This podcast contains adult language and content.

The stories shared in this podcast are told from the perspective of the authors.

Their accounts and opinions are personal and do not reflect the stance of the production team.

If you have a story to share, send it to Let's Not Meet Stories at gmail.com.

Enjoy the show. You know, you know, To respect my best friend whose life was a total mess as a child, I've been keeping this story under wraps for a long time.

I've kept it so quiet that I haven't even spoken a word of it to my mother.

At first, it was mostly because there was a fear of getting social services involved,

but they got involved anyway. I still never brought anything up to my mom about it, though,

because I guess I thought too much time had passed. I just figured she never

would have benefited from knowing. Well, this all happened when I was 11. I'm now 29. It all sort of

feels like a dream looking back on it, and this feels like the appropriate place to get it out.

The names I'm using in the story have all been changed. When I was in elementary school, I was an awkward child. In Canada,

elementary school is K through 6. Now I have high-functioning autism, and while my grades were great,

my social functioning was lackluster. It still is, if I'm

being honest. This left me with a fairly small but very colorful group of friends. Two of the

closest being Jesse and Katie. I came from a fairly overprotective household.

My mother watched me like a hawk, and thus I was a naive kid.

I didn't really understand that a lot of the oddness and dysfunction that would come out of my two friends had to do with problems that they were facing at home.

We were never allowed at Katie's house. I think her mom was

extremely overweight to the point of hardly being able to move and she had been embarrassed by it.

Jessie's house, however, was only a few blocks away from my school. So we ended up there a lot.

Her parents were divorced and her mom was deaf and mute.

...