Day Five, 12,061 Words

I wrote 2,000 words in five hours.  Shit.  I am back to not knowing what the hell is going on in my book, but I felt that I needed to add some backstory so that the plot wouldn't advance too quickly.  Here, I'm explaining what Penny Lane would consider to be the five worst break-ups of all time.  I have only described four so far, so I guess that the fifth will come tomorrow.

This isn't great, but at least it tells you a lot about Penny Lane.

Currently sitting at number five was her high school boyfriend, Billy.  He was on the high school hockey team, which was probably his most attractive quality anyway.  Well, that and the fact that he had a car.  Just thinking about the time that they broke up before the prom and he told everyone that she was gay made her angry all over again [note: this is a reference to the song that inspired the title of this novel].  They can’t all be winners, and Billy certainly was of the loser variety.  He had gone on to have a great career as a clerk at a dépanneur on St. Laurent.  She did not miss him.

Number four was Caleb Robinson, a man that she had met during the Metric show at the Osheaga Music and Arts Festival at Parc Jean-Drapeau the summer before her second year of school at McGill University.  Their initial attraction was based on her level of drunkenness and his possession of weed, which essentially tells you everything that you need to know about how promising that relationship was.  He was handsome in a not-trying way, which made a lot of sense since he didn’t really try at anything in life anyway.  She did not look back on that relationship fondly, since he had stolen money from her and immediately following the break-up had suspiciously moved in with another woman named Desire.  She couldn’t say the name “Desire” without her eyes rolling out of her head.

Coming in at number three was John Johnson, whose personality was just as underwhelming as his name.   Clearly his parents had gotten bored of him before they even named him, and after having dated him for seven months, Penny Lane had to agree with their initial assessment.  He had been a rebound from Caleb, and Penny Lane wanted someone stable and non-threatening, since Caleb had been particularly unstable and had threatened her.  John Johnson fit the bill to a tea; he didn’t scare her, not even in an “I have something to lose and I’m terrified” kind of way.  She never really felt anything for him, but after all of the feeling she did with Caleb, she almost welcomed the feeling that she was settling for something that at least wouldn’t hurt her.  But that’s the thing with dating down; you assume that you’re the one who will do the heartbreaking because the other person is (or should be) so happy to be with you that they wouldn’t be foolish enough to let you go.  As Penny Lane discovered, that was not to be the case.  Being broken up with by someone named John Johnson does not do wonders for one’s self-esteem, which is precisely the reason that this break-up ranks third in the all-time worst break-ups that Penny Lane had ever experienced.  

The second worst break-up was unfortunate in virtually every way that a break-up can be unfortunate.  When she had finally picked herself up off the floor and dusted herself off, she had been completely swept off her feet by Clark Wendell, a marketing major whose ability to tell people exactly what they wanted to hear did not seem to end in the board room.  What exactly was Penny Lane to do?  He knew everything about her in an almost Sherlockian way, and he became the person that she wanted him to be.  He cared about animals.  He developed a love for cute desserts.  He listened to folk music.  He didn’t do these things because he was a bad person who tried to hurt people; he wasn’t enough of an individual to even be that kind of person.  He didn’t know who he was, and it was easier for him to change for people than to figure it out.  Unfortunately for Penny Lane, he decided to become the kind of guy who cheats on his live-in girlfriend when she goes home for the weekend to visit her parents and who doesn’t bother to hide the evidence (in this case, the woman that he had met in his psychology class).  Her initial response to the situation had been to laugh, but unfortunately, it had sounded more like a sea lion mating call.  It was one of her least dignified moments in life (perhaps the least, but she had not gotten around to crafting that list yet).

Karl Marx drunk.  Just because.