The phone rings. It’s my dad. Even though he’s in the same house as me, he has to call to speak to me, unless he wants to go through the lengthy process of changing all his clothes, putting on the gloves, the facemask, the hair net, the whole gambit. My mom and dad used to do that quite a bit, but over the last year, they’ve understandably gotten tired of having to redress themselves throughout the day just to enter my room. So we use the phone a lot to communicate. I would never tell them, but it makes me feel horribly lonely, not having much real human interaction at all except through technology.

“What’s up, Dad?” I say.

“How’s my little girl doing?” he says. Yeah, I’m 20 years old, but I’ll always be his little girl in his eyes. That’s OK, though.

“I’m fine,” I lie. “Just catching up on some chemistry homework.” Another lie. I’ve been wasting time on the internet as usual, looking for more information about my “disease” or whatever the hell it is.

“That’s good. Hey, I just wanted to let you know, there’s an old friend, a doctor… I was just talking to him on the phone yesterday, and he mentioned he thought he might be able to help. He wanted to come over today and pay you a visit. I hope that’s OK with you.”

I sigh. Another doctor. I’m getting really tired of them. When I first went to the appointments, I was all giddy with excitement, thinking that I would be helped immediately. But of course, that wasn’t the case, and the doctors and therapists and psychologists all got more and more perplexed with my case. Each visit to the doctor was something to dread, rather than something to look forward to.

“I don’t know, Dad,” I say. “I mean, I’ve seen a lot of doctors…”

“We can’t give up on you,” says my dad. “I know the cure is out there somewhere. I just want you to be able to go out there and live a normal life like everyone else your age.”

“I want the same thing,” I say. And, really, I would like to add that it’s not helpful having my parents repeat my own worst fears and my dreams back to me. I want to be out with my friends doing normal college girl stuff more than my parents want it for me.

Each hour I spend locked in my childhood bedroom is like another eternity, another period of damnation. And each second on the internet, where I waste so much of my time, I encounter yet another reminder that everyone else is out doing fun things, creating their lives, and falling in love, while I’m stuck in here, doing nothing at all.

“He’s really good,” says my dad. “If anyone can find a cure, he’s the one.”

“That’s what you said about the last woman,” I say.

“This guy’s different,” says my dad. “He’s the best brain surgeon in the whole city.”

“A brain surgeon?” I say. “Well, if you think I need brain surgery…” The thought makes me depressed, having someone cut open my brain to figure out what’s wrong with me and possibly cure me. But honestly at this point I’m so desperate that I’ll try anything at all.

“Oh,” says my dad. “I don’t think you’re going to need brain surgery. But he’s an incredible diagnostician. He can figure out practically anything. Even though he’s known as the top brain surgeon in the hospital where I used to work, doctors of all types are always bringing him their difficult cases, the ones they can’t figure out on their own. And with just a single look at the paper, he can almost always tell them something that helps them solve the case, if not the answer right away.”

“He sounds good,” I say, completely noncommittal, but for my dad’s sake, I try to keep my voice sounding somewhat positive.

“He’s going to come tomorrow afternoon,” says my dad.

“It’s not like I’m going anywhere,” I say.

My dad chuckles. Laughter has become rarer and rarer in this household. And it’s all because of me. It’s all my fault, and there’s nothing in the world I can do about it.

We say goodbye, and my dad hangs up.

I listen to the dead sound of the cell phone for a moment before putting it down. I can feel the human contact fading away.

I can see the blue sky through the window. Nothing has ever looked farther away, nothing ever seemed remote and inaccessible as that sky. I can’t count the hours and days that I’ve spent this past year looking up at it, gazing up at it.

Most of my friends have dropped away over the last year. The only one that remains is my best friend for life, Shelly, who I know will always be in my life no matter what. But we’re more like sisters than friends, and that means that we can spend a good amount of time annoyed at each other, or frustrated with each other, or nagging at each other to do the “right” thing.

Shelly goes to college here in Philadelphia, but she’s been busier lately and hasn’t been calling as much. We still write emails and texts to each other, and I would never want her to know how much those texts mean to me, how much I wait for them in the day, checking my phone to see if she’s written something that will give me a couple minutes of respite from the blank reality that awaits me here in my room.

Aside from going to the doctors, I’ve spent a lot of the last year trying to cure myself. I spent time online reading medical sites, trying to understand what was going on with me, trying to see if there was someone out there who had experienced similar symptoms to mine. So far, nothing.

I also tried to cure myself with sheer willpower. Mostly that involved forcing myself to go outside. Sooner or later, the symptoms would invariably start. I would gaze with joy at the sky and practically rejoice in the feeling of the real ground beneath my feet. But my nose would always start to run, my throat would start to constrict, my eyes watering to the point that I couldn’t see out of them. Sounds just like any old allergy attack, right? Well, it was… sort of. My body would start to swell up like someone with a shellfish allergy eating a couple pounds of fresh lobster. Then I would pass out, and they would take me to the hospital for emergency treatment, pumping me full of whatever chemical cocktail would revive me.

And then I’d wake up again in my room. My room, my prison. It’s really the same thing. There’s no difference anymore to me… I might as well be in jail for all it means to me.

Despite not wanting to see yet another doctor, probably to hear the same thing again, I can’t help feeling more than a little excited about the possibility of having a visitor here in my room.

I know, pathetic right?

But that’s how starved I am for social contact.

And who can blame me?

It’s been an entire year.

An entire year without so much as a single date.

You can’t really date when you’re like this. An entire year without so much as a single kiss…

Oh, and I’m still a virgin, and it doesn’t look like that’s ever going to change. I went through high school as the goody two shoes straight A student, figuring I’d have time for boyfriends once I got to college.

But then I started to get sick.

I think I got close once to losing my virginity, in my first semester of college. A hot but somewhat geeky guy had asked me out, and we were back at his place, facing each other on the couch. He was making some awkward conversation and truthfully all I could think about was just getting it over with. I didn’t want to have my virginity hanging over my head anymore, the way it had been for so long.

I finally blurted out, “Do you want to sleep with me or what?”

He grinned at me and led me awkwardly into his bedroom. I mean, he was good looking and all, but I knew he wasn’t exactly the sort of guy I’d spend the rest of my life with, let alone date seriously or anything like that. But at that point I wasn’t even looking to get off. I didn’t care about enjoying the experience to come. I just wanted to get it over with.

If I could have signed some sort of official contract, the way you do when you go to the bank to apply for a loan to buy a house, I would have just done that instead.

If I could have sacrificed a goat to a god, the way they used to do back in the “old” days, I would have done that instead.

But there wasn’t anything else to do but follow this vaguely awkward guy into his bedroom that smelled like old fish and let him put his penis inside me.

That’s how I was thinking about it—totally mechanically.

Unfortunately for me, we didn’t get very far.

Maybe it was the smell of the old fish, which he assured me very passionately was just the smell from his old socks, as if that was any better. Or maybe it was the stress. Or maybe it was something else altogether.

But I got a reaction, one of my first.

My throat started to swell up, to the point that I couldn’t talk. The guy was asking me what was wrong, telling me that my face was getting red and ballooning up like an inflatable swimming raft. To this day, I still don’t know why he felt it was necessary to compare my face to a swimming raft, no matter how bad the swelling was.

So I feel like you know the rest of the story.

The reactions got worse and worse, so I decided (along with my parents, the dean of admissions, and just about everyone else) that I needed to take some time off and get my medical situation sorted out. I figured I’d go to a couple doctors, take a couple pills, and be back for second semester, not having missed much that I couldn’t read about online.

But things got worse and worse.

And now I’ve been stuck in my room for a year, without a single prospect of losing my virginity, let alone getting out of here to go for a simple walk around the block.

At one point I was complaining about my virginity so much to Shelly that she offered to send over someone who was apparently very willing. She’d shown him pictures of me.

I grudgingly agreed, despite the horribly awkward nature of the situation.

But once we got down to discussing how he’d need to change his clothes, and not wear any deodorant, and that a latex condom might send me to the hospital… He lost interest.

And he was going to have to sneak past my parents by climbing up the side of the house where there’s a convenient trellis on which grows a beautiful wisteria vine that’s been there since I was a kid. He was fine with that part, because I guess he’d seen something like that in the movies. But there’s nothing in the movies about your date essentially being the real life bubble girl. Something about that phrase just doesn’t seem to get the guys hot and rarin’ to go.

The afternoon seems to be stretching forever. I’d like to call Shelly, but she’s still going to be in her afternoon class.

My phone vibrates. It’s a text from my dad.

“You remember Liam?” it reads. “Here’s a link to his website so you can learn a little about him before he comes over tomorrow. Remember that he does much more than surgery.”

I click the link, and my phone’s browser takes me a hospital staff page.

“Liam Horton” is the first name on there.

Holy fuck…

I was expecting an old guy, some distinguished gray haired doctor.

I was not expecting a guy with a jawline so sharp it looks like I could brush up against my phone’s screen and cut myself on it.

I was not expecting the way his colored shirt simply cannot hide his muscles. There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s packing a six pack, maybe even an eight pack… rippling ab muscles that I can just imagine pressing against me…

My imagination’s already starting to get carried away a little bit…

I’m getting wet, and I can’t help sliding my hand under the thick elastic band of my panties (the ones that are completely not sexy, but comfortable as hell), letting my finger brush against my pussy that’s opening up and starting to get glistening wet…