once caught me alone in the corridor and growled angrily at me to stop with this bullshit. I answered “your only options are to shut the fuck up or to kill me now. I don’t think you have the balls, though”.
whatserface, that cool girl.. 