Talented Failure: The Works of A.T. Prenger

The thing I remembered the most about the worst day of my life was pain. Blunt, damaging pain. Sharp, searing pain. In the days after there was still a lot of pain, but none of it as bad. It was Friday. I was excited. Monday was a holiday so the bank was closed and I had three days off. Beth decided we were going on a trip to Vegas since neither of us had been. She was going to teach me how to play Texas hold 'em "properly", whatever that meant. She also spent the week dropping sly hints about prostitution being legal there and that she had never been with a girl. I didn't know if she actually planned on going through with it or if she was teasing me, trying to get me worked up. Beth was picking me up from work to save time. Of course she wouldn't be waiting for me in the parking lot. We agreed that she would park a block away and I would walk over. I found out later that she had been late because of some last-minute sexy underwear shopping. If it hadn't...

  More than two weeks passed and she still didn't call. I looked like an addict with the amount of times I checked for messages on my phone. It started to get bad. I got phantom vibrations I swore were real, but each time I checked there were no calls. Helen accused me of playing games on my phone. I had to show her every one of my apps to prove that I had no games to play. After that I left my phone in my car during my work day. After each shift, and on every break, I bolted outside to check it. Seeing a blank screen with no message icons broke my heart each time. Even worse was getting texts from someone else. It would raise my spirits for a brief moment before crushing them. I spent a day pissed at my mom when she called me to ask when I would visit for dinner next. I brushed her off. There was no way I could stand family dinner with the way I felt. I didn't want to be around them. Or people, really. I didn't want to explain what was going on or how I felt. There was...