I wasn’t prepared for what Catherine was about to tell me.
“I’m going to try to get pregnant next week,” she blurted out without any context.
Catherine just turned 19 years old. She still lives at home with a controlling mother. Her father killed himself when she was young. She doesn’t yet know how to drive and has to beg for rides to and from a menial job. She’s never had any romantic relationships, but she’s recently started slipping away from home to meet men for sex.
Just last week, she told me about how one such man — who she met online — picked her up and took her to a camper about an hour away from her. (She told her mother she was at a friend’s house.) They had sex for a couple of days, then he abruptly brought her back home — and then he disappeared from her life.
Now, she’s met another man online and she plans to meet him Sunday night. She’s never seen him in real life, but she’s planning to make sure he gets her pregnant. And she looked shocked when I told her that this plan was stupid and selfish.

Goodbye, Thomas (2006?-2023)
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