I had wanted to fucking kill Andy. To cut off his dick and feed it to a tank of colorful aquatic fish, something Law and Order: SVU esque. I could just see a rugged detective standing in front of the NYC deep-sea aquarium and watching as a severed penis floated by. He would turn to his partner and say in a deep, emotionless voice, "I wonder what that son-of-a-bitch did to become fish-food."

It would play out like that, but my methods would be more creative than your average scorned woman, and I wouldn't get caught. In my little fantasy, I would be the one that got away.

The whole plan, fish and all, sounds extreme I'll admit. But that was our relationship, Andy and me; extreme love to match extreme hate.

And in the spirit of extreme hatred, I wanted Andy to suffer the internal pain that I was feeling when he told me it was O-V-E-R. Unfortunately, it has always been easier to achieve outer pain, than it is inner. A black eye or a missing finger is more obvious, and thus more fulfilling to the avenger, than silent close-eyed tears.

Our blessed two-month relationship was dead in the water over for some fucking teenage bitches. And just hours after he took my hand in the bookstore parking lot and told me that he didn't think he could love me anymore than he already did!

Excuse the language please reader… but FUCK YOU asshole, it's my breakup and I can swear if I want to. That's what I told Andy when he asked me quietly to not make a scene. I screamed a relevant curse to answer his plea, and then threw my cell-phone at his head. Before I left, I told him I was going to come to his room while he was asleep and cheese-grade off his genitals and feed the shavings to ducks.

I swear, I'm not usually an aggressive, horrible excuse for a human being, but I was enraged at his senseless betrayal. I had never truly loved him, even when I thought I had, so our breakup had none of the elements of friendship and longing found in a breakup of love-lost; the situational elements which might have subdued me from making a fool of myself for the whole floor to hear. I only felt pure white-hot rage and the deeper sickness of self-loathing that always seems to come on when someone wrongs me. I wanted him to feel so bad. I wanted him to writhe in pain…forever would be seriously too short a time in the fiery flames.

I decided the best way to make him suffer was, to leave the idea of outward pain behind, and target inner; to make a big deal about how he took my virginity from me. In reality I actually didn't care. But of course I didn't want him to know that. It was the only guilt card I still held that had any bargaining capacity. Besides, he was a cold hearted bastard who was breaking up with me on Halloween for some 16 year old girls he met at a punk rock concert. I imagined that they had a lot of piercings and short black buzz cuts. Maybe some rub-on withered-rose tattoo tramp-stamps too.

To tell you the truth I wasn't upset that he was breaking up with me. I was just upset that I hadn't gotten there before him. I'm a little morally-challenged in that way. I'll admit it. We all have faults. I like to win. I like to be right. I like to be the one with all the answers. I really like to be in control. And friends, I just love to be loved. My pride was much more important to me than my virginity. I mean who cares about a little slit of flesh, a little end-of- my- girlhood blood. My tears were all about how he 'dared' dump ME. I was the best he was going to get goddamit. Me. Why couldn't he see that as clearly as I did?

There was a girl Marissa that Andy talked to on the internet. She was from his hometown and she was still in high school; apparently the girlfriend of his best friend. Coincidentally all of his friends were at least two years younger than he was, and were subsequently still in high school. The age discrepancy really should have been my first clue that he was a total creeper, that and the fact that he wore a leather jacket that was once owned by a Billy Idol impersonator. That's the beauty of EBay friends, a limitless supply of junk just waiting to have money wasted on it. For real… I couldn't make this shit up if I tried.

When I got back to my room I made up a list of the reasons why Andy was a piece of shit and an embarrassment to my ex-boyfriend roster. Listing has always been my way of mentally beating my ass for making such bad life decisions. A razor blade to the arm is hard to cover-up. A list on the other hand…

The Top 10 Reasons I Should Have Backed the Fuck off Andy Before I got emotionally Involved: (listed in order from honest mistake {HM} to complete idiot {CI})

1. HM - No 18 year old, male or otherwise, should still have an entire bookshelf of dungeons and dragons figurines and strategy books for World of War Craft and other equally as geeky games.

-Amend that to, no one in their right mind should ever have eight full shelves' devoted to computer game strategy books.

2. HM- He lost his virginity to a Japanese exchange student when he was 13. BTW- She only lived with them for 2 weeks and they still managed to get the hanky-panky on.

3. CI- He gifted me a used, yes, you heard right, a used pink dildo that some other former GF had rejected. I took it. But I didn't use it. I swear.

4. CI- He was raised Catholic. I was raised Lutheran. Lutheran is pretty much as close as to Catholic as you can possibly get without actually being Catholic. Yet he was so concerned that I convert to Catholicism after like a week of dating that he had his dad buy me a book called The 50 Most Important Misunderstandings about the Catholic Church. Yeah. I'm gonna read that. Fuck if I care, seriously.

5. CI- When we were dating and copulating like bunnies, Andy's dad came into town to take him to dinner. He saw me as they were driving near the dining hall and he told his dad, "Hey I know that person." That's it. Not, "that's my girlfriend." Not even, "that's a friend of mine who lives in North Hall with me." Just an acknowledgement that at some point he had met me.

6. CIx3- He hit me, he verbally degraded me, and he majorly insulted my body on more than one occasion while we were having sex.

7. CI- I once jacked-him-off while he was watching Conan the Barbarian, and it did not distract him at all from the movie. He climaxed while staring at a bare-chested Arnold Schwarzenegger. Which is totally wrong on so many levels, either that or I was really awful, but I don't think so. He was just gay.

8. CI-The first time we had sex he put on bagpipe music. That's right friends. I lost my virginity to 'My Heart Will Go On' as played by the Royal Scottish Bagpipe Quartet. He put a towel under me so that he wouldn't have to clean his sheets. God forbid. And when it was over, he hopped out of bed, left me there alone in my own blood, no post-coital cuddle, and played World of War Craft. Then he said, "clean that up will you." Not a question. An order.

9. CI- Dorm beds are notoriously small. And when I came over to spend the night after a little sexy-sexy, he would say he got overheated and then make me sleep on the floor next to his bed. On his dorm room floor. No apologies, just "why don't you lie on the floor so I can get some sleep without you crowding me... Oh hey and would you turn off my computer monitor while you're at it?

10. CI- And finally, last but certainly not least, I really should have backed the fuck away when I found out that he was two timing me with my best friend Sarah from 7th grade. 7th grade Sarah. We saw 'O Brother Where art thou' with my dad for my 13th birthday. We ate oranges in his hunter green crew-cab in the theatre parking lot and we commiserated that it's impossible to swallow the orange skin without gagging. The very same Sarah who I hung out with at the library after middle school and who transferred to another high-school after her mom divorced husband number 3. The Sarah who magically resurfaced at college with a totally new personality and a friend named Andy O'Connell.

As you can see, most of these were obvious, complete idiot mistakes. Hence why listing is so damn important.

With Andy went all those happy memories of 7th grade Sarah and me, and permanently gave my whole freshman year of college a grayish tinge. Not that my childhood was an apple pie and a frilly dress. It wasn't.

I can probably blame my childhood for all the insane reasons I hooked up with the first young man who paid me any attention, as my mother would say. Jeez. My life really is like a bad country song. How did I come to be so guilty about a perfectly natural thing?

Come to think of It, it might have been my mother's schizophrenic way of administering sex education. It started when she begrudgingly explained the mechanics of intercourse to me when I was 6, mainly because I bugged her about it for an hour until she was too fed-up to resist. She told me straight out. A bare bones sex-talk if there ever was one. No pretense of, "When two people love each other very much…" Her version went like this, "the man sticks his penis in the woman's vagina. He ejaculates outs a yellowish mucus plug called sperm. The sperm swims up into the woman cervix and penetrates the woman's egg if she is fertile. Then she can conceive a child. You can't have sex until you are old and married. The bible says so."

And that was that. Of course I was horrified, not to mention confused. My mom was never one to know how to communicate on the child-wavelength. She was strictly scientific, pragmatic, and blunt as anyone I've ever known and yet, as I got older she was surprisingly forthcoming with information about her own sex life. More than I ever wanted to know. Like when she told my sister and I that the reason she had to trade in her waterbed for a mattress, was because my dad didn't like trying to have sex on something that kept moving. Talk about waaaay. to. much. info.

And yet there was a time when my mom denied that she knew what oral sex was after my sister and I found Doctor Spock's Everything You Ever Needed to Know about Sex and More on the top shelf in the bathroom towel closet. My older sister told me and my mom she had read was something about sucking on penises, and my mom swore up and down that she'd never heard of such a thing, or practiced it.

Not to mention that scarring moment when she turned to me during a commercial break, and out of the blue said, "Listen Cilla, sex isn't necessarily as exciting as it's portrayed on T.V. I'm sorry to break it to you honey, but in reality it's more like a duty. It doesn't always feel good. Certainly not that good. When you get married you should just lay back and try to zone out."

With my mother being so scientific and yet so God-fearing, so open and yet so very prudish, there were too many mixed messages about sex to for an adolescent girl to wade through. Truth was, I already had my own sexual agenda, and I didn't know what my parents wanted from me. So instead I gleaned information from another source: my wonderfully enlightened peers.

My best friend's dad was a transvestite. When I was 9 I watched him go from scary old Mike the mechanic to fabulous Felina Francesca Fontana all glitter and gaudy snap-on earrings. At first it was weird, watching Mike roll nude panty-hoes up his harry legs and strap on black platform heels. He wasn't young. He must have been nearly 55 when he decided to change. Why he did it that far along in his life, I'll never know. The times they were a-changing I guess. The year was 1996 and daddy-dearest was taking the cross-dressing thing for all it was worth.

Mike was a skinny, sallow, pocked faced old man. His looks exemplified the inevitable wear and tear you would expect to see on a life-long chain smoker, black-out drunk and heroin abuser. Surprisingly everything but the smoking magically stopped when he became a woman. I guess he didn't need the vices as a crutch anymore. I can't imagine the freedom of suddenly being able to cover up life's past mistakes with the miracle of makeup.

Mike went crazy; he shaved of his eyebrows and drew them in with a midnight black pencil and a stencil in the shape of a checkmark for guidance. He wore bright red lipstick, fake lashes, and that shade of blue of eye shadow that is the trademark of the 1960's. When he was done he threw on a curly yellow wig, press-on nails, oodles of little-old-lady costume jewelry, and topped it off with a worn-out black leather jacket. He looked awful of course, sort of like a used-and-abused pay-by-the hour hooker. The kind that you'd expect could only afford to charge a couple of bucks for her services and probably slept in a cardboard box on the side walk while pubic lice ate her from the inside out. But of course Mike didn't know that. He hadn't had much practice at being a woman yet, and he was such a blinding light role model for my friend Jo and I that we didn't dare point it out. We learned a lot about the way of the world from his example. Jo got preggers at 14 (she has 4 kids now) and I masturbated with a curling iron and a broom handle.

I would guess that these earlier experiences with sexuality probably shaped who I am today. But I digress; we'll get back to that crazy psychological bullshit later.

Apparently Andy talked over our relationship with his internet buddy Marissa (remember her from paragraph 4?) and she decided it would be a good idea for him to dump me for some trollops named Alixza and Roxette. I'm lying. I don't know what the boyfriend stealing sluts' names were. I just imagined they called themselves by faux-punk names while they smoked their unfiltered cigarettes and thrashed to some bad band with an equally bad name like Panic at the Frisky Dingo! What?

I remember that the air was really, really still and hotter than hell in his dorm room. It was humiliatingly silent except for my sloppy cromes. I was so frustrated that I couldn't keep my cries segregated from my moans anymore, resulting in something like a dog slobbering all over the floor unknowingly while it dreams of chasing cats. Let's call it croming shall we? Always good fun to make up new words don't you think?

I make fun of it now, but at the time it was not a pretty sight friends, not a pretty sight at all; goops of snot falling out of my nose and onto my shirt, red blood shot eyes, whimpers, moans and tears all mixed up in the gift that just keeps on giving; emotional anguish.

I heard once that people greatly overestimate how long it will take them to get over a breakup. Of course I wasn't in mindset to be reasonable when I was in the midst of it, but I see that argument now. At the time I did the opposite of everything rational. I tried to kill myself.

Drum Roll Please….. yes, because I thought I couldn't live without Andy O' Connell, the cheating, girlfriend beating creep-show. It was a sad day for my pride, my friends, a very sad day indeed.

After I yelled a lot, made a fool of myself, and ran whimpering down the hall of our dorm to the 2nd floor where I lived, I took a handful of prescription drugs in a vain effort to end it all. After about 20 minutes of waiting for my life to erupt in chokes and throaty wasps, my roommate Kayla came in and asked me what was wrong. Apparently she had heard me crying from her room at the end of hall. It was super-embarrassing that she could hear me, but at the same time, loud, gushy, post breakup tears were justifiable anguish in the teenage-girl-world.

I told Kayla was happened. She said it was a good thing and not to feel too bad about it. I trusted her, primarily because she had been with me through it all. She knew about the frequent slapping and the loss of virginity, and even about how I tried to break up with him on six separate instances, every time crawling back in all-out patheticness.

A little calmer as I was now, I realized she was probably right. But I had already taken the pills. Luckily for me I'm a total idiot and the amount I took wasn't nearly enough to kill me, not even to knock me out or make me throw up. Instead I got overwhelmingly powerful diarrhea. Which bears the question- how on earth did I manage to get suicide so very wrong?

As I sat on porcelain throne, reading a bad paperback novel I had no interest in, and tried to ride out the intestinal explosions, I began to feel bad about attempting to leave my brother all alone in the world. We were close after all. I had practically raised him. I could never be so selfish as to take the one close family relation he had away from him.

After I was thoroughly emptied, I called my Dad who lived an hour away from the U and asked him if he would come pick me up, even though it was nearly 11pm. My dad is really a good guy, and so he obliged and was outside my dorm with my brother in the passenger seat by half after midnight. He took me to MacDonald's and got me a chocolate dipped cone to make things better. It did a little; chocolate always does, but let me tell you, it was the worst ever Halloween of my life. Luckily there were better things to come. I just didn't know it yet.

Thanks for reading. I know it's a little rough grammar wise and all, but it is my first ever draft. I haven't revised it yet at all, so cut me some slack...:) However, constructive criticism is always, always welcome. How else are we to get better? Just let me know if you would like me to comment/review your story and I would be glad to! BTW- There should be much less profanity in the next chapter... but a little more sex.