“The plight of an actor falls somewhere between donkeys and rapists in the who-gives-a-fuck index.”

She sighed. “If you quit, I’ll quit.”

We smiled in complicity.

“You realize what this means?” I asked.

“We’re not good actors.”

“Well yes, probably. But also we’ll forever be one of the ‘six or seven’ that students refer to when they intimidate the first years. The ones who were broken.”

We let that sink in for a moment and decided we were alright with that ignoble distinction.

We moved out of residence and spent the next few weeks floating through the city like blown garbage, wandering through art galleries, sleeping on friends’ couches, stealing food from supermarkets. We thought we were being terribly French New Wave. In truth, we were unmoored. Eventually, we got our own place. We spent nights reading Artaud and Genet to each other. We temped, we catered, we served. I grew a moustache. Pierced my ear. Summer came and went. The stock market crashed. Obama won the election. And still, I hadn’t told you. What could be more humiliating than flunking out of one of the flakiest university streams? I avoided your calls, your texts, your Facebook messages. I pictured you writing emails to me, saving them in your Drafts folder, and deleting them a few days later. Sometimes you left voice messages. Breakthroughs at work. Plans you were making with girlfriends. A funny PlentyOfFish date (I had helped you set up your profile).

“You have to tell her.”

“I took out student loans, it didn’t cost her a cent.”

“Jordan. Call her.”

I played it cool on the phone and rebuffed your fury with smart-ass bravado. But a couple of minutes after I hung up, I casually strolled to the bathroom and threw up. Far worse than any self-doubt and self-loathing was your disappointment.

Ana and I figured that if we couldn’t be good actors then at least we could be great sluts. I had rounded some kind of corner after high school, post-braces and acne, and what I lacked in natural looks I made up for in sheer ambition. We began devouring men like alpha predators. Floppy-haired hipster boys, bearded bartenders, suburban dads, skater twinks, foreign exchange students, Bay Street bankers, and just your average sportsbar douchebags. Text messaging became like air traffic control between us, ensuring we didn’t collide our conquests. We lived like the “foul woman” in Baudelaire’s poem “You’d Entertain the Universe in Bed”: “Ennui makes you mean of soul… O filthy grandeur! O sublime disgrace!”

“You know, when I was a little girl my mother used to call me a slut,” Ana told me one night as she came out of the shower, towelling off her hair. “She learned English from an old British woman and was taught the word just meant, like, unkempt or dirty. She’d poke her head into my bedroom and say: ‘My god, Ana, look at this mess! You’re such a slutty little girl.’ ” On some visceral level I understood the intersection between the two meanings of the word. To be a slut was to wallow in pleasure and filth. Eros and excrement. On the threshold between ecstasy and debasement.