When I was fifteen I experienced my first bout of heartbreak. His name was Pat (probably the grossest name for a male ever). He was three years older and in a band. Naturally, I thought we were going to be together forever. In hind sight he was a douche bag, which I can appreciate now because I learned from it. We started dating when I was fourteen, and it last for about a year, which in teenage girl terms is roughly four years. For the latter half of our relationship he treated me pretty poorly, and ended up leaving me for a girl his own age when he was at beach week. The day a friend told me he was hanging out with her at beach week, the same day he broke up with me, I was crushed. It felt awful and I was convinced I wasn't going to find anyone else. I was retarded. But instead of letting me deal with it, my mother barged into my room and demanded to know every detail of what happened even though I didn't want to talk about it. She didn't want to know the details because she was concerned, she wanted to know because she was a nosy bitch that loved to gossip.

In the months following the breakup I was pretty sad, normal stuff. I didn't eat as much. I have been blessed with a speedy metabolism, so I used to eat Mcdonald's and Taco Bell constantly, and just didn't anymore. My mother took this opportunity to decide I was anorexic. One morning when I was making cereal my mom came in and started freaking out about how I wasn't eating (ironic huh?). She was screaming and cursing at me at the top of her lungs, as usual. She knocked my full bowl of cereal out of my hands and onto the floor, where the glass bowl shattered. She continued to scream at me and push me in the mess. I didn't have shoes on.

She was always obsessed with being skinny and anorexic. She would boast about having an eating disorder and I wanted to tell her that eating a ton of pills and forgetting to eat actual food does not an eating disorder make. When I was twelve she started making me go to the gym everyday, because even though I wans't fat, I "have the potential to be." She got me a personal trainer, but after a while she would just drop me off there, sometimes not picking me up until they closed, at 10. But mostly making me take cabs home, who were unrealiable, especially since I didn't have a cell phone and constantly had to borrow the gym's phone. It was horribly embarrassing. Eventually I got a job at the gym. The woman I worked with at the front desk, Rita, was in her forties, one of the worst gossips I've ever met and devoutly religious. She'd read the bible and go to church all the time, despite treating me like shit and telling me I wasn't allowed to sign up new members (I later found out this was because we made commission off of them). Gyms are already gossipy places. So when I walked in one day and everyone was staring at me out of the corner of their eyes and then whispering to their chubby companions on the stair master, I knew something was up.

I was sitting at the desk reading when Rita came up and in a sickeningly sweet voice slid a power bar over to me "Here, I bought this for you." I was furious. I knew my mother, who gossiped with her regularly, and talked shit about her regularly had called to spread the rumor. When I got home I demanded to know who she told, "God, you're such a drama queen, I only told Rita." Though she knew perfectly well that calling Rita and randomly telling her this lie would ensure that everyone I worked with would think I was anorexic. It still just seems to me that her goal was to make every facet of my life as miserable as she could.