Loneliness Suspended
The summer before my senior year in high school my parents got a divorce. This didn’t surprise me, because my father had moved out months earlier, but I was surprised when my mother’s boyfriend moved into our house two days later and brought his three rotten sons with him. His oldest boy was in the eighth grade and specialized in sexual suggestions. Every time he saw me he made smutty comments about my body and described in graphic detail what he wanted to do with me, as if he could. The middle boy was in the sixth grade and he was a thief. He stole everything of mine he wanted and wrecked what he didn’t want. The youngest boy was never quiet. If he wasn’t shouting he was whining or crying. I put up with all this for a week, but then the boyfriend told me that I was going to have to share my room with the noisy kid. I appealed to my mother, but she just said that the boyfriend didn’t think that it was fair that I had my own room while his boys were all crowded together. I got the message and went to live with my father. ...