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 "Jason, come on, you need to get washed up, get ready for bed." Julie Standish couldn't see into her son's bedroom as she walked past in the hallway but she could hear into it. The unabated clatter of keys turned her around in mid-step and she stuck her head through the darkened doorway. "Now. It's almost 10:30 and you've got band early tomorrow." "Yeah, yeah. I'm gettin' ready." The part of his face that she could see looked prematurely aged in the artificial light of the computer screen; he was looking at some sort of sports site. "I thought you said you were up here doing homework. You know your dad and I don't want you spending too much time on the Internet." No one would ever accuse Julie of playing the cool mom. "I finished it," Jason half-grunted, closing his web browser and stepping away from the desk. "I only had like ten math problems and some stupid social studies questions." The 12-year old slid past his mother, trodding down the hall to the bathroom and shutting the door. With the boy gone, Julie stepped into his room and flicked on the light. The place was a mess, though not so much of a mess that it would stand out against the rooms of other 12-year old boys. The bed remained unmade, clean and dirty clothes mixed and strewn about. A Kid Rock poster drooped off the wall where one of the pins had fallen out. Julie overlooked it all, not without some effort, and set a stack of fresh laundry on the bed. She often wondered when she'd lost her son; some might wonder what makes her so sure she ever had him at all. She heard the activity in the bathroom stop, then the pounding of heavy feet in the hallway. When had she become the sort of person who thought about carpet getting trampled? Jason entered the room wordlessly, grabbed up the clothes and took them to his dresser. He opened one drawer in the middle and shoved them all in, simultaneously taking out a set of pajamas. "Remember, we're going to your Aunt Kelly's for dinner tomorrow, so don't run off when you get home from school. We're meeting her new boyfriend, I don't want to be late." "Her new black boyfriend?" The word stung Julie, just the way he'd intended it. It's partly rebellion, she'd tell herself, and partly a residual social effect. Don't rise to it. "The color of his skin doesn't matter. Not any more than the fact that you have brown hair. Now say your prayers and go to sleep. And remember, God doesn't like racism." The boy looked into the corners of his eyes, waiting. "I love you, see you in the morning." He made the sort of noise you make when you're not really making any noise. As his mother stepped from his room towards the stairs he shut the door to a crack and turned off the light. Back at the computer, a small icon was flashing. It was reminding Jason that 10:25 had come and gone and when he clicked on it he got a small box that read "AF Chat." Closing the alert, he proceeded to restore a minimized browser window. A banner across the top declared that the site was "Fighting For America's Future." A column on the right looked almost like a list of featured sales at one of dozens of independent book and record sites, right down to the prominent Paypal button. Halfway down the page, a graphic advertised a chat session with someone called Dr. Luke Minter. Jason clicked it and up popped a smaller window. In the quiet of the house's late evening, he could hear that his parents were watching ER downstairs. |