The Reason Why
Prologue
Life has a funny way of twisting and turning until you don’t know which direction you came from or which direction you’re heading. Just when you think you have it all figured out,
BAM
Another freakin twisted moment happens that makes you question everything you’ve done or anything you were supposed to do.
I was living life to the fullest. Well, maybe not to the extent everyone wishes for their own life, but one that was good enough for me at the moment.
I had finally graduated high school and was accepted into our town’s local junior college. My mom, who by the way had raised me on her own, when her one-night stand whom she got pregnant from had up and left her all alone after she had told him about the pregnancy. Well, she just hasn’t settled down since. She’s had her fair share of boyfriends since then, bringing home another new guy to our trailer every other week.
I’ve learned one thing from my mother. I will never, ever sleep around with every guy who puts their hand on my ass and tells me I am beautiful. It seems that’s all it takes for my mom to bring them home and shake the pictures off the wall until the wee hours of the morning with their drunken, sex-driven, lewd behavior.
Mom’s had her fair share of getting in trouble with our local small-town police department with disorderly conduct and public intoxication misdemeanors, but nothing compares to the shitload of trouble she’d gotten into with this last work of art she dated.
This past boyfriend had an outstanding warrant, which somehow, in their long history of being together for two weeks, he never told her about. It was for a parole violation on a past drug conviction that he’d served two years in the county’s correctional facility.
This guy and my mother were out on another beer run when they got pulled over by the police. To make a long story short, boyfriend number twenty for this year was arrested, and so was my mother. Somehow, without my knowledge, she had gotten herself involved with taking happy pills. You know narcotics—things that make you feel all better even though you know your life is shit. The police found her with a whole baggie of like fifty pills or so, and since they weren’t prescribed, she apparently has been buying them off the street.
She had to wait in jail until her hearing since we didn’t have money to bail her out, and a week later, the judge said he was tired of seeing her messed up in all of this nonsense, so he sent her to jail for eighteen months.
Since mom was going to jail and wouldn’t be getting any government assistance and I didn’t have a job because there weren’t any in our small town, our landlord told me I had until the end of the month to find another place to live.
My mother’s friend from childhood, the only person she’s ever kept in contact with all these years, volunteered to allow me to stay with her until Mom made the necessary changes she needed to do in her life. So, there I was going to another small town, in a state I’d never been to before, to live with someone I’d only met once in my life.
My life could only get better from here, right?
