Not my high school boyfriend.

He was not in high school. I was, quite specifically in the middle of high school, which back then was a five-year hitch if you had intentions of post-secondary.

My mother despised him, in a large part because he reminded her of my father, whose death less than five years before had left a Problematic-Man-shaped crater in my preadolescent heart.

My older boyfriend offered me the sex and drugs I had been looking for. 1980s prohibition messaging had lead me to expect high school to be a smorgasbord of inappropriate behaviour, reefer and bennies and circle jerks being offered at every turn, and I was poised to take advantage.  Instead I was in choir and two bands.  I had coloured hair and that was sort of insurrectionary.  Holed up in my bestie’s basement (except no one was besties because that word didn’t exist yet) scarfing down British music magazines and their lurid descriptions of Madchester rave-ups, I was longing for something strange to happen, primed for absolutely anything.

And when I met him and he offered, I took it. Not because he fooled me, but because it was everything I wanted.

Did I have an ordinary life ahead of me until then? I can’t say that I did. If not that man then another, or a woman, would have offered me something I wanted that I wasn’t meant to have. And I would have taken it. He just got there first.