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Parisian Treadmill

by Shi Y, Arizona, USA, Age 16

I went to France to strike gold, but instead missed by a lifetime and fell into a rose-colored vortex.

Thorne was a junkie out of East L.A., a girl with nothing to her name but a grudge and a habit. The only plan in life she’d ever had was to get discovered at a young age and make it big modeling. She put some effort into it, picked up a contract, over to Paris, and got herself ‘The Look’ and a craving for cocaine. Too late she finds out she’s a half-inch too short to do catwalks, and she’ll never be a great. Her delusions of grandeur dashed on the shoreline of reality, she nearly drowned in disillusionment. She gave up.

Now she stays out with the crew, partying with the up-and-comers, the people who are going somewhere, hoping to maybe catch a hold of their high-rolling coattails before they move on out of this hole. When she’s sober, she’s hell; she’s beautiful as sin with an axe aimed at your knees. Nonetheless, I moved in with her because it was cheaper that way. She was horrible company, thought, so I found another deluded victim to live with us and share the sorrow.

Crude Louis was exactly that, and the creepiest Frenchman I’ve ever known. He was sickening; he fairly worshipped America and adopted all its most offensive cultural traits: profanity, gluttony, ignorance, endless vulgarity. He repulsed everyone, but like a true American, he refused to concede defeat, and offended everyone even more enthusiastically instead.

Those two were my near constant companions in the city of love. We were all very bitter, and it was obvious we fundamentally disliked one another. At the same time, though, we realized anything beat solitude, so we adopted pretenses of affection that made life together bearable. Thorne would chain-smoke and glare sultrily around the room, and though that was the only thing she ever did, Louis and I knew she was being friendly, even sociable, in her silence, simply because she was repressing her constant complaints and criticisms. Louis would respond to her niceties by layer in his Yankee grime even thicker than usually, and I would keep myself sane by retreating to the kitchen and capitulating to Betty Crocker’s extraordinary range of baking mixes. So we lived for far too long, united by a lust for riches, and chained with the bonds of poverty.