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was struggling with some major issues. Marc was painfully shy, so much so that he struggled to say hello to Jean’s parents, despite the fact that they repeatedly demonstrated their fondness for him. More confident than his friend, Jean began dating Gina Cousineau. There was many a time when Marc stood awkwardly by, not knowing what to do, as the two lovers made out. When he finally tried his luck with a neighbourhood girl one summer afternoon, Nadia spotted them kissing in the backyard and laughed mockingly. Furious, Marc pushed the confused girl away, choosing solitude over his sister’s jibes.
    Jean disliked Nadia and the way she treated his friend. She was constantly calling Marc names in front of other people, accusing him of “having no balls,” and insinuating that he was homosexual. Whereas Jean and Marc devoted themselves to constructive intellectual pursuits like building electronic gadgets in the basement, Nadia fell in with a bad crowd, and began drinking and taking drugs.
    What remaining close relationships Marc had established perished in the summer of 1982, when his mother sold the family home in Pierrefonds and moved with her two children to a rented two-storey row house in the suburb of Saint-Laurent. Life at 2675 Marlborough Court had the advantage of being closer to St. Jude’s Hospital in Laval, where both Monique and Marc were employed; the former as a nursing director and the latter washing dishes in the hospital kitchen. By September, Marc had finished his summer job and was entering his first semester of a two-year CEGEP program in Pure Sciences at Saint-Laurent Junior College. At the same time, he was beginning to show signs of mental disturbance. Just after his seventeenth birthday he was debating a “controversial topic” with his mother when suddenly he seized her arm and gouged his fingers into her skin. When she threatened to kick him out of the home, Marc snapped out of his trance and let go, retreating in shame to his bedroom. Often he had professed to friends that he wished he had been able to save Monique from Rachid’s abuse — now, for an instant, he had taken his father’s place.
    It was merely the beginning. After excelling academically in high school, Marc failed two classes in his first term at CEGEP, spending most of his time locked in his cluttered room playing on his computer or reading. He applied for the army that same year but was rejected for displaying anti-social behavioural traits. In order to best understand Marc Lépine’s state of mind in 1982, we need only look at one of the first lines in his 1989 suicide note: “It has been seven years that life does not bring me any joy.” If we are to trust the judgment of the gunman himself, this period marked the beginning of a radical negative shift in his emotional well-being.
    Seven Years of Sorrow
    Without the benefit of hindsight, in 1983 Marc Lépine seemed angelic compared to his sister, Nadia, whose habitual disobedience had landed her in a boarding school for troubled teens. Lépine was not sorry to see her go. For years she had constantly taunted him in front of his friends, exacting a devastating toll on his fragile self-esteem. Though Lépine had fared poorly in his fall 1982 term at CEGEP, by winter 1983 he had revitalized his academic performance, earning grades which ranged from the seventies to the nineties. His boyhood dream of entering the engineering program at École Polytechnique was now close to becoming a reality.
    In the meantime, he continued to work part-time as a custodian at St. Jude’s Hospital, and was also responsible for serving meals to patients. Here his social shortcomings became increasingly evident. Considered weird and loud by his workmates, Lépine was judged to be seeking attention. Though he made friends, he argued with them constantly, a trait which some found annoying. Nicknamed “James Bond” for his high IQ and puzzle-solving abilities, sadly Lépine lacked 007’s