I know this will get buried and nobody will see it, but when I was 12 I started playing football. It was just pop warner and I didn't know any of the other kids on my team. My mom made friends with this other mom who I would later know as Kathy. Her son played on my team too and he happened to live about 500 yards from me. Through the years we became great friends, causing all sorts of mischief around the town. At some point we started smoking pot, eventually moved onto prescription painkillers. I don't want to call Kathy a pushover, but her son was all she had in the world. She was divorced, and suffered from a series of mental and physical illnesses. She had trouble saying no to her son. And he took advantage of that any time he could. He was a textbook sociopath. Him and him mom started doing pills together. And then I did pills with them. They had their dealer on speed dial and he was there a few times a day. It got to the point where he would front them a LOT of pills at once. And they'd pay it back, and do it all over again. I identified with Kathy a lot, I saw her as a second mother. She was just like me, we only wanted to make those around us happy, even if it might be at our own expense. Kathy and I would hang out some times when her son wasn't even there, and she'd tell me stories of her life. I know she considered me a son too.
One day I went over to his house, we had plans to hang out. Everything seemed normal. It was early and Kathy hadn't woken up yet. Me and her son went to his room to play his Xbox and smoke weed. The hours go by and Kathy still isn't awake. We go into her room with a bag of frozen peas, to go try and wake her up. He put them on her stomach, on her head. Her eyes would open and dart around the room. She looked me right in the eyes, for what seemed now like forever. I kept telling him that we need to call an ambulance, and he kept assuring me that if she didn't wake up another hour we'd call. I went home at about 7PM. At about 930PM he called me. He told me that she had died. That day I grew up. That was the day I quit all the bullshit I had been doing. That was the day I turned my life around. July 17th, 2010
If anyone actually reads this, I really appreciate it. I've never told anybody this whole story.