I ditched the boyfriend (the never-realized foursome retains the faint pastel aura of regret). And I discovered I wanted a purpose, something, anything more than the shithole my life was. And I fell in love with Tomas, and Arutha, and Admiral Trask. Yes, I was medically malnourished and deficient in every vitamin known to humans, but I bought books.
I bought Magician, and Silverthorn, and A Darkness at Sethanon. I'd just been given the unheard-of sum of $80 by my dying great-aunt, who intended me to buy moisturizer and body scrub so I would stop scaring unprepared members of the public with my sloughing. The tobacconist next to my bus stop sold books. I was living in monkey mind, wading through hormones and ignorance, flailing my way from one moment to the next with no thought of tomorrow unable to imagine that the next day could be any different. Needless to say, my body wasn't doing well on this diet, the skin flaking off me as if I were a scrofulus medieval peasant. I was in my second flat (share house) and I had 20 cents a day budget for food – one deep-fried potato fritter – supplemented with endless quantities of free alcohol, bought for me by my boyfriend's cronies, who, in retrospect, hoped to get me drunk enough I'd go for a foursome. I had an abusive boyfriend who was faking a back injury from his job as a navy mechanic so he could live on disability. I had already gigantically screwed up one job, and I was low-level incompetent at being a receptionist, spiking to appalling on a regular basis.
But, anyway, New Zealand had no student loans back then, and you had to pay tuition up front. No one in my family had ever been and I lacked the cultural capital to understand what I had needed to do to even apply. But I was very aware that everyone else had gone off to college, and I could not. I was glad to see the back of everyone from high school: I'd been awkward and gawky and utterly overlooked, and the word frenemy had not yet been coined, or I would have understood why the one girl I thought was on my team consistently ran me down to others. The year after high school I was working a dead-end job as a receptionist for a company that ground lenses for prescription glasses. Sometimes a book comes along at just the right time.
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