A few days later, we all went to Micah’s funeral. The doctors didn’t want to let Tracy and me out of the hospital, but Sandra and our parents pushed for it, and so we sat up in the front row in matching wheel chairs, with Sandra sitting between us. It was so surreal. To this day I can remember sitting there thinking, none of us is crying, we should be crying. But we just sat there, three banged up and bandaged teenagers, one of us missing part of her leg, watching as person after person stood up and told stories about Micah. And we just sat there, basically numb.

I spent the rest of the summer between my sophomore and junior years in high school working on recovering from the accident. There were endless days of physical therapy that at times seemed worse than the original injuries. But gradually, I regained most of the strength on my left side, and by the end of August I was well enough to head back to school.

Tracy went back home with her family to work on her own recovery, and it was years before I saw her again.

Sandra and I talked a little over the summer, but she was distant, and a few weeks before school started, the reality of what had happened hit me. My best friend was dead, and I’d been driving when it happened. I knew in my head the accident wasn’t my fault, but still a deep sense of guilt settled in on me; I couldn’t bear to look Sandra in the eye; and as school got closer, I realized that I’d lost two friends, and I started my junior year under a cloud of depression. I tried going back to the high school marching band, which had always been the one place I felt most comfortable about myself and around other kids. Unfortunately, while I’d mostly recovered from my injuries, my left leg would still give out on me from time to time without warning. That wasn’t conducive to holding a field formation, and I found myself sidelined even from the band!

As the school year started I sank deeper into my depression, and I started to drink. Mostly beer, but I’d partake in just about anything that was available. My grades suffered, and I started skipping out on classes, too. I found myself hanging out with a whole new crowd of kids, the ones I used to mock as stoners and losers, and to my surprise they welcomed me into their circle. I lost my virginity, drunk, with a group of people watching, at a party during our winter break that year. To be honest, I don’t even remember most of it, much like most of the rest of my junior year.

Sometime around March our mid-semester grades came out, and my parents saw how far I’d really sunk. They sat me down and we had a long talk about how I was throwing my life away, ruining my chances at this and that—the usual “let’s give the screw-up kid a wake-up call” conversation fodder. Not much of what they said had any sort of impact on me, until my mom asked if I thought Micah would be doing the same thing if I’d been the one killed.

That hit me hard, and as it sunk in, I started to realize over the next week or so, in a beer-and-schnapps-clouded, stupid teenager sort of way, that I hadn’t even thought of Micah since sometime early in the school year. Without intending it or realizing it, I’d started down the road of an alcoholic’s retreat from life’s pains. And in the process, I’d tossed out my friends, my virginity, and as it turned out, my chances at making it into any of the big-name colleges I’d had my sights set on the year before. That last part threatened to send me back into a depressive spiral, but luckily my parents were able to get me refocused on applying to a series of “second choice” schools, and with their help the acceptance letters started to come in part way through the summer before my senior year in high school.

So with a lot of help and encouragement, (and not just a little course-corrective punishment), I started to recover from my death spiral and get things back on track for finishing high school and heading off to college. I got myself involved in the band again, started to reconnect with some of my old friends, and even started dating a girl, a cute little sophomore named Stephanie. In January, I settled on going to college up at CSU Humboldt in northern California, and I started bringing my senior year in for a landing.

I broke things off with Stephanie after graduation, and headed off to college and dorm life at the end of the summer.

College treated me well, and presented me with an opportunity to both rediscover and reinvent myself a little bit. I found a confidence in having a certain degree of anonymity, in knowing that no one in the dorms knew about what I’d been through the last couple years. I’d ended up in a co-ed dorm, so there were girls everywhere, and the pairing off started within the first week of classes.

I met a girl from the next building over, Karen, at a student mixer at the end of the first week. She was a freshman, like me, and was absolutely beautiful. She was only 5’1, and very petite, with short brown hair, blue eyes, and a smattering of freckles across her cheekbones. She had tiny little breasts, and just the slightest hint of hips that called attention to her tight little butt. We were sitting in a big overstuffed sofa in the student union, talking about our home towns, the friends we’d left behind in high school, the girlfriends/boyfriends we’d broken up with before heading off to college, and how we were getting on with our new roommates, when she suddenly sat up and kissed me.

“My roommate hasn’t spent the night in our dorm room for the past three nights,” she said, almost matter-of-factly. “Do you want to go up to my room and mess around a little?”

I was a little surprised by how straightforward the question was, but I was there for the full college experience, so I thought, why the hell not? We got up and walked out of the student union holding hands, and Karen led me, almost running, over to her building and up to her room. When we got to her door she said, “Let me just make sure Naomi’s not in there, just a sec,” then ducked into the room and left me standing in the hallway, hornier than I’d been in a long time.

After just a minute I heard the doorknob turn, and Karen swung the door open and beckoned me inside. “Coast’s clear,” she said, then grabbed my hand and pulled me in. She slipped a pair of panties on the doorknob and closed the door quickly.

“Dang,” I thought, “that really happens.”

I didn’t have time to think of much else, because almost as soon as the door closed, Karen practically jumped on me and we started kissing. Her hands were everywhere, running up and down my back, grabbing my butt, fumbling at the button and zipper on my jeans, and reaching into my pants clumsily. I followed suit, running my hands through her hair, down her neck, and down to where her t-shirt sat over her small hips. I ran one hand up and cupped one of her breasts through her shirt, then with the other I reached up underneath and started feeling around for her bra. Karen broke our kiss and pulled her shirt up over her head and tossed it aside, then moved backwards and climbed up onto her bed, pulling me with her.

I followed obediently, eagerly, and climbed up on the bed with her. Reaching around behind her back, I fumbled a little with unhooking her bra, and then marveled at her sexy little pink nipples as she shrugged it off and threw it to the floor. She laid back on the bed, pulling me down with her, and I followed. I returned to kissing, massaging her small breasts under my palms, then kissed and licked my way down her neck and chest to find her nipples and suck them gently. She gasped a little when I found the first one, but then she arched her back up to meet me, so I sucked harder.

All this time, she started tugging at my shirt, so I worked it up over my head and got rid of it. Before I could finish taking off my shirt, Karen’s hands moved down to the waistband of my jeans, and she started working my zipper down. Before long I had wiggled out of my jeans and my boxers, and I knelt over her, completely naked, with my cock straining to find its way inside her. I went back to kissing and sucking her breasts, then continued on my southward journey down to her navel, then lower still. When I got to her pants and started tugging them down I thought she showed a slight sign of hesitation, but then it was gone. I peeled off her pants, leaving her there on the bed in just a small pair of cotton panties, and then I made short work of those as well.

I stopped for a moment to admire Karen’s beautiful pussy. Her lips were soft and dark pink, with just the slightest hint of a part to serve as an invitation to come inside. She either didn’t have much hair naturally, or she trimmed it (which I found out later was the case), as her pussy itself was practically hairless, and only topped by a small, neat patch of reddish brown pubic hair. I returned one hand up to massage and play with her breasts, while at the same time I leaned down and stroked her pussy lips with the other, then leaned in further and gently licked from the top of her slit, down and around her clit, and further still until I had licked the entire length of her lips. I licked up and down along the length of her pussy slit a few more times, stopping to flick my tongue around her clit each time I came up.

This only served to increase her frenzy, and she pulled me up on top of her and reached for my hard cock. I didn’t need any more invitation than that, and I started to push myself into her warm, wet pussy. Right about then, Karen grunted, and got a funny look on her face, scrunching up her nose a little bit.

“What is it?” I asked, and then I felt the blockage.

“I’m still a virgin,” she said, “keep going, don’t stop, please.” She looked up into my eyes, and with her hands reaching down my back, she grabbed the top of my butt and pulled me further into her. She let out a small yelp when I tore through her hymen, and she started to cry a little bit, but she repeated, “Don’t stop, Tom. Please.” Once I had opened her, she seemed to relax a little, and her frenzy subsided a bit. After a few minutes, while I moved in and out of her as gently as I could, she stopped crying and smiled up at me and said, “It feels nice. Thank you.”

Seeing her smile while my cock slipped in and out of her really turned me on, and I started to feel my own tension building up. I started moving faster, and before long I was reaching the point of my own orgasm. Suddenly I was there, and I pushed deep into her and let loose four or five strong blasts, then kept moving in and out until I was spent. Then I pulled out and rolled over to lie down next to her. We stayed like that for a while, just lying together, naked, on Karen’s bed. After a while I got up and asked where I could find a towel to help her clean up, and we set about cleaning up both ourselves and the room.

Karen and I were together as an item for most of that first semester. She broke up with me after Christmas, saying she wanted to see other people, and we drifted apart after that. We still saw each other around campus, of course, but like so many others in the dorms, we just became acquaintances who used to have sex. I spent the rest of my freshman year being more or less of a male slut, trying to bed any girl I could. When the semester ended, a lot of people went home for the summer, but I managed to secure a summertime job on campus, so I stuck around. The summer was fairly quiet.

The summer was fairly quiet. I worked my job, took a class during the summer session, and got ready for the next full year of classes. The day after classes started in the fall, I was sitting in my room, doing a little bit of reading, when someone knocked on my door.

I got up, opened the door, and couldn’t believe my eyes when standing there in the hallway with a shy smile on her face, was Sandra.

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