Double lives

OK, an intermission about double lives.

You can say I am quite interested in the subject form a sort of professional point of view, with all my stories about transformations and what not.

So, here goes the thing.

Following the business course, I met an old friend. Let's call her B.
She's doing a similar course in the same place.

Now me and B. go back to kindergarten, and we did primary school together and secondary and high school in the same Catholic institute but not in the same class. Then we sort of lost touch, but this is not a big town, so we saw each other passingly a few times. She saw me go through my various phases, and never commented, basically because we were no longer hanging together and seeing the same people anymore.

Now we spent a few lunch breaks together talking about this and that... yes, OK, smoking and gossiping like rabid bitches... and this is what I learned about her double life.

When she was 16, back in 1999 or 2000, B.'s parents arranged for her to spend one month in the summer with her cousin, that was three years older and was living in London. It would be good for her English, and she'd be under the watchful eye of her cousin, that was studying and working in a language school over there.

So B. started out promising to send postcards and visit museums and take photos and all that. Two packed suitcases, guidebooks, the works.

Anyway, B. lands in Stanstead, and there is her cousin waiting for her, in full Goth gear.

Turns out her cousin is no longer working in a language school, now she is a bartender in a pub.

They ride to tube to the cousin's place, that she's sharing with a bunch of other people. B. described the place like "a sort of squat."

B. is pretty taken aback and disoriented but you can imagine what a girl of 16 for the first time out of her parent's control might feel like, given the circumstances.

Her suitcases get stashed away in a closet, and within 36 hours she's fully Gothed-up and ready to hit the town.

Basically doing everything she promised her parents: sending postcards, visiting museums, taking photos, practicing her English and all that.

Clubbing like there's no tomorrow, getting drunk, learning to smoke, experimenting with drugs, losing her virginity... well, maybe she had not promised THAT to her parents.

She even calls home once a week, telling her mom how much fun she's having. Maybe omitting a few details.

At the end of the month, she takes two days to get back into her good girl skin, and flies back home.

"My mother said it was a pity neither me nor [her cousin] appeared in any photograph..."

And nobody ever knew about it, apart from her smoking habit, that became evident by the time she was 17.
Her cousin was her accomplice in all this, who did the same sort of transformation when she came back to visit the family for one week at Easter.

And that was B.'s life, for one month every summer and for two weeks over Christmas, for the following five years.

She now laughs about it.

She's married, has two kids, and is generally what you'd call "well adjusted".

And yet, I wonder...

Oh, yes, I thought about writing a story based on B.'s story.
I'd love to write it in alternating chapters, from her point of view and from her cousin's.

But this is not about that.

Because apart from wondering if it was our Catholic upbringing that caused both of us to go through a Goth phase in our life (and this might be a nice subject for a future post), but apart from that, I wonder if she ever misses her double life.

But after all, she only smokes when her kids can't see her, so she is still living a double life of sorts, right?