17 Years Old

Father told me that Max invited me to visit him in France for three weeks. I would have to travel there alone, and Max would pick me up at the airport near his hometown of Montpellier. At first I was very anxious about it, and I was about to say no. Father talked me into it, saying that I was lucky to have an opportunity like this. I really missed Max, and I wanted to see him again, so I quickly made the decision to go.

I left around the beginning of August. This was my first time traveling alone, and I didn’t know what to expect. Father signed me up to have supervised travel assistance to help me along the way, otherwise I would get lost in the airport. On the way there, I made a stop in Frankfurt, Germany to transfer planes. Germany became another country I can add to the list of places I’ve been. When I arrived at the airport in France, I waited for a few hours and finally Max showed up. I was really happy to see him. I couldn’t believe I was actually in France again.

Max and I stayed at his grandmother’s house in Montpellier. Montpellier was an exquisite city, with a romantic and cultured vibe to it. It was such a pity that I was too caught up in my own world to truly appreciate it at the time.

Max introduced me to his life in France. I met with some of his friends and we went to bars together. In France, the legal drinking age is 16, so I was able to drink alcohol at a bar. It was astounding! For those three weeks, I had the faintest taste of what life was like for normal young people. The experience of hanging out with a group of young people, boys and girls, and enjoying life was something I never did before. It really turned my whole world around, for that short amount of time. So this is what everyone else gets to experience, I thought to myself with jealousy. I felt a sense of happiness and bliss that I hadn’t felt since childhood, when life was good.

During the trip, we visited the town of Arles where we stayed in the hotel that Max’s family owns. Max told me about all of the sexual experiences he had. I never knew he had such an active sex life. The more he talked to me about it, the more envious I became. I questioned to myself why he got to experience such an amazing life, while I had to suffer so much loneliness and humiliation. I was introduced to some of the girls he had sex with in the past, and they were all pretty. On top of that, his family was extremely wealthy and they owned a sprawling mansion in the countryside. Where’s the justice? I thought. Why couldn’t I have been born into that life? I envied Max so much. His life must have been heaven on earth. Despite my envy of Max, I couldn’t hate him, at least at that time. He was the only popular young person who ever reached out to me. He invited me to visit his home, and he treated me like a friend. For that, I will always have a grudging respect for Max Bonon.

After three weeks in France doing exciting social things, I returned to my lonely life in the U.S., where I became even more depressed than I was in the beginning of summer, especially after getting a taste of what life was truly like for normal people. I knew I could never live such a pleasurable life, and the knowledge haunted me. I was back to my routine of World of Warcraft. At least the new expansion was coming out soon, and I tried to look forward to that.

When Twelfth Grade began, I made a vow to finish high school before the month of March. The high school system at Independence allows students to work at their own pace, so the more extra work I did, the sooner I could graduate. I was always depressed and bored for the few hours a day I had to spend there, and I disliked all of the degenerate, low-class students there. They repulsed me. I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could, and it became my goal for the year. At the end of school time every day I asked my teachers to give me extra homework assignments, and I stopped myself from playing WoW until I completed them.

The second expansion for World of Warcraft finally released, called Wrath of the Lich King. When I got home from school, I wanted the game so badly. Mother wasn’t home from work yet, so she couldn’t drive me. I decided to walk all the way to Best Buy to pick up the game. It was a long walk that took almost an hour. On the way home I was very hungry and stopped at Panda Express to eat lunch. Planet Cyber was right next to that Panda Express, so I walked in there for a few seconds to reminisce about better times before hurrying home to install the game. Once it was installed, James and I played it together all afternoon.

I found out that one of my teachers at Independence, Mr. Perales, also played WoW. From then on, the two of us would talk about the game every day. It was nice to have someone at school to talk to, and I enjoyed telling him about my daily progression with my character. This made my time at school a lot less mundane and boring.

James, Steve, and Mark were the closest thing I had to a group of friends. I played with them online almost every day. We had so many adventures in WoW as a group, and yet... I felt like the outcast of the group. Steve and Mark only considered me an online friend, never a real friend. I found out that the three of them had WoW meet-ups at one of their houses a lot, and they never invited me. Sometimes, when I would be playing with them online, I would find out that they were all together in real life, and I was the only one left out. Whenever they did this, I acted bitter towards them through the game, but they didn’t even care. Even in the World of Warcraft, I was an outcast, alone and unwanted.

The more lonely I felt, the more angry I became. The anger slowly built up inside me throughout all of the dark years. Even after the release of the new WoW expansion, I noticed that the game’s ability to alleviate my sense of loneliness was starting to fade. I began to feel lonely even while playing it, and I often broke down into tears in the middle of my WoW sessions. I began to ask myself what the point was in playing this game anymore. I spent less and less time playing it.

One day I found some posts on the internet about teenagers having sex, and I was once again reminded of the life I had been denied. I felt that no girl would ever want to have sex with me... And I developed extreme feelings of envy, hatred, and anger towards anyone who has a sex life. I saw them as the enemy. I felt condemned to live a life of lonely celibacy while other boys were allowed to experience the pleasures of sex, all because girls didn’t want me. I felt inferior and undesirable. This time, however, I couldn’t just stand by and accept such an injustice anymore. I refused to continue hiding away from the world and forgetting about all the insults it dealt to me.