on, baby, we gotta go.”
His hair is still sticking up where it was pressed against his pillow. His T-shirt is stained and wrinkled, which means he probably plucked it from the dirty pile on the floor. My son is an unapologetic slob. He’s uncoordinated and more than a little awkward looking. His ears are too big and his curls are too fickle and his glasses, constantly clouded with fingerprints, never seem to sit straight on his nose.
But I love him with everything inside of me—not despite all his quirks but because of them. If there’s one thing Andrew taught me, it’s that you can’t love only pieces of a person. You have to love all of them, even the ugly parts.
I hustle Ethan down the stairs, down the cramped hallway and out the back door. Our tiny ranch is not much, but divorce is expensive, and every time my attorney thinks we’re getting close, Andrew comes back with another ridiculous ultimatum. The antique side table we bought on our honeymoon. A pair of crystal candlesticks he broke ages ago. The negatives for Ethan’s baby pictures. As long as it’s not Ethan he wants, I give in to his every demand.
Ethan stops in front of the car, still half-asleep. “What are you waiting for? Get in.”
He doesn’t move. I check the time on my cell—six-twenty-seven.
“Ethan.” When there’s no response, I give his shoulder a little jiggle. “Come on, sweetie. Get in the car. Otherwise you’ll miss the bus.”
Which leaves in exactly thirty-three minutes, from a parking lot across town. Today’s destination: Dahlonega, an early gold rush town an hour north of Atlanta. Ethan’s class will be traipsing through mines two hundred feet under the ground, panning for gold and semiprecious stones, sleeping in a cabin under the stars. When he brought the permission form home from school last month, I thought it was an April Fools’ joke. What kind of teacher takes a busload of second graders on an overnight trip on purpose?
“But we do it every year,” Miss Emma assured me when I questioned her. “We stay at a YMCA summer camp facility so it’s perfectly safe. One teacher or chaperone for every five students. The kids look forward to it all semester.”
It was the speech I heard her give every second grade helicopter mom, but in doing so with me, she missed the point. It wasn’t Ethan’s physical safety I was worried about, but his emotional. Ethan has an IQ of 158, a level of giftedness that comes with a particular set of challenges. This is a kid who’s brilliant but socially awkward. An analytical thinker who needs constant stimulation. An insatiable learner with a never-ending stream of questions. His speech, his interests, the way he thinks—his world is so different from his peers that there’s practically no point of contact. He’s been at Cambridge for two years now and hasn’t brought home a single friend. No playdates, no sleepovers. Nothing.
But his class has been learning about the mines all spring, and Miss Emma has filled his bottomless brain with tales of hydraulic sluices and a network of underground tunnels. Lode mining, my son informed me, and up until this morning, he was desperate to see it for himself—despite having never slept in a bed that wasn’t under the same roof as me or Andrew. He begged long enough that I caved. I swallowed down my worries and signed the damn form.
He climbs onto the backseat, and I toss him a peanut-free breakfast bar, which he ignores.
“What’s wrong, baby? Are you sick?”
“No.” He looks at the wrapper and makes a face. “Just not hungry.”
“Well, eat it anyway. You’ll need the fuel to climb all those steps to get in and out of the mines.” The last bit is a deliberate reminder, meant to drum up some of his previous excitement.
But my son is onto me, and the look he gives me is textbook Ethan. Dipped chin. Arched brow. Eyes on the verge of rolling. He heaves a sigh so forceful that it lifts his little body from the seat.
“You’re always starving in the morning. Why not today?”
“I don’t know.” His glasses slip down his face, and he wriggles his nose to push them back up. They’re too loose, the fake tortoiseshell too heavy for his head. Ethan is eight, but he’s small enough to be six, yet another disadvantage he faces. “I’m just not.”
You need to stop coddling him. I hear Andrew’s voice as clearly as if he were sitting here, in the passenger’s seat beside me. Otherwise that kid will never toughen up.
You need to. He’ll never. This is one of Andrew’s more impressive accomplishments: he’s an expert at assigning blame. He’s only been practicing it for years.
But Andrew’s not here, and I need to get to work. I can barely afford my half of Cambridge Classical Academy’s tuition, not with the clock still ticking on this divorce and the stack of bills by the toaster, as terrifying to me as Ethan’s fear of the monsters that live under his bed. My boss doesn’t have kids. She doesn’t understand that Ethan’s little Einstein brain needs longer than others to weigh the pros and cons. I need this job, which means I need to get him on that bus. I start the car and back out of the driveway.
All the way to school, I watch Ethan’s expression in the rearview mirror. Not for the first time, I wish the uncoupling between his father and I wasn’t so explosive. That our conversations didn’t have to happen in writing and from a minimum physical distance of two hundred feet. The restraining order sure makes coparenting hard, especially when your Dahlonega-bound son sits staring out the window like he’s on the way to a root canal.
I hit the button for the radio, silencing the morning-show prattle. “Sweetie, please tell me. What is it? What’s wrong?”
His gaze flicks to mine, sticks for a second, then slides away. He bounces his shoulders, even though he knows the answer. Ethan always knows the answer.
“Are you worried about the other kids?”
He frowns, and I know I’ve hit a nerve.
“Is someone bothering you again?”
I purposefully don’t say bully, the B-word that his teacher has been avoiding, along with the name of the little shit—though both of us knew who she was talking about. Miss Emma tried to blow off whatever happened as a silly squabble, one she promised she had under control. But that’s part of the problem. She dismisses all the bullying as petty, silly squabbles, even when things turn bloody.
“If you tell me what happened, I can help you fix it. I’ll talk to Miss Emma and make sure she’s aware of the problem. Miss Emma and I are on your team here, you know. We want to help.”
“It’s nothing, okay? Nobody’s bothering me.”
“Are you worried about being away from home?”
Ethan frowns into the rearview mirror.
“Because you shouldn’t, you know. Miss Emma will take good care of you.”
No answer. He slumps in his seat, his palms cupping his elbows, his fingertips tapping out a nervous rhythm on his skin—a tic he’s picked up when he doesn’t want to talk about something.
We drive the rest of the way in silence.
By the time I race up the tree-lined drive that leads to Cambridge Classical Academy’s parking lot, I don’t have to check the dashboard clock to know it’s well past seven. The yoga-toned mothers
