I move on to the halls of high school. Grade Nine: was horrible; really.

My teachers all call me "precocious." I wonder why. My boyfriend is the twenty-three year old guy who stops me on the way to and from school for sex-on-demand. My eldest brother has introduced me to marijuana, and thinks it's wonderful that I'm so sexually active, and suggests, as he strokes my hair, that I move on soon to the wonders of the birth control pill. My promiscuous period begins. I skip a lot of classes. I pass Grade Nine with flying colors.

I am not tired. I am hungry. I sleep all the time; I refuse to eat. I am sent home from school occasionally because I "look anemic." The term "anorexia nervosa" has apparently not been discovered yet. I am fifteen, and I am in Grade Eleven. I am different. In every way, I am different. (Did everybody but me wait until they were seven before they started school?) I am suddenly sixteen.

I go to school, I go to work, I go home, I go to work, I go on dates, I go to school. I like the schoolwork itself, but I am afraid of the place and the people; I like the work itself, and I especially like the paycheques, but I am afraid of the people and the place; I date, but I only date men ten or twenty years older than myself; I like to be at home, as little as possible.

I do my algebra homework sitting alone in the hallway at school. In class, the boy sitting directly across from me is constantly demanding my notebook with my answers. "Give me your book" or else. Or else he'll shove me in a corner and stick his tongue in my mouth. Or else he'll toss lit matches in my hair again today at recess. I fling my damn book across the aisle at him, and I am flung into the guidance counsellor's office. I am told I am in trouble, because I "threw a temper," and I am told I must see the counsellor weekly until the end of the school year; I am asked to begin by relating my family history. Yeah, right. I could see the inkblot on the wall. I am not asked why I threw the book. I didn't go back to the office. Grade Eleven ended. I didn't go back to school. I went to work full-time instead.

Out in the "real world" I am taught: "It don't pay to say NO." I hear: "Date me, or your hours are cut back." Pushed against the cash register, I still hear the hard cock: "put out right here, or you don't work again." I space. I quit, again. Walking to and from work, I hear: "Hey, is twenty bucks enough for a blow-job?!" and I think, to myself: if it were, I'd have been rich by age nine. I hear another car horn: "Two hundred dollars baby, right now!" I admit, I wondered how long he would take at it, and calculating from a minimum wage of $1.85 per hour, it was tempting, very tempting, but I did not get in to find out if it paid to say YES. I got married instead. (No, it does not pay to say yes.)

My husband was both alcoholic and abusive. (I will point out that those are two separate problems, though they are often found together in the same person.) I married in 1980, and during the nine years of marriage, my husband subjected me to emotional, psychological, physical, and primarily sexual abuse (the most brutal rape inflicted upon me during my pregnancy). The operative word in what I have just said, is subjected. He owned me, controlled me, and abused me. He taught, and reviewed, all the rules: fear, shame guilt, depression, non-existent self-esteem, and not to tell.

I begin my writing career. I work with past and future tense. I am very tense. But my work is very intense, and I am very persistent. I am finally published. My prose and my poetry; my veiled pain. Pain does not pay. Neither does a career in literary writing. I am going to have a child to support. I know I need my grade twelve and a paying career to go with motherhood. I save for the correspondence courses. Too late, I find out there is The Un-written Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not have a higher education than thy abusive spouse. The quadratic equation, in a no-win situation, is: "no more fucking algebra you stupid woman; do the fucking dishes and then come to bed now." (Think about it; I cannot Do, Then, and still come to bed Now. So I'll opt to do the dishes and he'll screw me at the sink.) This formula is also known as "curricula interruptus" and is known to be a 100 per cent effective method of control. Finally, yes, he taught me anger. My anger. I petitioned for divorce in 1989.