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“Let’s throw a sendoff party tonight,” I say. “Invite the team to my house and bring a keg. We’ll have fun.”
I’ve already made my way through half the high school football team. Statistically, one of them should be able to make me come. Hell, they can even take turns.
As long as I don’t have to be alone in that empty house tonight.
They call me Willow the Nympho at school. The entire senior class knows I’m always down for a blow job behind the bleachers or a quickie in the boys’ bathroom.
I have a lot of sex, and I’m good at it. It makes me popular with the guys. With the girls, not so much.
Emily said her boyfriend gave her chlamydia after sleeping with Willow.
Watch your boyfriends because Willow doesn’t care if they’re taken. Nasty slut.
I heard she took two dicks at once. How does that even work?
For the record, I don’t have chlamydia.
I wasn’t always Willow the Nympho. Until last year, these jocks didn’t even know my name because I kept to myself. My nose was always in a book. I got good grades like good girls do.
Then Mom got sick.
The insurance covered a part-time nurse, but when I got home from school, the rest fell onto me.
Being a caregiver for a loved one sucks the soul out of you. Time is no longer your own, and your life becomes a revolving door of medications, urine bags, and sponge baths.
And if you fuck up, you worsen their condition—or kill them.
A seventeen-year-old isn’t equipped to deal with that.
I had a front-row seat to Mom’s cancer. I watched her wither away into a ghost of her former self, and the transformation was swift and painful.
It’s hard to remember the version of my mom pre-cancer. When I think of my mother now, all I see is her gray, lifeless corpse before they lifted the sheet over her head—an image painfully tattooed on my brain.
Mom was vibrant and bright once, and when she walked into a room, the clouds parted to let the sunshine in. She was a strong, single mother, giving me the love of two parents to make up for Dad’s absence after their divorce. Her and me against the world.
But over the past year, those memories began to fade like the burning end of a cigarette, disappearing little by little until all that remained were the ashes of the woman I once knew.
And in the process, I became an empty shell of myself with nothing left to give.
The first time I had sex, I forgot about medication schedules and oxygen tanks and the smell of sickness lingering in the house. The escape was fleeting, but it made me realize I was floating through my life, disconnected from everything around me. Losing myself in physical pleasure became my solace.
Now, sex is the only time I feel remotely connected to another human being.
Because the one person I ever loved is gone.
Even though it was only a few days ago, I don’t remember much from Mom’s funeral. The service and subsequent reception passed by in a blur. My dad took care of all the planning and putting the “estate in order,” whatever that means.
But he didn’t bother to come. He was about to give me another lame excuse involving work, but I hung up the phone before he could.
I sat in this exact spot on the sofa as people came up to me offering condolences, but that’s the last thing you want when a loved one dies. Every time someone says, I’m so sorry for your loss, it reopens the wound all over again. It’s cruel, but people are expected to say it anyway.
Tonight, the house is full of people again, but this time it’s for a party instead of a wake. Over two dozen jocks are crowded into my living room, and a beer pong tournament is underway using folding tables someone brought. One of them set up a full sound system in the corner, the walls shaking with the hip-hop bass.
It’s March, but they’re still talking about how we almost won the championships in December. Here in Conroe, Texas only three things matter: God, family, and football. In that order.
And I’m lacking faith in all three.
The captain, Tyler, plops down beside me on the sofa. Each hand is fisting a red plastic cup, and he passes one to me.
