“Why do you think that is?” I asked. “Why did you give him another chance?”
Ethan yawned. He closed his eyes.
“Because you said,” he mumbled. “On the first day. If somebody doesn’t like me, they don’t know me yet. Give them a chance.”
He was almost asleep.
“I gave everybody five days,” he said. “Mason just needed more.”
I sat there in the dark for a long time after his breathing went slow and even.
I thought about the doctor at the foot of my bed ten years ago, with his clipboard, saying I’m sorry. I thought about the woman at Chuck E. Cheese. The life skills classroom twenty minutes away. Dr. Pickett’s test scores. Forty-one signatures on a petition.
All those people who looked at my son and decided who he was before they ever met him.
And I thought about a boy on a bench, alone, with a loaded gun three inches from his hand and a voice telling him he was stupid and nobody would believe him.
He didn’t argue. He didn’t fight. He just got up and did the thing he knew was right, and trusted somebody to listen.
I stood up. I pulled his blanket up over his shoulders. I looked at the T. rex on the nightstand and the certificate in the cheap frame.
Then I went to the door and turned off the light.
“Night, Mom,” Ethan said from the dark. Not quite asleep after all.
“Night, baby.”
“Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“Can you leave the hall light on?”
“Sure.”
I left it on. A thin yellow line across his floor, reaching all the way to the hook by the door where his blue backpack was waiting for Monday.
He always wants it on. He says it helps him see the way.
