The next morning my mother marched to Mrs. Peterson’s front steps and rang until the bell sounded like a distress call. I watched from my window as Mrs. Peterson opened the door a crack and then wider when she saw it was my mother and no one else. There was no pretense.
“You’ve crossed a line,” my mother declared. “This is slander. If my son is taken from me, you’ll pay.”
“I am not afraid of you,” Mrs. Peterson said, very calmly. “Report again? I will. He deserves parents who are present.”
The door closed with the kind of finality you don’t get from anything that’s only wood.
On Monday, a black sedan idled across the street when I got off the bus. A man with dark glasses sat inside pretending not to be watching. Every afternoon that week the car appeared when I did, waited a while, then left. It should have been ominous. It felt like an escort.
Inside our house, my parents changed their theater. Elaborate dinners appeared: roast chicken, three sides, a bowl of fruit so glossy it might have been wax. They left the front door ajar so anyone walking a dog would see us being normal. My father took calls from his office with the volume low. My mother walked with her heels landing softer than usual. Life took place at an inside voice.
At school, the story spread like a rumor that had finally found the truth to fit its size. One of the Johnson kids told a classmate who told everybody: the boy at eighteen gets left alone. Some kids called me the neighborhood orphan. Some kids stared like I was a sad movie. The principal called me into her office and asked if I wanted the school counselor to follow my case. I said I wanted to study in peace. She said that was also an option.
Friday arrived and my parents tried a new script. “Quick trip,” my mother said, too bright. “Back by dinner.” She didn’t mention the retreat. When they left, a patrol car rolled down the block like a reminder. I locked the door behind me and did not feel like a prisoner. I felt like someone responsible.
Mrs. Peterson opened her door before I could knock. “Lasagna,” she announced, as if that single word were adequate emotional language for boys twelve to eighty. It almost was. Her living room always smelled like something forgiving. We ate at the table with mismatched chairs that had been painted at different times in different colors because life had not stayed steady enough to match anything on purpose. Her daughter, Aubrey, tried to teach me chess again. Her son, Marcus, asked if I wanted to learn how to wire a lamp. I learned both, badly.
On Sunday evening, a social worker met my parents at our front steps when they returned. I watched from Mrs. Peterson’s window as my mother straightened her blouse and my father put the good smile on. The conversation lasted an hour. When the door closed behind the social worker’s careful shoes, my mother hurled a glass at the wall. It shattered into a map of something I didn’t want to learn to read. “What did you want?” she screamed, not a question. “For us to stay here every weekend because you’re afraid of the dark? We’re saving our marriage.”
The next week, envelopes appeared in Mrs. Peterson’s mailbox without stamps. Notes typed in a font that wanted to look like a warning and only managed to look like it had given up on handwriting. It’s dangerous to meddle. Good neighbors mind their own business. Everyone knew the source. Mrs. Peterson pinned one note to a corkboard in her kitchen under a grocery list. She made tea.
On Thursday, a banner appeared on the Johnsons’ porch, hand-painted and crooked. CHILDREN DESERVE PRESENT PARENTS. PROTECT YOUR CHILDREN. I stared at it like you stare at a sky you thought was empty and find a constellation you should have known was there the whole time. My parents saw it too. My mother called it persecution. My father called it a conspiracy. The neighborhood called it a message.
On Friday, the social worker returned with a folder and a decision. “While the investigation proceeds,” she said, “Lucas cannot be left alone. If you go out, he goes too, or a legal guardian stays in the home.”
My mother laughed once, and the laugh cut itself. “This is absurd.”
I said nothing. When she slapped me—open palm, sharp, more punctuation than pain—in front of the social worker, the social worker’s pen paused once and then moved faster. The report would read: physical discipline administered in the presence of CPS personnel. It would be both accurate and not large enough to hold the whole moment.
Mrs. Peterson walked me out onto her porch that afternoon and pressed a laminated card into my hand. It fit my palm like a strange credit card. “If anything happens,” she said, “you call this number. Tell them ‘Lucas, case number 2073.’ You don’t have to wait for the whole world to be ready to help you.”
I tucked the card into the lining of my backpack, beneath the tear I’d once made with a pencil. Some things you keep where you can grab them in the dark.
And then, because people who are losing control rarely choose to lose it gently, my parents changed strategies. They stopped leaving me alone.
They started locking me in.
It began with “We’ll be right back, market run,” and a click I recognized as the sound of a key turning where it shouldn’t. They took their phones. Then they took mine, when they noticed Mrs. Peterson’s name lighting it up.
“You’ve made us look like monsters,” my mother said, handing me my backpack but not my freedom. “You’ll learn.”
Friday evening they left at sunset. The house relaxed into shadows that remembered my name and didn’t answer when I asked them to say it back. Every window had been latched and keyed. I sat on the floor with my back to the bed. I counted my breaths. Then I reached into my backpack, found the card by feel, and dialed.
“This is Child Protective Services,” a voice said, neither hurried nor bored.
“It’s Lucas,” I whispered, like my walls could tattle. “Case 2073. They locked me in. They took the phone. They took everything.”
“Are you hurt?” the voice asked, suddenly closer. “Are you safe where you are?”
“I’m alone,” I said, and it turned out that was both an answer and a request.
“We’re coming,” she said. “Stay by the door.”
Less than twenty minutes later, red strobes painted the living room ceiling. Two cars. One CPS, one police. The social worker I knew came in first, a folder in her hand and eyes like a person who cannot be lied to in the way that matters. A cop popped the front latch with the practiced efficiency of a man who has gotten very good at removing excuses.
“You okay?” she asked, crouching to meet me where I was on the floor.
“I’m okay,” I said, and in saying it I realized I was about to be.
They took me across the lawn to Mrs. Peterson’s house and told me to wait there while they called my parents. Through her curtain, I watched my mother and father arrive, faces pale like bad news. They walked toward our house and were met at the gate by two officers and a legal sentence spoken quietly. Temporary suspension of custody. Emergency placement. Words can be doors.
That night, Mrs. Peterson tucked a blanket around my knees on her couch and handed me a mug of hot chocolate so sweet my teeth almost ached. “You’ll never sleep alone in fear again,” she said, and the sentence fell into my bones and stayed.
Part III — What People Mean When They Say “Home”
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