Another concept that wasn’t outlined very well for us generation Y kids is that peer pressure is most certainly not obvious. I personally am a little miffed by this. I’d like to have been told that you could be peer pressured into literally anything from smoking cigarettes, drinking, drugs, dating, strip poker, bad taste in music, driving illegally to having sex. You name it and you can probably be subtly peer pressured into it at some point in your life. Let’s move onto the examples of things that could’ve been better explained to us generation Y kids, shall we?

My first example of how we were let down as a generation is of the D.A.R.E. program, which in case you didn’t know stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education. What Yogi Bear, the original mascot for D.A.R.E., and the second mascot Daren-the-Lion, didn’t tell you is that peer pressure comes in multiple different forms and is rarely obvious. Sure, in the case of drug peddlers it’s pretty easy to figure out you shouldn’t be buying or selling drugs, but I know plenty of D.A.R.E.’s star pupils that wound up addicted to drugs later on in life.

My main issue with the D.A.R.E. program is actually one that I’m sure a lot of people share. Daren-the-Lion would come to class in his Lion suit with an armed police offer and it all started off innocent with “Hi kids, do you want to meet Daren-the-Lion?” Which is cool, I mean this is the closest that most of us inner city kids would ever get to Disney Land, so why not? Yeah, I want to meet the guy in a Lion suit!

Meanwhile the cops would be pulling out this huge black suitcase and laying it down on a table in front of the class all nice and slow and mysterious-like. You’d be thinking to yourself, “What could possibly be in this suitcase? Is it guns?” No, kids that would be too innocent its’ a pile of drugs! Drugs that you’ve never seen but can now identify in multiple Ziplock sandwich Baggies. Not sure what they are? Don’t worry; they’ve been carefully labeled for all the real OCD freaks out there to stare at.

They had cocaine, heroine, LSD, ecstasy, weed, uppers, downers, Queludes, DMT and a plethora of other drugs in that suitcase! You name it and these guys had it! Needless to say the D.A.R.E. program mostly taught kids how to identify and buy these drugs in the future. Also, just take a moment to realize that they handpicked someone to label all of those drugs and arrange them nicely in the suitcase for this douche nozzle to bring them to your class. I bet his name was Frank, a little lazy, prefers sitting at his desk most of the day doing paperwork.

So that is my first problem with the D.A.R.E. program. My second problem is that they come to visit you when you’re maybe 7 or 8 years old. How many of you had friends doing drugs at that age? That’s what I thought, no one! I mean, I know that we lived in a lower income part of town but really? Okay, Daren-the-Lion, let me get this straight, you think we’re all getting hooked on drugs that early in life? Also, as a side note we live in the poor part of town so why are you showing us what heroine looks like? We can’t afford that shit!

Lastly, there are only a few reasons that people choose to use drugs in their lifetimes.

They’re in an experimental phase of their life. Their life truly sucks and they need a way to escape their own reality. Mommy and daddy are rich and they can afford to buy drugs and alcohol, which they think makes them feel cooler than they really are. It’s a lucrative business model for people who don’t feel the need to work for a living.

However, according to the D.A.R.E. officer, when they talked to you about why people choose to do drugs it was because they were all losers and were going nowhere in life. But in reality some of those drug dealers could have “47 Lamborghini’s in their Lamborghini’s account. Or even seven Hollywood Hills in their Hollywood Hills account!” (If you don’t get this reference you need to look up Tai Lopez’s video “Here in My Garage” because you’re missing out on some quality humor.) Actually, that’s probably a lie because most drug dealers use their own stash so they probably aren’t rolling in the dough. Most likely they live in a meth den and have no teeth left but they have the illusion of happiness… So there is that.

Seriously though, all the jokes aside, we’re telling kids not to drugs because it makes them losers in life. Yet because we never explain the root cause of why people do drugs these kids eventually will fall into that second bullet point listed above. They’ll start doing drugs to escape their own reality, which is where most low-income children fall on the spectrum.

I also want to point out that this concept applies to lots of types of addictions. For instance, isn’t an addiction to playing video games the same concept of escaping reality magnified? People that play video games religiously are literally escaping reality through a virtual reality where they can be the masters of their characters own fate? These are both forms of addiction, but one is deemed more socially acceptable. The only difference between the two is our perception.

Our perception of video games is that they’re less addictive than drugs and therefore harmless. The second perceptual difference is that we imagine drug addicts spend more money on drugs than you could on video games. I can attest that depending on the individual in question that second belief may or may not be true. Don’t get me wrong I love video games but they were designed to allow us to escape into another world, so were books for that matter. An addiction is an addiction but some are worse for your health and society than others.

The point that I’m winding up to is that D.A.R.E. comes to your school at such an early age that you’re not able to accurately assimilate the information into your adult lives. As a child your home life or school life may not be the greatest but the truth is that you have no other experience to compare it to. As a child you are much more prone to living in the moment and your world consists mostly of family. It isn’t until you become a young adult that you start to make friends and begin to see what other people’s family lives look like. At this point that you begin to realize your reality isn’t peachy keen and you need to find a way to escape it. Some people endure domestic violence or sexual assault at home; feel unloved by their family, live their lives well below the poverty line or their parents are getting divorced. There are plenty of reasons to do drugs or abuse substances, so when the opportunity presents itself it can be hard to resist that form of escape.

As a message to the D.A.R.E. program the people that abuse drugs and alcohol didn’t start off as losers. It is a cruel misconception to portray to children who don’t yet know the pain and the struggles that real life entails. That said, I can also cut the D.A.R.E. program some slack in their oversimplification of the concept of drug abuse since the learning capacity of children is limited to a certain degree within a two or three hour timeframe. However, they should think about re-evaluating how they explain substance abuse or drug addiction. Especially because many people that slip into the cycle of drug abuse stay there because they have begun to feel like losers. They have a negative self-image and negative mental self-talk that beats them down into thinking that they deserve nothing better than to be a drug addict and this at least partially because this is what D.A.R.E. taught us as children. Only losers do drugs, remember?

Anyways, enough D.A.R.E. shaming for the time being we should move on and talk about how subtle peer pressure is. I’m sure that I’m not the only individual that has suffered from peer pressure. What follows are several of my experiences with peer pressure and what it taught me about others and myself.

Ironically enough the first person to pressure me into doing things I didn’t necessarily want to do was Ophelia. Ophelia was coercive and easily talked me into doing I had no interest in doing. The first time she talked me into sneaking out of the house at night, I was probably 13 years old. Ophelia was 16 or 17. We were both awake around 2 a.m. when she decides she wants to go for a walk. She asked me if I wanted to come with her and while I didn’t want to go with her, I also didn’t want her to go alone either. I believe this was after Vladimir had been sent to Prescott, after she’d been raped, but before Vladimir had returned to Mesa.

I can still recall our conversation in the pitch black of our room.

“Ophelia, it’s 2 a.m.! Where are you going to go walking?” I questioned her in hushed tones.

“We’ll walk by the canal or something”, she said with a sort of somber tone to her voice.

“It’s way too dark to walk on the canal”, I hissed trying to change her mind.

She shuffled around in the darkness of our room. I couldn’t see her but I could hear the door creak open slightly as she attempted to make a break for it.

“Hey!” I called out to her.

“Well, are you coming or not?” she asked.

How could I refuse when it was my responsibility to keep her safe? At least if we got caught sneaking out we’d both be getting yelled at instead of just the person that was left behind, right? She already knew what could happen to her out there alone so what the hell was she thinking?

I quickly flopped off of the top bunk and onto the floor. Then I proceeded to toss off my pajama pants, grab around in the dark for some jeans, throw on a bra and tiptoe after her through the house. I was hopping my shoe into place onto my foot as she was allowing the front door to glide closed behind her. I barely had my shoes on as she traipsed down the sidewalk towards the canal’s gate. I eventually had to ask her to slow down so that I could finally tie my shoes.

As I may have pointed out in an earlier chapter for some people it is never fun to go some place dangerous without a cautious person with you. Some people need that little voice in their head telling them what a terrible idea something is or else it just isn’t riveting enough for them. Unfortunately for me, I’ve always been that little voice inside of Ophelias’ head. So we went out on our walk, which I thought would only last 30 minutes but it most certainly did not.

At first we walked up the canal from our Mesa Drive apartment complex until we reached Horne Avenue. We walked on Horne Avenue until we came to the 7/11 on the corner. At first I thought we would continue down Horne and come to rest at the Junior High. I couldn’t have been more incorrect; instead we then turned left and went across the crosswalk to follow Brown Road. After we’d walked down Brown a ways we turned around and walked back the way that we had come. We trekked all the way back to Mesa Drive but to my chagrin we weren’t headed home just yet. We then walked all the way down the hill from Mesa Drive to Inglewood Street, which was close by our former Elementary and was also referred to as “Get Shot Street”. Why was it referred to in this manner? I’ll give you one guess. Bingo! A kid we knew got shot on that street when we were both attending Elementary. Don’t worry, the kid was fine but this still wasn’t the place that we should be out and about, regardless of the time of day.

We eventually made our way back home but what I found incredibly frustrating was that Ophelia and I barely spoke the whole way. I would like to say that we didn’t have anything to talk about but that wouldn’t be true. We could’ve talked about a million things, but instead we mostly walked in silence because that’s what Ophelia wanted. I was just there as a buffer in case anyone tried to kidnap, attack or assault her. Looking back though I only weighed 110 pounds and was barely 5 feet tall. What the hell was I going to do to an attacker? Scream at them to death? Give them the evil eye until they politely moved on? I had no conceivable plan for if someone did attempt to cause us any harm.

It’s funny to me that at the time I couldn’t quite figure out our pattern or why we chose to walk in two completely opposite directions before coming home. Yet looking back on it now two of her friends lived nearby those areas. There was of course Celeste who lived off of Brown and Rachel who lived nearby Get Shot Street. Perhaps she was simply hoping that they’d be up and she would be able to talk to them. Or maybe she just felt antsy and needed to get out of the house. Or maybe like me, she needed to be in the silence whilst still being surrounded by the familiar; I know that feeling well. I’ve always found that there is something oddly comforting about feeling like you are the only person in the world awake at that hour. Sometimes when I have to work incredibly early or insanely late and no other cars are on the road, I like to pretend that I’m the only one in the world awake in that moment. In those moments a feeling of peace tends to wash over me; maybe that is the feeling Ophelia was trying to recreate.

We arrived back at the house, sliding through the door around 4 a.m. undetected. Not a small feat considering Genevieve has always woken up bright and early at 5 a.m., whether it’s a weekday or a weekend. We both prepared ourselves for bed and as we lay awake not speaking I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on in Ophelias’ mind on the bottom bunk.

Another time that Ophelia pressured me into making bad choices was my first drink; it was a watermelon flavored Smirnoff Ice. I’m not really sure how she managed it but she’d purchased several wine coolers and I can tell you from personal experience that watermelon is a horrid artificial flavor. I can also tell you that she was disappointed when I only had one “bitch beer” as she so kindly referred to them. I’m sure that in her mind she was doing the sisterly thing and helping me by testing my limits.

I was maybe 14 so she must have been 17 or 18 at the time. I remember that Ophelia had recently crashed her white Kia Rio on the freeway a while back while attempting to visit Vladimir at a boys’ home in Phoenix. Honestly, the details are a little hazy but I know that someone crashed into her on the freeway and pushed her into another vehicle. She’s actually quite lucky to be alive after becoming a tiny car sandwich on the freeway but the crash totaled her car and she got soda all over the laptop that my parents’ had recently bought her. Our parents were furious when they got her call and not even because she’d smashed her car but because she’d totaled it on the freeway, which she’d been forbidden to use. She was also in trouble for driving to see the boyfriend that they had forbidden her from contacting.

I sat in the car on the side of the freeway looking at the mangled mess of the five-car pile up thinking “Jesus Christ! It is always something with her!” Rowen was in between trips to heading from working on the house in Washington and heading to take care of his brother or our grandmother and he was rife with hostility. I don’t think that she’d even had the car for a year. Plus, our parents had cosigned to help her get a nice first car in the first place. What a cool thing for them to do seeing as how they wouldn’t cosign a loan for me to get a used car let alone a new one! Nor would they cosign my student loans to help me finish my college education, despite the fact that I managed to pay them off by myself 10 years early. But those are my grievances and I digress. In the car on the way homer Rowen and Ophelia screamed back and forth at each other about all of the rules Ophelia had broken, about how she was incredibly lucky that she had GAP insurance, and how incredibly screwed she was.

It wasn’t until years later that my father would divulge to me that she was likely high as a kite during the time of the crash. Ophelia had dabbled in using meth for a short period of time and when he arrived at the accident he found a note from the Phoenix Police Department that read, “The next time someone steals your meth, don’t call the police about it.” Ophelia later explained that she had indeed bought some meth that another meth head had stolen from her on the street. Being as high as she was she called the police to file a report because in her mind I suppose this was some form of great injustice. Stealing is wrong so clearly the other drug addict should be punished and not Ophelia who was buying illicit drugs. Truth be told, she was lucky that the cops couldn’t arrest her when they arrived because she didn’t have any meth on her at the time. Talk about dodging a bullet. Consequently, as a result of the meth purchasing incident, and the subsequent crashing of her previous car, she went out and purchased a cherry red 280z with a T-top. It was beautiful, it even had the original red velvet on the roof, but it was also a piece of shit.

So here we sat at a park near Mesa High School drinking our wine coolers. We then hopped back into her talking Datsun 280Z to drive home. The thought had never occurred to me that she could be drunk after two or three wine coolers, as I blindly trusted that she had my best interests at heart. However, I can tell you that as an adult about three wine coolers is all she can handle without starting to be that drunk crying girl that ruins a party. In hindsight I probably should’ve been more concerned for my safety at the time.

Another time she took me to a piercing party at the age of 15 that also involved a lot of drinking. I didn’t know anybody there but she swore that she wouldn’t leave me all night and we’d have a great time. To be fair I did have a great time chugging jello shots and I did get my belly button pierced in the kitchen of some strangers apartment. Which looking back on it was a terrible idea! This wasn’t a sterile environment and this guy for sure didn’t give a fuck about my safety. However, he did give me what I thought was a compliment by telling me he didn’t think I “had enough skin or fat to be piercing my belly button” but he did it anyway. Later it got infected and my mother accidentally pulled it out because the skin was practically melting away from the piercing itself. Also, not learning my lesson the first time I had my belly button re-pierced at the age of 17 and my body rejected it a second time. So now I have a super sexy belly button scar to show for my bad choices in life. But at the time Ophelia held my hand and was like, “You’re such a badass.” It was nice to feel like we were bonding.

However, during the latter half of the night Ophelia abandoned me to go have sex with, guess who? That’s right! Vladimir had somehow conned his way into getting someone to drive him to the party. I couldn’t have been more embarrassed for her. I banged on this strangers bedroom door trying to make it physically impossible for them to continue having sex but I’m sure it was all to no avail. They could power through and have sex through anything.

We left the party and Ophelia tried to pretend that she was sorry but I knew deep down that she wasn’t. In her mind she’d provided the perfect medium for me to loosen up while she got to finally have some alone time with her boyfriend. On the way home I sat in the back seat behind her because we wound up giving someone a ride close by to his or her house. She accidentally flicked an ash from her cigarette out the window of the Z that wound up traveling into the backseat of the car and burning my arm slightly. I called her an asshole and moved on to thinking about where Sebastian or any of my other friends might have been on this night. Sebastian was probably having sex with his girlfriend like any normal teenage boy while I was still trying to babysit my older sister. We stopped at the QuickTrip (QT) by Westwood High School and she let the individual who needed a ride out.

Our fellow traveler bid us ado as Ophelia filled the car up with gas and then we headed inside QT for her to buy a pack of Marlboro 27’s and a soda. It wasn’t until we got back to the car that she started talking to me again. I appreciated it because all I really wanted was for tonight to be a night where we both hung out without any distractions. Most of my life had been spent trying to obtain some type of quality time with any one of my family members. Yet we were all so busy worrying about ourselves that we were oblivious to anyone else’s needs. Ophelia asked to look at my belly button ring and said it looked really cool but that she thought it was crooked, which kind of hurt my feelings. She was probably right though. I mean I was lying between two kitchen chairs while he pierced it. It wasn’t exactly a rock solid foundation, nor was it an exact science. But we had a lot of fun hiding it from Genevieve for about a week until she realized something was off and caught me. What is it with moms’? I gave no indication that my belly button was pierced. She never saw it and I wore fairly baggy clothing so how did she magically know that something was up? My mother wasn’t happy with the piercing at all but after she accidentally dismantled it, she later told me that it looked more tasteful than she’d imagined it would.

After having this experience with Ophelia it wasn’t a far stretch for me to begin making my own choices when it came to liquor and friends. Not shortly thereafter I was having a particularly rough day so I took a walk on the canal. It was just starting to be dusk in the desert when I came upon a group of familiar faces in the ever-growing darkness. My heart leapt a little bit when Jordan called my name from the shadows,

“Well if it isn’t Roslyn”, he called out.

The other three heads of the group turned for me to easily recognize Joseph, Colin, and Pascal. I was disappointed that Sebastian wasn’t there but perhaps he had a prior engagement. I slowly plucked my headphones from my ears and began to roll them up and around my ipod.

“Hey guys, what are you up to?” I asked.

They needn’t say a word as they held up a bottle of Jim Beam whisky that they’d stolen from Jordan’s father.

“Oh,” I said, “that’s cool. I’m just headed home is all”, I said and as I started to walk away Jordan put his hand on my shoulder.

“Come on! Stay! We haven’t even cracked it open yet. You look like you’re having a tough day anyways.”

I couldn’t argue with that kind of logic so I sat down on a cement block that someone had chipped off of the wall that separated someone’s backyard from the canal and began to drink. We passed the whisky around in a circle and the boys’ marveled at how much I could throw back without appearing to be affected. I finished off the bottle after several others had quit taking swigs.

I felt great! That was until we stood up to start walking back to the more urbanized part of the canal and then I felt Jim’s full effect. I normally look down when I walk, which is usually a great way for me to avoid eye contact with others. Unless of course I’m unfamiliar with the territory, in which case I tend to keep my head up, but Jim wasn’t allowing me to stare at the ground tonight. Every time I looked at the path below littered with rocks and dirt, the world would begin to weeble wobble. So I held up my head, which had grown monstrously heavy and strained my eyes trying to focus on the distance ahead of me. The sky was all a deep purplish blue at this point, so it was easier to focus on this rather than admit I was pretty trashed. I played it cool despite their questioning.

“Damn Roslyn, how are you not drunk?” Jordan pried.

“I don’t know. I must have a high alcohol tolerance.” I replied with confidence.

“Yeah right,” Joseph said, “When do you ever drink?”

“Well I haven’t hung out with you guys in a while, so how would you know what I do in my free time?” I shot back with venom. I just wanted them to know I was bitter about missing them.

“Jeez, we’re a little touchy tonight.” Joseph teased.

That’s when Pascal chimed in changing the subject to something else entirely. I’m not sure if he’d sensed my burning hot rage or if he just didn’t want to deal with anyone’s drama in the moment.

Why was I so pissed off? At first it was hard for me to pinpoint but as the boys blathered on I came to a realization. I was pissed off that just because Sebastian and I didn’t hang out anymore it felt like they had dropped me like a bad habit. How could they just abandon me like that? We hung out and had fun everyday for the past 2 or 3 years together and now that one of them had a girlfriend all bets were off? Where was their loyalty? They’d turned out to be no better than my own family and I was more than cross about the whole thing. I had made them my new family and because they had families and lives of their own they had never considered that they meant so much to me.

I understand now that it wasn’t their fault that they had separate lives from my own but I thought that these were my people. This was my niche and I thought that they could understand me when in all reality I never really let them in. I only let them close enough to think they knew me, but I never really shared what was going on in my life with them. I did what I always do, I let them scratch the surface but never let them close enough to dig much deeper. I’m not sure if that was because of fear on their part or just terrible detective work.

When I think about this now though, I’m sure that many people feel the same about their own lives. The thing is that our whole world is based on perspectives. I think of the world from my own unique perspective as a result of my own collection of experiences, so no one can ever really understand the inner workings of my mind. This logic then extends to others as well. I can never truly understand the inner workings of anyone else’s mind because they’re also a combination of their own individual experiences. So it follows that everyone else is in the same boat whether or not he or she is consciously aware of this fact. However, at the time there was no solace in this knowledge. There was only a strong bitter aftertaste left in my mouth from the belief that I could one day find people who understood me better. But I’m sure I’ll find time to explain those frustrations in some other chapter.

The point at hand is that in that moment, trying not to trip on a rock as I stumbled, unstable and wasted, through the dark on that canal, I realized that I might have put myself into harms way. I didn’t want the boys to know how drunk I truly was. The girl that I was and am today would never have put herself in this potentially dangerous position. I mean look at me for Christ’s sakes! How could I be having an existential crisis right now? It’s almost pitch black outside and I decided to get drunk with four of my fairly burly guy friends on a remote area of the canal where no one can hear me scream. Genevieve and Ophelia have no clue where I am and I don’t have a cell phone for which to get ahold of them. Anyone of them could’ve easily assaulted me on their own since I was half the size that they were. The four of them could have easily killed me if they wanted to and had their friends back them up in trial. Strange that this thought hadn’t occurred to me until just now in the pitch-blackness of the desert surrounding us.

What the hell was I thinking? I mean I know that I had known these boys my whole life, literally from kindergarten until the 8th grade, but who was I to say that they had good intentions? People change and hormones make you crazy from about age 13 to age 25 or older. In hindsight the whole situation could’ve gone downhill very quickly. While I highly doubt that these thoughts were running through any of their heads because they actually were great guys, it did cross my mind.

I continued to feign sobriety until we arrive at the paved area of the canal. Thankfully this stretch of the yellow brick road was well lit. The boys’ tired to bid me ado as the darkness had fully encroached upon us. However, it was probably another half of a mile back to my house and I didn’t want to walk the rest of the way alone. It seemed unfair that the boys had a posse to walk them home and little old me had, well, just me. The though only made even more depressed, it was always just: me, myself and I. So the boys agreed to walk me the rest of the way and we laughed and joked the whole way home.

When we arrived at my house my mom was none too pleased with me. The streetlights had come on outside before I’d made it home but it was October, so I argued that the daylight hours had begun to wane. She asked me where I’d been and the boys chimed in,

"Sorry Mrs. B. she was with us”, said Jordan.

“Oh that’s okay boys,” Genevieve placated them because she’d grown so accustomed to their presence, maybe she even loved them a little bit.

“Where’s Sebastian?” she questioned, “You boys are always together.”

That’s when Joseph chimed in a mocking voice, “He’s probably hanging out with his stupid girlfriend.”

I grimaced a little bit at the thought but I was glad I wasn’t the only jealous party in the group.

“Well, we were just about to set down to dinner would you boys like to stay?” Genevieve proposed.

“No, we should really be getting home. It’s getting pretty late and my parents will start wondering where we are”, Pascal replied.

His father was a little strict and I’m sure that he’d be in as much trouble as I thought that I would be in tonight.

“Ok, well do you boys need a ride home?” Oh my God Genevieve, leave them alone.

“No Mrs. B but thank you.” Joseph replied.

They started to open the door, and they slowly began to slip out of the foyer back into the fall air, and with this my mood grew colder.

“Oh wait boys! Before you go take some Halloween candy! We never get enough trick-or-treaters and we’ll never eat it all.” Genevieve called down the stairs.

“Thank you Mrs. B!!!!” they screamed in unison and rummaged through our candy bowl.

I have no doubts that a few days later the kids that visited on Halloween would be sore about not getting enough KitKat’s or Reese’s peanut butter cups because of my friends.

After saying our final good-byes I made my way up the stairs and into the dining room where we all sat down to eat. I’m sure that my eyes were glassy, but I never really spoke much at the dinner table or elsewhere in this house for that matter, so I didn’t think anyone would notice I was drunk. I was staring off into space when Genevieve asked me what was wrong. I responded with the classic “Nothing, I’m just tired” and she dropped it.

I asked if anyone had called for me while I was out. I was hoping to make Sebastian jealous if he had magically broken up with his girlfriend and chosen to call my house while I was away. I imagined how the conversation would go. I’d call him back and nonchalantly tell him all about how much fun I had with the boys’ tonight without him. What a splendid form of revenge. What would I expect him to say back?

“Oh! I’m so sorry I took you for granted! You were the one for me all along! Take me back, Roslyn.”

No, he wasn’t a groveler and I wouldn’t have admired that in the first place. Needless to say I was snapped back to reality when Genevieve informed me that indeed no one had called while I was out gallivanting with the boys.

I stood up from the table, grabbed my plate and proceeded to the kitchen sink. I began to rinse my plate off and put it in the dishwasher.

Genevieve still seemed concerned, “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked.

“I’m sure. I’m just tired. I’m going to lay down.” I responded as I walked past herself and Ophelia at the dinner table, through the living room and to my shared bedroom.

I closed the door behind me and lay faced down on the bottom bunk pressing my face deep into Ophelias’ white bed skirt covered with pink flowers. Not ten minutes later Ophelia walked in to our bedroom and sat down beside me.

“What’s wrong with you?” she drilled me. “You don’t have any music on? And you’re just tired?”

She sat straight up like a stiff board and began haranguing me, “Sit up and face me, God dammit!”

“No.” I mumbled into the sheets and bedding. I just wanted to lay here and cry or die, whichever one came first.

“Face me!” she demanded grabbing my arm and pulling me into a half-propped up position.

“Look at me!” she grasped my face in one of her dainty yet deceivingly strong hands.

“You’re fucking drunk!” she exclaimed with disapproval.

“No, I’m not.” I lied in a rather unconvincing and slurred manner.

“Yes, you are! Oh my God!” she said with a mixture of shock and disgust.

“Do yourself a favor and stay in here so mom doesn’t find out”, she said and then swiftly exited the room to go cover for me and watch television with our mother.

After Ophelia left I crawled into bed and tried to figure out why she would be so irate with me. This uproar was coming from the girl who coerced me into smoking weed when I was 13 years old because she wanted to make sure I was exposed to recreational drug use in a safe environment. We smoked all day and I was so high the next day that I felt like I was underwater. Genevieve took us to the Chandler mall and while everyone around me was chattering away I was just stuck in slow motion land. I’m sure that some brain damage had to have been done that day.

This scorn coming from the girl who decided I needed a sleazy boyfriend at the age 13 so I would leave her and her boyfriend alone. A boyfriend who after a week told everyone we knew that he was going to get lucky by telling me he loved me later in the week. So Ophelia came to me and told me about it begging me to not be so stupid and irresponsible. Ugh!!!!! Excuse me but do you think I have no class older sister? Do you think that I can’t think for myself? Also, to the boy in question, yeah, right! Fat chance asshole! I was 13 years old and your tiny ineffectual dick and brain capacity couldn’t have handled me if you tried, not then and certainly not now! Who do you think I am kid? I’m certainly not the type of lady that gives it up just because you said you loved me! That line may work on someone that feels loved by those around her but ladies with abandonment issues see right through those smoke and mirrors.

Also, since when did my older sister think that she had my back? Or was she just jealous that she didn’t get to be the only bad influence in my life? If anything I’d been doing just fine on my own and if I wanted to get blindly wasted with my friends why did she care? No one cared before so why start caring now! ARRRGHHHHH!!!! I was so angry with all of the thoughts and memories swirling around my head that I crawled into the top bunk with all of my clothes on and fell asleep hoping that when I awoke the next day I might just feel a little less empty. Later I learned that the emptiness is something that never really goes away though. You can try to fill it with anything you want: alcohol, drugs, pets, people, cars, money, etc. but the truth is that you just have to learn to live with it.

Anyways enough with the choice few of my drug abuse encounters. Let’s move onto another terrible peer pressuring experience that D.A.R.E. and your guidance counselors didn’t cover with you; dating. Believe it or not one of the main peer pressures that all people experience is dating. I have a friend who until she met her now husband told me that she’d never felt the same way about any other relationship that she’d ever had. I was shocked because I have loved many people in my lifetime, not sexually or physically but in a friendly and emotionally invested kind of way. I was also flabbergasted because this friend of mine had recently gotten out of a two year long relationship with her best friend from high school, so I found this statement hard to believe. She also began dating her now husband only a week after her previous relationship had ceased so I assumed what she was referring to was just the honeymoon phase of a new relationship.

When I told her that I was miffed at this concept she went on to explain to me that she never really liked any of the people that she’d dated in the past. What had happened was that one of her friends would say, “You know so and so likes you and you would make a great couple! You guys should just date!” So without already having feelings for these individuals my friend would just give it a try and date them at the behest of her friends. Without a doubt in my mind this is a form of peer pressure.

My situations were always a little bit different but a form of peer pressure nonetheless. From the first “boyfriend” I had at the age of 6 because the kids at the YMCA ganged up on us and forced us to kiss each other, to the kid Ophelia set me up with at the age of 13 who was a total slime ball. I didn’t start dating because I wanted to or even because I was ready to. I started dating because it was what society, my friends and family expected of me. I’d already been bullied and teased mercilessly for a being a lesbian simply because I had short hair, didn’t wear skintight clothing, and had never really had a boyfriend at school. So at some point it just seemed like the logical choice to start dating to get these people to leave me alone.

Up until being completely crushed by Sebastian and learning that he and his girlfriend were already having sex at the age of 15 I wasn’t really interested in dating. However, after learning that Sebastian had moved on I decided that I would as well. I wouldn’t start having sex but I’d keep up the appearances that I could date whomever I wanted whenever I wanted. I flirted mercilessly in an attempt to make Sebastian jealous and dated or at least made out with several people throughout junior high and my sophomore year of high school. I mean don’t get me wrong, it was nice to be wanted by someone but I wasn’t interested in giving my virginity to any of these boys. I didn’t want to be one of those girls that confused love with sex, which later on I would find becomes a hard distinction. Sex is just a little more complicate than that.

It wasn’t until we made it to the end of our sophomore year of high school and Sebastian and his girlfriend started having problems that I realized how stupid I was being. Sebastian had invested over 2 years of his life into this current relationship. And frankly his girlfriend and I were friends long before the two of them ever started dating. His parents were in the process of getting a divorce, which must have been hard on him so I should cut him some slack. More importantly, I shouldn’t be excited that the only relatively normal relationship he had at the time was on the rocks. He needed that support system and he had burned all of his other bridges by making this stupid girl his entire world; a mistake we all make at some point. If I honestly cared about Sebastian as a person, I’d let go of my flame and stop acting so juvenile. I decided from then on, any boy that I wanted to date would be on my terms and because it was what I wanted, not what was expected of me.

After I had made this empowering discovery I began dating a boy named Cole. Cole was very nice, polite and gentlemanly. I had a crush on him for a few years now but he had dated a girl who was my friend, and she still clearly liked him. In fact it was this friend of mine who told me that Cole liked me in the first place and encouraged me to date him, which is always a trap. When Cole asked me out I told him no because I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of this ginger haired Mormon girl who played guitar, wrote songs about him, and clearly wasn’t over him in the slightest. The next day at school she told me that I should date him again and though I was reluctant, I took it as her blessing and we began dating.

Cole was an interesting boy and what he lacked in physical attractiveness he made up for in personality. I’ve always chosen the men I dated this way, up until I met my husband who is beyond dashing, smart, funny and full of personality. After about two months of dating Cole, my mother got the news that we’d be moving to Washington State and it was the perfect excuse for me to break up with him. Cole was just too nice, too kind, and too respectful if that is at all possible and I was starting to get worried that he might be one of those keep in your life forever kind of guys.

This is actually my number one weakness in life. I get bored or feel stuck far too easily. I get bored with jobs, bored with people and places and then I leave them. Or I start to feel trapped, and then I do the same thing; I find a reason to leave because it’s easier to be alone. I know that it’s a fickle and frivolous thing of me to do but I simply cannot help myself. I needed to connect with someone the way that Sebastian and I had always connected. Sebastian and I could talk for hours on end about absolutely nothing, we had the same type of humor, and we were both quick-witted, snarky, outspoken, creative and adventurous. Basically what it boils down to is that I needed another me to keep pace with myself. And I was a little scared that Cole might be the first person that loved me for me, not who he thought I was or who he wanted me to be. That scared the living hell out of me, what if I wasn’t capable of loving him back. No, this wasn’t Cole’s fault at all. This was all my inability to accept the possibility of being loved.

So while I was devastated that I’d be moving to Washington State in June of 2005 I was equally relieved that I didn’t have to become more emotionally invested in Cole than was necessary. I know that makes me a selfish person, but at least it would be a clean break and we wouldn’t have to pretend to be interested in each other from 2,000 miles away. Cole could move on and find a girl that was more of a homebody and he’d be happier in the long run.