A/N Just a little something I started writing in the cafeteria at McGill. It’s part autobiography, part pure fiction, as all good works are. LoL. Let me know what you think.

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What innocents we were! We were secretly thrilled by our own audacity, our perceived precocity. We were so tragically jaded, it seemed, for ones so young. It made us arrogant. Not for us, the pink lipstick, the baggy jeans, the puppy love, no, we were beyond that. We were no longer children, at fifteen, not even mere adolescents. We knew things, you see. We were wise beyond our years. We had naught but disdain for the trappings of youth, the silly trinkets that filled the girls’ purses, cluttered the boys’ shelves. They were tokens in a game which we were too mature to play. We did not play. What did we do? We wrote. We composed poems, odes in honour of our disillusionment, elegies commemorating the instances of cruel irony that shaped our lives. The world was a bleak place, and what better way to capture the despair, we thought, than in beautifully elegant verse?

But what did we know then of poetry? And what did we know then of cynicism?

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We met in high school. Overachievers that we had always been, we were enrolled in a small, very academically-driven private school in the south-western part of Quebec. It was a Catholic school, a former seminary, complete with a small chapel, an in-house relic of a priest, and a dormitory for boys only. The rampant religiosity managed, eventually, to turn some of us against itself.

We were all, for the most part, somewhere near the top of the class. It can be said without pretension now that we were intelligent, more so than the average. We prided ourselves on this, and it drew us together as surely as anything else.

No, we were not average. We were outside the mainstream, and not, at first, by any conscious effort on our part. While we recognized that “normal” was relative, we were not like the others. The question of nature versus nurture became important – were we simply raised differently, or were we born different?