I
knew then. They knew it, too -- no one blamed me. They loved me, I
guess."
"You stayed with them until you went to school?"
"Almost. Their daughter went to Waterloo, then the next year, their son
went to McGill in Montreal, and then it was just me and them. I had two
more years of high school, but it just got unbearable. With their
children gone, they tried to take an interest in me. Tried to make me
eat with them. Take me out to meet their friends. Every day felt worse,
more wrong. One night, I went to a late movie by myself downtown and
then got to walking around near the clubs and looking at the club kids
and feeling this terrible feeling of loneliness, and when I was finally
ready to go home, the last train had already gone. I just spent the
night out, wandering around, sitting in a back booth at Sneaky Dee's and
drinking Cokes, watching the sun come up from the top of Christie Pitts
overlooking the baseball diamond. I was a 17-year-old girl from the
suburbs wearing a big coat and staring at her shoelaces, but no one
bugged me.
"When I came home the next morning, no one seemed particularly bothered
that I'd been away all night. If anything, the parental people might
have been a little distraught that I came home. 'I think I'll get my own
place,' I said. They agreed, and agreed to put the lease in their name
to make things easier.
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