Well, that was interesting. If you find lectures on socio-economics interesting, that is. I probably couldn't care less. And yet, here I am, for the third day in a row, sitting in a classroom with the world's most stuck up human beings. If it were possible to view a person's ego separate from themselves not one among these peoples' egos would fit in the room and it is built to accommodate three hundred students.

I suppose you are now wondering why I'm here. Honestly? I'm hiding.

Everyone makes bad decisions from time to time. Everyone makes mistakes.

'I'm only human', so the saying goes. Except, I've made more than a few mistakes. What can I say? I had an angry childhood, followed by years of rebellion, frustration and a desperate need for attention. I guess, you could say, I lost it.

By 'it', I mean whatever it was that made me a good person. To fully explain how this all happened, I'd have to go back to when I was seven years old, when my parents first split up and then take another trip down memory lane to Jr. High, but its probably best if we start with my parents' divorce.

I'd like to say it was a mutual parting with no hard feelings, but that would be as far from the truth as London is from Australia.

My dad cheated on my mom, with her sister. And once again, as much as I'd like to say that he was the bad guy and this act of adultery was the worst in the separation, I would have to go back to the London and Australia concept, because my mom cheated too. However, she cheated with his boss, the mailman, a stranger she meet in a bar one night and a woman who called herself cherry pie as she followed my mom up to my parents' bedroom.

She cheated first, with the boss and then the mailman. My dad walked in on her and the mailman, or possibly Cherry, I'm not sure. Instead of getting mad or getting a divorce, he went out and got drunk. Then, he called her sister, Lillian. Lillian is the kind of woman that if you meet her you will hate her, and you will always hate her, but at the same time she will exude a presence that would make you want to be near her, even if it was only in the hopes that some of her presence would wear off on you.

My mom is one of the many people who hate her sister. She is the older sister, she was head cheerleader, she was on honor roll and she went to the Ivy League school. She did all the things that an exemplary big sister is supposed to, to set a goal and a standard for her younger sister.

But the teachers never asked Lillian why she couldn't be more like her big sister, Marie. They were under Lillian's spell. How could my mom not be upset? After all, she was shown up by her baby sister who didn't put in any effort to get good grades or be popular, she just was. The one thing in her entire life that she felt she had truly beaten Lillian at was love. Lillian was always more beautiful and poised than my mom, so when they both became interested in the same man, you can bet that it was a serious conflict for the two.

My father, was that man. He was a doctor at a hospital near where I was born and when my grandmother broke her leg he was her doctor. As you can imagine, this was how my mother and aunt met him.

Lillian tried her best to win his heart, but he loved my mother. She didn't have Lillian's grace but he always spoke of her smile. He would say it was the kind of smile that didn't have to be perfect to be the most beautiful in a room, because it was effortless and kind. So, she won his heart and his hand.

I remember being five or six and avidly listening to my father tell me stories about why he loved my mother. Everyone has a role model when it comes to love whether it's good or bad. Most children look to movies like Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, where in they see handsome men and beautiful women fall into love easily and then live happily ever after, to base their views on love. My idea of the perfect love is the one my parents had. I never saw them fight. They laughed together, they cried together and they smiled together. In all the movies I'd seen, I never saw a love that seemed so honest.

So, when they split up, my whole view of what love was shattered. I had always believed love to be so pure and selfless, then suddenly it all seemed different. But, I was just a child still. The true effect of what happened didn't hit me until Jr. High.

I had a crush on a boy named Brad Mitchell. He had sandy brown hair and emerald eyes. He had golden skin and surfer's hair. It was puppy love at first sight. Then, a couple weeks into the first year of school, he asked me out.

At the time, I was in shock, but looking back, it wasn't all that surprising. I had inherited my grandmother's blond hair and my father's blue eyes. And it probably helped that I'd also started to develop breasts, and I was one of the few girls in my grade that had.

Still, I was floating on air that he'd noticed me. I wasn't particularly popular as my parents' divorce had made me different in the social setting in which I grew up. It was a town where everyone lived in a beautiful house, with beautiful gardens and beautiful pets all owned by beautiful and rich people. All of these people were married. In this social setting, it seemed like it was more acceptable to cheat on your spouse than separate from them. So, a lot of the town gatherings were for married couples and their kids.

At first, my mother still made the attempt. She went to the meetings like nothing had happened, like she hadn't cheated. Like he hadn't cheated. Eventually, she stopped going.

I went with her and I can still clearly remember the looks on the other attendee's faces. It was like they felt ashamed for her. Every one of them judged her with an unrelenting gaze, and yet she smiled and brushed her hair behind her as if she didn't notice. But how could she not?

Their gazes burned holes in our backs everywhere we went. And even though it was like they never let us out of their sight, if she tried even for a moment to grasp their attention, they would pretend as if she wasn't even there.

It was horrible town, full of horrible ignorant people.

So, when Brad Mitchell, the most popular boy in my school, son to the most prestigious family in town asked me out, I felt like the troubles were finally passing, like I was finally getting a second chance to be something in this miserable town.

It started out well enough. After all, we were just kids, dating to us was just sitting together at lunch and holding hands. Then, it suddenly became more. He kissed me after school on a Friday, when he'd walked me home. I remember gushing to my diary about how happy I was. It was a beautiful moment, until it passed. The next week on Monday I walked to school a grin spread from ear to ear across my face. Math class flew by, as did history, as I eagerly waited for lunch. And when the lunch bell did finally ring, I ran out of class to the cafeteria just in time to see Brad, my Brad, and Amy Lewis kissing.

I was crushed, and as I stood their watching them from the other side of the cafeteria I saw my mother flirtatiously sliding her fingertips over the mailman's hand six years ago. I saw my father kissing my aunt Lillian, I saw Cherry cackling at a joke she'd made that was in no way funny. I wanted Brad to hurt the way he'd hurt me, so I thought if I asked out someone he hated then he would feel the same way.

I'll admit the logic was a little hazy, but I was a thirteen year old girl who'd gotten her heart broken by a boy for the first time.

There were a lot of students in the school that Brad hated, but the one he hated the most was a boy a year ahead of us named Dylan Collins. He was as bad as any Jr. High student could possibly be and he'd once called Brad some pretty crude names.

Dylan Collins is easy enough to find in this school. It's not a big school to begin with and he tends to migrate towards the edge of campus by the parking lot, where all the school's greatest troublemakers find themselves. Though, it is not spot I had ever been before. Nor was it one that I thought I would go to again. I never would have guessed that it would become a place so important to me, that would practically be home-away-from-home for the next few years of my life. 

But I am getting ahead of myself. And I don't want to leave you confused. So, let us get back to Dylan Collins, one of two people I would meet that might have changed me forever.