Cold Dark Heart by Julie Kriss

Eleven

Andie

“Let’s do something this weekend,”I said to my son as I poured coffee into my travel mug the next morning. Miles was sitting at the kitchen table, quickly scarfing down Corn Flakes before going out the door.

“Like what?” he asked without looking up.

I shrugged. “The weather’s nice. We could find somewhere to go for a hike. Or we could go to the movies.”

He crunched another bite of cereal. He was in a phase where it almost hurt me to look at him, because his face was so clearly that of my baby and also that of a young man. He didn’t look much like Terry, thank God. What Miles truly looked like was photos of my father when he was a teenager. And in his young days, my dad had been a looker.

But Miles was still growing into himself. He grew his hair too long and let it flop over his forehead and his face, and he often sat hunched over. Baggy sweatshirts were his favorite items of clothing. I wanted to fuss over him every time I saw him, but I also knew I needed to keep some distance. I didn’t want to drive him further away.

“I can’t,” he said in response to my invitation. “I’m hanging out with Cindy this weekend.”

I stood up straight, as if someone had zapped me with electricity. “Cindy? Excuse me? Who is Cindy?”

I sounded like a mom, but I couldn’t help it. I was a mom.

Miles rolled his eyes, one of his favorite moves of late. “Mom, it isn’t anything. It’s just hanging out. She’s with Trevor anyway. He’ll be there.”

This was not reassuring. “Your friends are dating? No one should be dating anyone. You’re thirteen.”

“People hang out, Mom.” His tone was exasperated. “Anyway, Cindy is having some people over, so I’m going to go. We’ll do the movies or whatever another time.” He pushed his bowl away—nothing on earth would get him to rinse it in the sink—and stood up, hefting his backpack. “I have to go.”

“Do you want me to drive you?” I asked, following him to the door. “I don’t mind.”

“You’ll be late for work.”

“So? I can be late for work. I’m the boss.”

“I’ll take my bike. It’s fine.”

“You have a dentist appointment on Friday.”

“Kay. Bye.”

He got on his bike and pedaled away, and I felt yet again like I was somehow failing. Who was Cindy? Who was Trevor? Who were their parents? Would there be adult supervision? Why didn’t Miles tell me anything?

I couldn’t blame him for his mood. When he’d come home from Jonathan’s last night, he’d called his father back. Terry hadn’t picked up the phone.

Miles had barely said a word as he hung up. He’d gone into his room and closed the door. He hadn’t come out again.

I stood in the empty house, my mind racing. Miles had his own cell phone with internet disabled on it. He had a computer in his room, and Terry had installed parental controls so that Miles could look up things for homework and chat with his friends without being able to go to restricted websites. But what if Miles had somehow disabled the controls? How would I know? And was he really turning his homework in on time? Whenever I asked him about homework, he always told me everything was “fine.”

I hated, hated that I was suspicious of my own son. Then again, I hadn’t seen a report on his marks in quite a while. Miles had told me there wasn’t a new one uploaded to the school’s online system yet, and in the chaos of the past few weeks, I’d forgotten to look.

I walked upstairs and stood in front of the closed door to his bedroom. I put my hand on the knob. My own parents had let me have privacy in my room, so this was hard for me to contemplate. Then again, my parents had had strict disciplinary rules, and after my mom died when I was ten, my dad hadn’t let me have my own phone or computer until I was sixteen. That was what happened when your dad was a sheriff and had seen his share of the bad things that can happen to kids in the world.

I hadn’t gone on my first date until I was nineteen, which was why I was shocked at thirteen-year-olds dating. I had been raised pretty sheltered. Then I’d met Terry, and my lack of experience meant I got pregnant with Miles, and now here we were. So maybe it was better to be a sheltered kid—or maybe it wasn’t.

“I hate this,” I said out loud, and then I opened the door.

It looked like a boy’s room. The bed wasn’t made, there were clothes in messy piles, and there were a couple of chocolate bar wrappers on the floor. I hadn’t given him the chocolate bars, but if chocolate bars were the worst thing Miles was into, I’d be a happy mother.

I stepped into the room and looked around, trying to touch as few things as possible, as if my son could dust for fingerprints. I crouched and looked under the bed—nothing. I opened a drawer of his dresser and saw only socks and underwear. A couple of schoolbooks were tossed in a corner. I tapped the keyboard on the computer, but it didn’t wake. So it was powered off, then.

Should I power it on? He probably had a password on it.

I was distracted from this problem when I caught sight of the wastebasket on the floor next to the computer desk. It was stuffed with papers. I fished the papers out.

On top was a history test. Miles had gotten a D.

I stared at the grade, stunned. This wasn’t like Miles at all. He was a smart kid. He knew this stuff. We’d had a call from the teacher a month ago, but for some reason she’d called Terry instead of me. The teacher had said she was worried about Miles’s grades and his “lack of focus.” Terry told me he had handled it.

Oh, right. Terry handled it.

I left Miles’s room and went downstairs to the home office, where I kept my laptop. I powered it up and logged into the school’s online system. There was a new report card uploaded last week.

Miles had lied to me. Worse, his grades were all C’s and D’s. He’d never had grades this low before.

I was going to have to contact the school. I was going to have to set up a parent-teacher meeting. I was going to have to handle this.

Everything else would have to wait.