~Well, it's been awhile. I've been working on this mammoth chapter here from Mama Lipsky's perspective. Absolutely no puke this time around, either. :P

Challenges for this chapter:

*How do I portray child-Drakken in a way that developmentally appropriate but still unique?

*How can I make Mama Lipsky a believable character while still having be her be her lovably over-the-top self?

*How do I show the evil side of Drakken through the eyes of a character who never sees it?

*How do I reflect the specific time periods?

*How many ironies, in-jokes, and episode tie-ins can I possibly put in?

Let me know how I did. :)~

0

The insurance advertisement she turned over and placed on the table with little interest. The most priceless treasure in her life now couldn't be sheltered in a safety-deposit box.

She'd be more than willing to keep him in one if she could, though.

Simplicity was the word that came to mind whenever she looked at him. He knew nothing of the riots down South or the anti-war protests back East or the frayed edges of her marriage. None of that had crept up behind him and clouded his view of the world yet, and she hoped it never did.

He shifted in her lap now, her precious Drew, staring at her friend Linda Delmar with his blackberry eyes. He'd been born with blueberries, and they seemed to darken further with every passing day against the milky skin he'd inherited from her.

Linda passed her a church bulletin and tapped her long red thumbnail against one particular piece of still-wet ink. This she took the time to pick up, hold close to her glasses, and study.

"Mom and Pop Mentorship Program," she read out loud.

"And you are cordially invited," Linda said. "It's the absolute best class you can find anywhere in Middleton for new parents." She smiled from the other side of the loveseat, and it wasn't the smile of a spokeswoman. It was a smile you could trust.

She cuddled Drew closer to her body now. "There's day care there, of course?"

"Of course," Linda said.

Mentorship. She supposed she could use some of that. Briar patches of fear had sprung up when the nurse had said, "Yep, no doubt about it, honey - there's a new little family member growing in there," when she felt the first kick, when her in-laws had entrusted her with their old wooden cradle.

Her own mother's advice had been something less than helpful. "Oh, don't be silly," she'd said with a hand-squeeze. "Of course you'll know how to be a mother. You already know how to love and care."

It was true. She knew how to love and care - for sick calves, skittish horses, and stray cats. The tiny little human being taking shape in her womb could be a different matter altogether.

Yet the moment the doctor handed her a curled-up bundle with butterfly eyelashes and a nose just like hers, she was in love. The name Drew fit him as though it had been measured and cut for his six-pound body - not Andrew, just Drew, as he would have been just Carly, not Caroline, if he'd been a girl. She knew she'd rip off any hand that ever curled within a mile of him.

Now she couldn't imagine surrendering him to someone else for even a few hours - not even to the group of wise women who ran the church nursery, the group that had raised twenty-four children between them.

"There's actually a meeting tonight," Linda said. "I couldn't officially sign you up before then, but you and Richard are more than welcome to drop by and see what we're all about."

Linda's gentle words fell against her with the force of hailstones. "Actually, no," she said, trying not to sound hail-struck. "Richard's working late again tonight, and I want to have supper ready for him when he gets home."

"Understood. So, tell me, how's this little guy doing?" Linda leaned forward and gave Drew's knee a pat. He examined her warily, the way he did with most everyone.

"He's as good a boy as ever, my Drewbie," she said. His sticky weight across her skirt kept her anchored; there was no longer any need to fake her happiness. "He mastered pulling himself up last week. Such a smart baby!"

She could remember it now, his tiny hands outstretched, shivering, even after they found the dresser-drawer handle, the strain on his face as he gathered his legs and heaved himself to his feet. He'd run an astonished glance all the way around the room, at a world that must have suddenly been less overwhelmingly large, and then he'd split into his gummy version of Richard's enormous grin. It was an expression made for pictures, and she'd gotten six of them before he plunked back down to the floor.

The phone rang and pierced into her memory. She stood up and hoisted Drew to one hip, where he clung like a baby koala as she padded her way into the kitchen. "Hello, Lipsky residence," she said into the horn-mouthed receiver, pulling Drew's hand away when it made a lunge for one of the dial tabs.

"Hi, honey." It was Richard's voice, doused with the warmth that had been so scarce lately. "Listen, can you do me a huge favor?"

"Probably."

"Did I leave last month's bank statement in our room? I know I was reading it in bed last night. . ."

He was. Long after she'd turned out the lights and clamped a pillow over her head. She gripped the phone tighter. "I can go check for you," she said.

"Would you? Oh, that'd be super. And if it's there, can you read me our balance? I've been trying to calculate how close we are to paying off our mortgage. Thanks, hon, you're a lifesaver."

She turned, the phone cord dragging behind her, and stopped at the end of it, weighted there by the brass base.

Linda was there in a flash, holding out her much-longer arms for Drew. "Oh, here, I'll take him. Just for a second."

Drew's brow pleated and his eyes crossed as Linda squeezed him to her side. A small grumbling noise came from low in his throat. It was the noise he always made when he was trying to decide whether or not a crying fit was necessary. He didn't cry too frequently, her Drewbie, and when he did it was an anguished cacophony that seemed to bother him every bit as much as it did the neighbors three doors down.

She swallowed, lifted the phone base with her other hand, and practically jogged back to their room.

And sure enough, Drew sent up a howl that no coyote could match. The shrieks followed her through the bedroom door and all the way to Richard's nightstand. Why-why-why? gasped between each one - desperate, uncertain, baffled at how something so terrible could have happened to him.

"Shhh, Drew, it's okay," Linda murmured from the living room. "Your mommy'll be right back."

"You still there?" Richard asked her. The warmth was quickly drying up.

She retrieved the bank statement from where it lounged against Richard's alarm clock. With a knot of rope in her chest, she read each off each number standing in stark, impatient black print. Richard's "thank you" and "love ya" and "be home around eight" would ordinarily tingle through her, but with their son screeching his little lungs out they rolled right off her as if she were made of feathers.

The instant she reappeared in the kitchen doorway, the screams choked themselves to a stop. She relieved Linda of Drew, now dishrag-limp with relief, and whispered into his hair, "It's okay. Mommy's here. Mommy's got you, Drewbiecakes."

It was apparently the only thing Drew needed to hear, because he snuggled up against her, his chin awkwardly burrowed in the crook of her neck. He sighed with what must have been all the air he had in him, the injustice and unpredictability of the world wiped away for now.

She might have known what she was doing after all.

1

"Drew Lipsky, what in the world?"

Drew looked up at her from the middle of a mud lake and giggled in that hiccuping way of his. His arms were submerged up to the chunky little elbows, and when he pulled them out, six layers of mud had left his hands indistinguishable. Those same hands that would soon go up his nostrils or into his mouth -

"You are filthy!" she exclaimed.

Drew clapped his hands. Strings of muck flew from them and narrowly missed her head. She fought back her gag reflex and planted her high heels just out of range.

Next to him, Richard gazed up at her. A humbler man would have been sheepish, sitting there in a pool of mud, in his grubbiest T-shirt and the jeans with the rubbed-open knees that he hadn't worn in so long. The brown specks on his cheeks only floated the matching fudgy colors of his eyes to the surface and enriched his toasted-marshmallow tan. She was mad at herself for not being able to appreciate it.

"Richard, are you serious?" she cried. "Do you know what kind of bacteria float around in puddles like this?"

"Exactly my point. Kids need to be exposed to germs early on so their immune systems can toughen up." Scorn slashed across Richard's smile. "Or hadn't you heard?"

Drew's legs, naked except for the mud, jutted out from his diaper. The sludge in his hair would dry brittle and be murder to comb out. He needed a good scrubbing under all ten of his toenails.

"Ma-ma-ma-ma," he babbled, a dripping hand waving her direction as if it were having the time of its life. "Ma-ma-ma. AH-CHOO!"

The sneeze nearly barreled Drew over backward, and he stared straight ahead, visibly wondering what it was that had just jolted his world like that.

"You hear that?" She grabbed Drew and swaddled him in the front of her flowered dress, grime and all. "He's already sick!"

"It was a sneeze." Richard straightened and waggled some mud from the soles of his beaten-up sneakers. "Kids sneeze all the time. Probably just got some mud in his nose."

"In his nose? He'll be lucky if he doesn't catch pneumonia!"

Drew stiffened in her grip as if someone had spritzed him with her hairspray. "Ma-ma," he said. "Dirty. Oh-kay?"

She couldn't say no to that face.

"Well. . ." she said, tapping her toe. "Let's just get you cleaned up and forget this happened, okay?"

With one last switchblade look over her shoulder at Richard, she carried her son back into the safety of his house and plumped him in the bathtub.

2

"Come on in, Drew! The water's fine!" Richard swished his legs back and forth to prove it. Here in the shallow end, the water barely lapped over his waist.

"No," Drew said, lower lip hanging out even farther than usual.

Here he was, her little boy, completely weaned and almost completely potty-trained. With his toddler tummy bulging over his polka-dotted swim diaper, he glanced up at her, the spitting image of the lost little bear cub in his favorite storybook.

"Mama, no," Drew repeated. He buried his head in her thigh, grabbed two fistfuls of her bathing suit, and tried to scramble his way up her. "No water."

She braced her fingers around his, which felt clammy with fear, and rubbed his knuckles. Every part of her heart softened and oozed. Every part of her mind locked down in resolve around the horror stories she'd heard of children drowned in two inches of water, all because their parents looked away for a minute too long.

"Come on, Drew! Buck up. Face it like a man!" Richard gave the water a playful slap that should have been gentler.

Drew's pinprick-fingernails sank into her flesh.

"He's scared," she called down to Richard.

Richard's eyes flicked up to the vents and back so quickly she couldn't be sure they had moved at all. "You baby him so much."

Something more painful that Drew's grip dug into her.

She planted herself in front of the boy. "He is a baby!"

"No!" said the tiny voice beside her.

She turned, startled by Drew's glare, sent from two feet off the ground. Even this year during the supposedly-terrible twos, he'd never been much for rebellion. "What did you say?" she asked.

"No," Drew repeated. "I not baby." He grabbed higher for her hand, almost coming away with her wedding ring in the process.

"Attaboy, Drew! Come here. Daddy'll catch you." Richard held out his hair-coated arms, water droplets glistening only where his fingertips skimmed the pool's surface.

One by one, Drew's fingers unlatched.

It felt like having her own skin peeled off. In one blink she saw him nestled securely in his baby blanket, and the next blink showed her a strong, confident swimmer with Richard's size and his laugh and his self-assurance.

Now all she saw were his ankles as they bunched beneath him and Drew worked up to the release all with the concentration of a surgeon. Richard, to his everlasting credit, caught him.

She clasped a hand to her chest.

Drew shimmied down his father's firm muscles to the water and dipped one plump toe in. Instead of the holler she'd expected, a squeal rose from him that could have stopped traffic. Her spirits flew up to meet it by the ceiling.

That's my brave boy.

3

It had all been a blur.

The open cabinet, food coloring box tipped over on its side, three tubes where there should have been four.

A wide track of blue smeared down from the cabinet onto the countertop, across the floor, where it merged with a puddle of water dribbling from the kitchen chair someone had crashed up against the sink.

The blue and the water staining the bare wood on their path down the stairs.

The rug at the base of the stairs - the one Richard's brother had given them as a wedding gift - with wet blue soaking its lilac braiding.

Following the two trails to Drew's room.

Drew hunched over a mixing bowl, undoubtedly the biggest one he'd be able to carry, that rocked from side to side, the water brimming over as he happily squirted it with blue.

How round and authority-stricken Drew's eyes had grown when the door opened, as if two armed officers had just entered his room.

Richard, in a tight mutter: "He needs a good spanking for this."

It wasn't the hand stationed in midair that brought her to near hysterics. She'd seen her own father do that half-a-dozen times in her childhood, and he'd never left any lasting damage. It was the anger pent up on both sides of his neck.

She pleaded - "Richard, really, he didn't mean any harm. . ."

He swore. Not at her. Not at Drew. It was too flat and impersonal for that. "I need you to support me on this. If we let him get away with this, he'll think he can get away with anything."

In her silence he must have heard a "yes."

She stood there to support him with her eyes slanted shut. If she'd kept them open, she knew she wouldn't have been able to resist barricading herself between her husband and their son.

Now Richard finished and swung himself out, his arm a ticking pendulum at his side. Across the room, her baby cried on his bed, in pain, his face wild and mottled with no trace of understanding.

She sprinted across the room and wrapped him in an embrace. "Shhh, Drewbie. It's all right. You're going to be okay now, sweetums."

Drew sniffled and ran a hand under his nose, breathing as if someone had clamped his lungs in a vise. Little wheezes tore from his tiny nostrils and broke her heart clean in half. "I was bad," he said.

The lump in her throat turned to an arrow. "Just a little, honey," she said. "Mama knows you didn't mean to be." She wrenched him tighter, focused on rolling up the sleeve cuffs he'd drenched in water and food coloring. "And Daddy will know, too, once he. . . .once he's not so angry anymore."

Drew slid into his baby-koala pose and hung on as if she were the only person in the world guaranteed to watch over him. She didn't let go because in this moment he just might have been right.

4

"Drewbie?"

Drew looked at her from over his stuffed monkey's head. He'd been working to fashion a slide for it out of Legos and a slanted picture book, but the book pulled back and dropped under the monkey's weight each time. Each pipsqueak-grunt was progressively louder and closer to a tantrum that wouldn't be cute even on her darling boy.

"Yeah, Mama?" he called back, and she heard the tantrum fading away like footsteps in the opposite direction. Even through the doorway, she could feel him brighten.

"Why don't you come on out to the kitchen? I've got something to show you."

The door creaked open, and the head of restless almost-curls that constantly defied combing poked in. "Are we gonna do a 'xperiment?" Drew asked. Ever since he'd heard it on an episode of Sesame Street, "experiment" had become Drew's favorite word.

"Not exactly an experiment," she said. She patted the floor beside her. "But we're going to learn something."

Drew was there in an instant, legs crossed, face riveted to her every move. She reached into the old oatmeal canister where she stored the alphabet magnets and sifted through the letters until she found the four most dear to her.

D-R-E-W went up on the refrigerator.

"Do you know what that spells?" she asked.

"No," Drew said. His eyebrows were descending, as if he expected her to be disappointed in his answer.

She gave his limp little wrist a squeeze. "That's your name, honey. That spells Drew!"

"Really?" Drew bounced across the wood floor on his rear and nearly went cross-eyed gazing at the letters from a half-inch away. "Drew?"

He reached out and dragged one magnet down the length of the refrigerator with a sound that rang in her fillings, then gave it a weak flick backward. When it snapped right back into place, he clapped both hands to the sides of his head. She could already see his lips rounding off his other favorite word - "Why?" - which was never too far from them. Richard saw it as a challenge. She knew it was curiosity.

"Why do they stick?" Drew said. He looked up at her, every freckle craned her way, waiting for her answer.

"Because these are magnets, Drewbie," she said. "They're made to stick to anything made of metal."

"Ohhhhh." Drew nodded as seriously as if he planned to write his dissertation on that very topic. "And the 'frigerator's made of metal?"

"That's absolutely correct, you little smarty."

"What else is metal?" Drew asked. He was perched on his knees in front of the refrigerator now, tapping it as far up as he could reach.

"Coins," she said. "Like quarters and dimes that Mama uses to pay for things. Your Peter Pufferpuff toys are metal. So are belt buckles and parts of pencils and sets of keys."

"And robots!" Drew supplied.

"Yes, robots, too!"

"How do you spell 'Mama'?" Drew asked.

"M-A-M-A." She stuck the letters on the refrigerator, and Drew traced each of them with a finger, beaming in that stadium-light way of his. After a moment of deliberation, he plucked the heart magnet from the canister and dropped it at the end like wobbly punctuation.

"Heart means love," Drew informed her.

He said it no differently than she'd said that coins were made of metal. She blinked away a tear that was trying to take shape.

She turned back to Drew's name on the refrigerator and nudged the E away, replacing it with an A. "Now it says 'draw' instead of 'Drew.'"

"Draw?" Drew hooted. He gave the letters a poke and then whipped his head back toward her. "I like to draw! Mama, can I draw?"

"He has the attention span of a mayfly," Richard had muttered to her once.

"He has the attention span of a four-year-old," she'd muttered back.

"Yes, you must certainly may." She emphasized the correct word with a smile and held out her hand to him. Together they made their way into the living room, where she found a piece of typewriter paper for Drew to draw on. He'd already gone rooting through the bottom shelf of the bookcase and come back with his crayons.

In another ten minutes, Drew presented his latest masterpiece to her. He'd drawn an animal of some sort with two protruding tusks and a vaguely sausage-shaped torso, out of which grew four spindly parallel legs that barely seemed to connect with the jagged line of green he'd designated as the ground. The sky was an equally haphazard blue stripe.

"Can you tell me about your picture?" she asked, instead of coming out with a "What is it?" Those parenting seminars at church had taught her a few things.

Drew poked the picture, crayon wax packed down under his nails. "It's a cow."

"Why does it have tusks, then?" she said. Most four-year-olds wouldn't even know the word "tusks," she thought with a twinkle inside, but her Drewbie already had a book about Arctic animals that he insisted be read to him at least once a week.

"That's not tusks." Drew gave her the heavy stare she'd seen Richard use on colleagues who showed up late to board meetings. "That's a magnet. He's got a magnet in his mouth."

"A magnet?" she said.

"Yup. He's trying to find coins so he can buy - um, a rocket! So he can go to the moon, too!"

Drew drifted his gaze significantly over toward the television, toward the spot where he had sat in its light a few months ago with every different angle of the landing, every booted bounce higher than the ones on Earth, every black-and-white glimpse of the craters.

The moon had seemed like such a distant, desolate place that a sense of loneliness had blanketed her - until she'd looked over at Drew and saw him half-squatting, half-standing, his mouth agape, his entire being transfixed and alive. When the grainy words "That's one small step for man. . . one giant leap for mankind" crackled from their old set, he shot straight up and burst into applause.

Her vision of him as a scholarly young man in white lab coat had been there and gone in between claps. She'd shivered anyway.

The cow picture was fixed to the center of the refrigerator - with the heart magnet, of course.

5

She rested her elbow on the steering wheel and checked her watch yet again. There were only a few more minutes until the bell rang and the students were released.

Only a few more minutes before her son's life was under her control again.

She'd inched into a white-walled classroom this morning with Drew strapped to her leg, one of his tiny palms leaking fear and the other jouncing the lunchbox it carried against her ankle. Stooped under the weight of his backpack, speckled with pictures of that one comic-book hero he liked, the one with the spider powers, he looked pale and pitiful and as starched-into-place as his new shirt. She hadn't been able to see Richard in him at all.

The room looked inviting enough, with the bulletin board that took up almost one whole wall stapled with rainbow cutouts and the tables arranged in a semicircle that didn't cut any one child off from the others. Certainly the teacher had been kind, too. She'd asked Drew's name in a low, smooth voice, unoffended by his violent head-shake with she inquired whether it was short for Andrew, and began to pitch him the promises of snacktime, storytime, and coloring. None of it had any effect.

Not until the teacher had happened to bring up the magnet table, and then Drewbie jumped toward it as if he were being offered the wealth of kings. By the time she herself had said a choked good-bye, Drew was so busy clicking magnets together that he didn't even watch her go.

That was a good thing, she knew it. Truly good. She didn't want to raise an ill-adjusted child, after all.

It seemed to her that the adjustment could have happened a little more slowly.

She'd closed the door behind her and leaned against it. Another mother with eyes that had already seen one or two older children off on their first day had offered her a tissue, and she'd dabbed at her mascara before it could start to run.

An older gentlemen passing the kindergarten wing gave a grunt. "Just wait until their first day of college," he said.

She'd clenched her purse to her chest to keep herself from pummeling him with it.

Now she drummed the steering wheel and shifted in her seat, conscious of the vacancy beside her. Richard, who'd had to go into work early, who'd promised he would "make it up to them" later, as if he'd missed a dinner party rather than his son's first day of school. Whatever bridged the three of them could've been easily snapped by a fierce wind.

The bell jangled then, the school doors surged open from inside, and the kindergarteners poured out as one person. She craned her upper body halfway out the window for a glimpse of Drew. But wherever her son was, he was swept out of view by the heads and shoulders of quite a few larger classmates as they pumped toward the cars where the other women who had been chewing the insides of their cheeks sore all day waited.

It took several more waves of them before she spotted black hair springing away from a thinker's high forehead. Drew bounded his way across Middleton Elementary's lawn with no sign whatsoever of the sobbing fight that had been hovering over him and his bowl of corn flakes that morning.

She slapped the door shut behind her and squatted down so that he could run right into her arms.

"Mama, Mama, Mama!" Drew cried. He couldn't stay still in her hug, wriggling out of it and turning in puppy-dog circles on the blacktop before he climbed into his carseat. "Guess what? I colored a picture today!"

He waved a coloring sheet where the lines had been respected, if not strictly obeyed. It nearly landed in the corner of her eye as she bent over to buckle him in.

"That's beautiful, Drewbie!" she told him.

"Yeah-huh, and. . . .she read us a story about a frog and a toad. And I wrote my name for her, and I only made the D a little bit backward, and we got to sing the albpha - alpehb - ABCs, and we counted to ten and she said this year she's going to teach us how to count all the way to a hundred, only I can already count to fifty. Listen: one, two, three, four, five, six -"

Drew waved his hands in the air and continued his stream of pure, obnoxious little-boy babble. It kneaded her spirit like a rushing brook or a gentle moo from Belle, her childhood favorite cow.

6

She paced in front of Middleton Elementary's gymnasium, underneath the multicolored banner that announced, Science Fair Today! The doors stood resolutely shut in front of her, and she squinted at them, trying to guess whether the ribbon her son would carry as he emerged from them would be white, red, or blue.

Off-white lights groaned above her head. Across the hall, the principal's secretary snatched up a ringing phone. Sneakers screeched between classrooms as seventh-graders shoved each other up against pine-green lockers that were already flaking away this year's coat of paint.

A bell shrieked from its high perch on every wall. The gym doors opened and poured out a stream of children. They looked ready to go home and forget about science until the next morning - all except the winners with proud walks, who rolled their ribbons back and forth in their hands or wrapped them up in hugs.

Before she could even locate the first-grade class, something hit her hard in the chest.

She glanced down in surprise, and there was Drew, his head sloped between his slumped shoulders like a horse trying to eat from a too-low trough. He scrubbed his fists across his eyes, over and over, with sharp jerks that must have been painful. Her baby hated pain, but something deeper than that kept him mashing his hands.

His empty hands.

She felt herself droop. "Oh, Drewbie - I'm so sor -"

"Let's get out of here," Drew interrupted. He didn't wait for her to reply but bolted for the door, heels kicking up behind him like they couldn't bear to touch the floor, and glowered his way into the car.

Only once the engine had cranked up and the tires had spun out of the parking lot did Drew finally hurl a shout of, "Those judges are so dumb!"

"Drewbie!" she chided him. He knew better.

Drew jammed his arms together, not the slightest bit apologetic. "Well, they are! I was all ready to show 'em my experiment about how air has mass and it takes up space. Remember, Mama?"

She nodded. Of course she remembered. For the last two weeks she'd watched him putter around with balloons and empty plastic bottles and a pencil he never let get out of reach.

The child was probably the only first-grader in Middleton who knew what "mass" was, and he didn't even come in third? She got a stranglehold on the wheel. "What happened?" she said.

"I told the helper I needed a scale - ya know, so we could weigh the different balloons. And he came back with a people-scale." Drew's face was a collection of pink circles angrier than the poison-oak rash it had suffered this summer. "One that measures by pounds. Like, twenty pounds at a time."

She took a turn a bit too sharply.

"So it made it look like the balloons just weighed the same!" Drew burst out, the blotches flushing even more furiously. "The judges said my theory was probably right, but I didn't have the right equipment to prove it."

He pronounced that last sentence as if someone had attached a clothespin to his nose. Another car swerved in front of her before drifting back into its own lane, and she laid on the horn with all her strength.

"W - why, that's ridiculous, Drewbie!" she said. The back of her neck hardened so that she couldn't look away from the road. "It's not your fault that someone brought you the wrong scale!"

"Yeah!" Drew said.

She sniffed. "Somebody could teach those judges a thing or two about science."

"Because they're dumb?" Drew suggested.

Well, in her book, they were, but that couldn't be the message she sent to him.

"No, honey," she said. "But they sure didn't do the smart thing this afternoon. . . and they will be hearing from me!"

Drew blinked at her and the blotches seeped to a less alarming color. "You mean that, Mama? They made me feel so stupid. . ."

"Of course I do!" She smacked the steering wheel and nearly set the horn off again. "Nobody makes my Drewbie feel stupid! No one. He is a good, smart boy!"

A long sigh simmered out of Drew, and he let his head drop against the window in obvious exhaustion. His sag down into the seat belonged to a boy that could rest easy for the first time all day - because his mother was there to be on his side.

She spent the better part of the afternoon, while Drew sulkily attended to his homework, on the phone with the school. The judges passed her to Drew's teacher, who passed her to the principal, who passed to her to the superintendent. He apologized like a politician, saying he was sorry for the "mix-up," but that the judges' decision had to remain final. "After all," he said, "can you imagine how devastated some child would be to have their ribbon taken away and given to someone else?"

It was the first time in her life she'd ever hung up on someone.

7

There was a jagged hole in the knee of his school slacks. The new round, shiny lenses that made him look like a small, smart owl sat at a crooked perch, and behind them he gazed at her as if expecting to be smacked, even though she'd never raised a hand against him in his life. Mud and misery were smeared across his cherubic cheeks.

But none of that mattered because beneath the hole in his pants, Drew's knee was scabbed with blood, and something similar crusted a tear in his upper lip. The sight rattled her to the core.

"Drewbie?" She grabbed his sleeve - Drew winced his chin nearly all the way into his neck - and spun him around. Yellow-green wept down the back of his Size-Slim polo in strips. "What in the world?"

Drew's eyes took on a wild sheen she'd only seen in spooked fillies. They ran down the rest of himself, as if he were as surprised as she were by what had happened to the tidied-up little boy she'd walked to the bus stop that morning. "I - uh - errr -"

"What happened?" She knew she should have been more patient with him - poor Drew had a stutter that kicked in when he was frightened - but her son's blood staring back at her sawed her heart to pieces.

Drew's fingertips flicked together. There was a split on one of his knuckles, too, and as soon as she got an answer out of him, she was going to gather him into her arms. "I - uh - nggh - fell. 'Cuz of gravity."

She felt her face soften. Listen to him.

"At recess?" she asked.

"No. Um, after school. I was doing - gkeg - the monkey bars. Y'know, on the playground? Yeah, I was doing those, and then I reached for the next monkey bar - and it, uh, turned out to be farther away than I calc'lated. So I fell. On the ground. Really truly. And that's why I got hurt."

"And at that point you couldn't go back in and see the school nurse," she finished for him, clapping one hand to the side of her face. "So you had to just get on the bus and come home like a trooper."

Rather than the doleful nod she expected, the one she got was quick and snappy, relieved to be understood.

"Because that's what I am." Drew snapped his head away from her. "I'm a trooper. Not a baby," he said.

In all his second-grade sweetness.

"Well, you'll always be my baby." She reached down and gathered up a handful of cheek. Her fingers came away muddy. "Come on, Drewbie, dear. Let's go get you all fixed up."

Despite Drewbie's bays of protest, she dragged him into the house and down the darkened, skeletal stairway and deposited him on the floor of his room. He squirmed out of her grasp at every conceivable opportunity, and when the peroxide bottle came out he resorted to squirting out between her hands like a bar of soap. The howling and kicking commenced as soon as the cotton ball touched skin. But afterward, once she had bandaged the hand and the knee and blotted the lip with a hot washcloth, Drew sighed, exactly the way he used to in the ninety-second gap between when he finished nursing and when he fell asleep.

For about that same amount of time, he relaxed against her and snuggled in, taking a big breath of the flowers on her dress as if he were trying to smell them. Then he was backing away, darting a glance in every direction, on surveillance. He scrambled to his feet and trudged dutifully to the child-size desk in the corner, his backpack smacking the floor beside him.

She smiled, a little mistily, to herself. The child could never be still long.

Which probably helped explain that bruises that formed the next day, deep and furious against his ghostly skin.

8

The clock in her squint pointed to 4:52 a.m. She had no idea what had woken her up.

Rolling over onto her side, she let her arm wander to the other half of the bed.

The empty half.

She closed her eyes again for a moment. The bed was so cold without him.

During the day, all she missed was having another set of hands to support her. Night was a different story. At night, she missed Richard's blocky back against hers as she drifted off. She missed the tender sound of his snores. She even missed how he would tiptoe in from another late shift at work, practically tap-dancing around the squeaky boards to keep from awakening her.

She missed the man she'd married. The man whose whole face had come to life when she'd told him she was pregnant. The man who rubbed her shoulders during a twelve-hour labor. The man who would sprinkle playful kisses across her brow.

The neurotic workaholic busybody he'd become - him she could live without.

She retrieved her glasses from her nightstand and stuck them on. The empty silence tingled with something that wasn't quite right, and she opened her door and padded down the hallway just to make sure.

That was when she heard the crying. The open space beneath the stairs funneled the sniffles straight up to her.

Drew.

During the day, Drew held it together in the same scuttling way she did. He'd ask her if she needed anything, she'd ask him if he needed anything, and they'd both lie and say no. They were two of those repulsive poker players with their chairs turned away from each other, each of them bluffing about the quality of the hand they'd been dealt.

Now it was the middle of the night, and Drew's poker skills had abandoned him.

She snagged her bathrobe from her doorknob and cinched it into place, and she went ahead and picked her way down the wood steps that felt even limper than usual. Without Richard's nervous, organized energy, the entire house seemed to sag, like schoolgirls once the headmistress left the classroom. That night, when the front door had pressed shut behind him, she'd realized that his soul had been somewhere faraway for a long time, and he was only following it out the door.

Drewbie was standing to the right of his bed when she poked her head in, and he froze as if he'd somehow caught a draft through his closed, fingerprint-smudged window. He glanced up for an instant, his own glasses blotchy with tears. He'd probably donned them as soon as he'd woken up, and he blinked toward the floor, a baby professor hunched over by the shame of not qualifying for Harvard.

"Drewbie?" she asked. "What's wrong, snookums?"

"I - I - I - Oh, Mommy -" Drew still wouldn't look at her, and his voice fluttered like a flag in the breeze - "I wet the bed."

She moved her eyes over to the pile of fabric in the corner that she now recognized as Drewbie's favorite pajamas, fat clouds on shimmering, sky blue. He hadn't wet the bed in almost two-and-a-half years.

Hadn't called her "Mommy" in about that long, either.

"I already got into different jammies." Drew gestured at himself, the stripes on his top awkward, nearly painful against the train-and-car print on the bottoms. "But I couldn't figure out how to get the sheets off. Well, actually, I could figure out. I just couldn't do it." He looked down at the skinny arms he let fall to his sides. "'M sorry."

It took several blinks to clear her own tears - the last thing he needed was to see her crying. "You are absolutely fine," she said, swallowing between words. "I'm not mad, honey. It wasn't your fault."

Drew sniffed again. "Maybe it was. I probably drank too much water before bed. That's what usually causes it, you know. Once you're not a baby anymore, that is."

She didn't know enough of the science behind it to argue, and she wasn't about to challenge what was clearly the only thing standing between him and a total meltdown. "Accidents happen," she said. She bent down and cupped her son's face before crushing it into the front of her robe. "I'll change your sheets for you. Don't you worry about a thing."

Drew wriggled away, but he'd broken into the first puffy suggestion of a smile. It was tiny and dim, nothing at all like the usual gummy one that could bowl you over with its brightness.

She swept the soggy sheets off the bed, marched them upstairs, and tucked them into the washing machine, her little gosling two steps behind her the whole time. Drew never once took his eyes off of her or his thumb out of his mouth. He was getting a little old to be doing that, but just the fact that he trusted her not to reach down and whisk away his comfort the way his father would have kept her from saying a word about it right now.

Only after the washing machine started up, alternating between growling and shushing itself, and she'd given her hands a good hard scrub did Drew's eyelids begin to drop. She linked fingers with his and led him back down the steps, testing each flimsy board with her weight before he set a toe on it.

Drew climbed meekly back into bed and let her pat a clean set of sheets down around him. He nodded sluggishly at her promise to wash his favorite jammies. Anyone observing him at the moment would cross themselves and swear the child was incapable of the tantrums his teacher had talked to her about just that afternoon.

Kneeling on the raw wood floor beside his bed, she watched his face crawl to the edge of sleep. When she stood up to go, he hooked onto the sash of her robe and pulled her back. "Mommy, don't leave me," he said in a plaintive whimper that spiked straight through her.

She closed her eyes, watched Richard twirl the doorknob with his characteristic neatness, and sat back down again.

Within five minutes, Drew's grip went slack, and he was breathing in sleep-puffs. She traced the soft, rounded jawline pushed into a permanent stubborn pout by the underbite he'd inherited from her. The frontal view she had of him, ears poking out from a head that hadn't grown into them yet, made him look more like a sleeping pup than ever.

Extra set of hands or not, for tonight she was glad Richard wasn't here. She didn't want to hear the words of admonition he'd have had for their son.

No - her son. She watched Drew burrow deep into his pillowcase. She was all this little boy had left in the world.

And may she be hog-tied if she let it hurt him any more than it already had.

9

"Well, I can honestly say we've never called a parent in for this reason before," the principal said. He floated his words lightly toward her, but he looked as grave as if he had evidence linking her son to the KGB.

"And what issue would that be?" she said. Her body pricked forward, on the defensive. She couldn't imagine what Drew could have done to warrant the atmosphere of sternness in the room.

The principal flattened his palms on his desk. "There was an. . . an incident in Physical Education class today."

She flew out of her chair. "Did he get hurt? Is my baby okay?"

"Drew is fine. If you wouldn't mind sitting back down. . ." The principal's nod toward her seat was probably the same one he gave to children caught running in the halls.

"I'd prefer to stand, thank you," she said.

The principal blew out a breath. Exasperation. She couldn't tell if it was for her or for Drew, but she knew she couldn't forfeit the ability to look this man in the eye.

"The fourth-grade class was playing a game of dodgeball this afternoon. At one point, the ball was headed straight for your son." The principal breathed in again, ignoring her shudder. "According to the PE teacher" - this time he nodded at the stoic-faced man hovering on the other side of his desk - "Drew pulled some sort of ray gun from his pocket and shot it at the ball, causing it to immediately shoot in the opposite direction.

"He continued firing the ray at the ball until all of his classmates had been hit and knocked out of the game except for him. Several students have testified that he used this same weapon at recess to win every game of four-square and kickball." A conclusion of Nothing further, Your Honor wouldn't have felt terribly out of place. The principal sat back and folded his arms across his suit jacket while she blinked and waited for the news to catch up.

"What are you saying?" she said.

"Basically, Mrs. Lipsky, your son somehow built a ray that can control rubber objects."

Her inner twinkle flicked on, and she leaned forward, nearly scraping herself on the principal's nameplate, whose cedar curlicues spelled out Mr. Bill Stickler. "Do you hear what you're saying?" she cried. "Why, that's - that's -"

"Mad?" The PE teacher - a Mr. Slamm Dunck according to the letters stitched across his chest - spoke for the first time, and his low-pitched, almost-cruel voice hit the twinkle and switched it back off. "Yeah, that's exactly what we're saying."

She felt her mouth drop open, and an "Excuse me?" fell out of it.

"It was like some alien machine from one of those sci-fi movies," Mr. Dunck said. He kept his hand in his pocket, bunching the fabric as he jerked his thumb to the side.

"So you're saying my nine-year-old son just invented a ray over the course of a school day to control rubber objects - and it works - and you didn't call me here to discuss scholarship offers? I don't think you realize how serious this is -"

Principal Stickler's nostrils thinned until they nearly met in the middle. "On the contrary, Mrs. Lipsky - I don't think you realize how serious this is. Your son constructed what is quite frankly a terrifying machine for the sole purpose of humiliating other children and feeding his own ego. That's not genius; that's madness and cheating."

"Cheating? My son has never cheated on anything in his life -"

Mr. Dunck made a hoarse sound in the back of his throat. "He found an advantage he had over the other kids and he exploited that. In my academic handbook, we call that cheating."

Her purse smacked to the ground between her heels. She scooped it up and only by the grace of God did it not come back down on one of their smug heads.

"Is this how you treat all your exceptional children?" she spat at them.

The deep throaty cough came out of Mr. Dunck again. She wondered if it had ever been a real laugh, one that had charmed a mother or done anything else except egg on dodgeball-wielding children. "The crazy ones, yeah."

Even Mr. Stickler stirred. "That was in poor - "

But she got there first. "My Drewbie is a good, brilliant, honest boy!" From at least a foot below, she looked up the long legs that pushed this dry-coughing man close to the ceiling. "I'll talk to him about cheating, but I will not call him mad or discourage him from inventing."

She huffed her way to the door. Before she opened it, she crooked a finger and a gracious smile at the two men. "Shame on you! And have a nice day."

The door cranked shut behind her.

Drew was just barely sitting on a chair out in the hallway, his tailbone perhaps the only thing still making contact with the thin cushion. He had her sun-bleached-sand coloring, and Richard's athletic build hadn't taken hold yet. One look at his concave chest almost bent double, and she understood why he'd felt the need for his brilliant invention.

10

The eyes that looked back at her were empty shells.

She'd just hoisted herself out of the driver's seat of her old beater, the one Richard had let her keep in the settlement, and run over to give her boy his first hug in six hours. Drew had immediately slithered beneath her arms and into a self-conscious squat above the parking lot pavement and looked up at her, glinting with sweat and sudden resentment. All of her beautiful boy's traits had been rubbed away.

"Drewbie? What's wrong?" she asked.

Drew's only answer was a grunt and a sharp step backward. He snatched the handle that tilted loosely across the beater's door and pried it open, smashing his backpack down on the seat like he'd had a fight with it. The door's closing was every bit as angry. Drew buckled himself into the booster seat his sixty-pound body still required and swept the vicinity for onlookers, red devouring his face from every angle.

"How was school today?" she said. She put the key in the ignition, and the engine struggled its way back to life.

Drew turned his head away and pawed for his backpack's zipper. "I've got homework," he said.

She froze with her hand still on her keyring. She'd had that tone thrown at her a thousand times before - that tone full to the brim with business and purpose that refused to absorb anything else.

"Did something happen, Drewbie?"

"No. I've just got homework."

She looked in the rearview mirror and immediately wished she hadn't. Drew was returning it with a cool, appraising gaze that had been a part of her life for so long it had no more lost its fit than she suspected her wedding band would have.

Then, with a weary groan that got her concern standing right on end, he turned to the window, piled his arms and legs close to his body like toothpicks, and watched the trees pass from behind a glaze of utter blankness. A glaze that screened her out and aged him decades in the ten-minute ride home.

On the way, she babbled about the gardenias she was going to plant once the frost went away this weekend - in the hopes that he would want to take a soil sample - and the construction site she drove by on the way to Middleton Elementary - just in case he had a new theory about what they were building there - and the new cereal she bought at the grocery store this morning - because he would be equally likely to barrage her with a chemical explanation of how cereal went soggy or to work himself into a lather over the prizes in the boxes.

Drew collected his backpack and lunchbox and headed straight for his room. His walk was detached, and she knew it only had one destination and wouldn't swerve even if it steered him into a wall or a bookcase. She recognized that walk, too.

This time, Drew made it safely to his room. That didn't stop anxiety from making ripples in her as he dragged a textbook out of his backpack by his fingertips and threw it open on his lap. He stared down at the page with wings carved into his forehead.

Dear Lord, not my little boy too.

She crouched down beside him and fought the urge to pinch his skin to see if it was still baby-soft. "Drewbie," she said.

His head came up with a glare. "What?"

The familiarity of it sliced at her as if she'd nicked herself shaving. "Drewbie," she pushed out, "I love you."

Drew surrounded the book with his arms and let his face fall into them. When he lifted it again, the stiffness had dissolved from it.

"School was okay," he said. "We didn't get a chance to do our science experiment today. Some mor - some guy asked the teacher questions about the differences between acids and bases, even though we'd already spent all of yesterday's class covering that and how could he not know? And she kept on explaining and explaining until we were out of time." He threw his shoulders back in disgust.

It was all she could do not to melt right there between the floorboards. "Anything else?" she said, not caring how high her words floated or how much they begged.

"Ummm-uhh. . . We got our spelling tests back. And I spelled over half the words right." He finally flashed her Richard's handsome smile, with the added cute imperfection of one front tooth ducking behind the other.

That resemblance didn't disturb her one bit.

11

Boom.

The floor didn't drop away beneath her, but it didn't matter. The noise alone was enough to almost split the room in half and send her sister-in-law's cup to chattering fretfully on her saucer. The tea hadn't even settled before she was staring at her sister's-in-law's retreating back on its frantic path to the front door.

For an instant, her own body tried to take root in the tiles, but she wouldn't let it. She took as many stairs as her short-legged strides could manage at one time, her head striking a single key over and over: Drew. Drew. Drew. Drew.

The beat accelerated with her every step until she crashed to a stop beside her sister-in-law in front of their family's detached, two-car garage. Her sister-in-law's Chevrolet still sat nonchalantly on the left side. On the right side, though, there was nothing but leveled concrete and chunks of stone. Drywall was caught in the wind and swept away.

Behind the chaos, no longer shielded by a wall that had been blown to smithereens, two boy-figures stood. Eddy gazed around with his usual grin collapsed into an O, speechless for once. Next to him, Drew was white as linen.

"We can fix this!" Drew yelped as soon as he saw her. "We'll just need some. . . cement." He took a sheepish look at the empty lot where her brother-in-law would expect to park his converted, olive-painted taxi cab once he arrived home from work today. "And about six months."

Her sister-in-law's lips slashed open, seemingly unable to decide whether to dissolve laughing or weeping. "Well. I think it goes without saying that our sons are in trouble."

That would come later. She waded through the debris to her Drewbie and wrapped him in her arms and pressed him to her, even though he was dirtier than a typewriter ribbon, until the feeling came back into her legs. He glanced up at her, and she caught a flash of fear under his thickening eyebrows.

"I'll take mine, you take yours?" her sister-in-law said.

She nodded, caught Drew by the loose sleeve he had yet to grow into, and tugged him off to a corner of the yard. Behind her, Eddy sprawled on the ground, openly inviting chiggers, while his mother's finger punctured the air in front of him.

Drew fidgeted in her grasp, every inch of his body in motion. The Richard in him would have liked nothing better than to pace the grass and trample it, she knew. It was what both father and son did when they were afraid and couldn't send it away.

"Drew!" She dropped the "bie" entirely. "What in the name of heaven happened here?"

"It was Eddy's fault!" Drew's words shot out of him like they were being held at knifepoint. "I mean, mostly. We were just trying to play around with my Junior Scientist Chemistry Set, and then he got the idea that it'd be a lot more interesting if he added brake fluid, and I tried to tell him that no, these chemicals were already a volatile mix and shouldn't be mixed with anything even remotely flammable, but he wouldn't listen and then - KABOOM!" His hands pleaded with her.

She pinched on to the end of his explanation. "So this was an accident."

"Absolutely! Of course, Mom! Why would I want to blow up Eddy's garage? If I were going to blow something up on purpose, it would be the gy -"

Drew cut himself off and scuffed his feet, his untied shoelaces lashing at each other.

Her thoughts made a sudden, sharp veer to the right and sent her hands to her hips. "What Junior Scientist Chemistry Set?" she demanded.

Drew's eyes startled, halfway out of their sockets from what she could tell. "Mine."

"You asked for that kit six months ago, and I told you we couldn't afford it right now! Where did you get the money for it?"

"What if I didn't get any money?" Drew asked, suddenly sullen. "What if I. . . what if I stole it?"

Her jaw plunged. She couldn't push out a word.

"I mean, that would be awful, right? That would be the worst thing I could've possibly ever done to get that kit!" Drew's fingertips bashed together in an attempt to keep up with his mile-a-minute speech. "So, since I didn't steal it, whatever I'm about to tell you isn't going to be that bad!"

Sometimes the child was far too smart for his own good.

"Well?" she said.

Drew turned to the side, leaving her to address a scab on the fork of his elbow. "I used my lunch money."

Her vision flaked at the edges. "Your lunch money? That must have taken -"

"A week." Drew's head shuffled up and down, stayed down.

"Drew Theodore P. Lipsky, you cannot afford to be skipping meals!" The breeze could have already carried him away with the drywall. "Do you know how irresponsible -"

"Yes!" Drew flapped his hand, dismissing her. "I do! But I was just a kid then."

"Oh, really?" She stared at the baby fat still firmly stationed in his face. "And what are you now?"

"I'm an adolescent," Drew informed her. The gawky arms he gathered to his chest and then spent the next several seconds trying to arrange seemed to confirm it. "And, besides, it's not like I did something that will get me thrown into Juvenile Hall."

"Do not even joke about that!" She swept a hand over the rubble that had once been her sister-in-law's front yard. "You're going to help them fix this."

"Of course I am." The eyes that Drew notched up to her were visibly wounded that she could have even suspected otherwise. "I already said I would. Sounds like a lot of fun, actually."

That's my boy.

12

"Mrs. Lipsky?" The male voice on the other end of the line reminded her of a tired old steer. "This is Principal Bowers of Middleton Junior High."

She gripped the phone receiver until its cold metal bit into her palm. "This is she. Did - did something happen? Is everything all right?"

"As you requested last week, Drew was excused from his Human Growth and Reproduction class last period."

"And. . .?" There was more. With Drewbie, there was always more.

She could hear the man lean back in his desk chair, which sighed with him. "Apparently Drew didn't leave the classroom empty-handed. A Human Growth and Reproduction textbook was found on the school grounds after dismissal, stamped with the initials D. T. P.L."

"Says who?" she said.

"I believe it was. . ." She imagined Mr. Bowers massaging his temples. ". . . Carl Thompson was the boy who brought it in."

She'd known Carl Thompson since he and Drew started kindergarten. Nice kid. Member of the Junior Mad Dogs track team this year. Polite and honest as they came. But it was possible he'd somehow gotten mixed-up today.

"There must be some mistake, Mr. Bowers!" she protested. "My Drewbie would never dream of -"

"With all due respect, ma'am, I don't think you know everything he dreams of." He blew his next sentence right over her gasp. "Which is not a reflection on either of you. I don't think Drew meant any harm. Curiosity is very normal at this age. They introduced this curriculum to the public school system for a reason."

She glared at the peeling wallpaper. Curiosity, he'd said. That was her baby's innocence they were talking about!

"Thank you, Mr. Bowers," she said, hearing her own voice go sour like a bad glass of lemonade. "I'll take it from here."

"He's got to find out sometime, Mrs. Lipsky," were Mr. Bowers's parting words.

The receiver went back onto its cradle, and she leaned her weight against the tabletop. The nerve of that man.

Of course he had to know sometime. She'd learned the facts of life from horses and barnyard cats. And just because Drew was growing up in the suburbs didn't mean he had to be taught in a classroom full of girls who would mortify him with their very presence and boys who would leer over every passage read.

Then again, what were her options? Tell him herself? The poor child would never be able to look her in the eye again.

Who he really needed was Richard. He would treat their little scientist to nothing but the facts. He could offer insight into those things that were about to become a part of Drewbie's world, things she'd never experienced. His reassurance that all of this was normal would mean so much more than hers.

She sank into a chair and began to cry.

13

"Drewbie, you know it's rude to wear sunglasses at the dinner table."

Although she couldn't see it, she knew his eyes rolled. "Tell that to the sun, Mom."

She glanced out the kitchen window at the gray-swabbed sky. "It's cloudy."

"Yeah, but looking directly at the sun is hazardous to your health even on a cloudy day. See, it has to do with the UV rays that the sun puts out and even from behind cloud cover, they can damage your eyeballs. Just one quick little peek and - blam! You're blind!"

Drew flung his arms out to demonstrate, and his fork landed on the kitchen floor with a smack. She hid a smile behind her hand and crouched down to get it.

"No, no, let me!" Drew cried, his frantic gestures nearly catching her in the chest. "Really! Let me! I've got younger legs, Mom!"

Her good, courteous boy made a dive for the fork and got there at the same time she did.

Right in time for her to see the turquoise bruise staining the underside of his wrist. Its ends snaked down out of sight before looping back around and finding each other again, an ugly illustration of finger meeting thumb.

"Dre -"

"It's nothing!" Drew yipped before she could get any further.

"Drew -"

"Really! It doesn't even hurt! In fact, what are we even talking about?!"

She sat herself in the chair directly across from him and planted her gaze on the dark lenses that screened his away from her. "Take off the sunglasses."

Drew automatically obeyed, and then immediately looked down at the bacon on his plate. It couldn't hide the fact that his right eye had been raised into a mass of lumpy skin and swallowed alive by every shade of blue the world had.

The pain that constricted her felt like she was giving birth to him all over again. "Dear Lord, Drewbie. What happened?"

"It's nothing."

"Don't you dare tell me it's nothing!" She leaned across the table, almost dipping the front of her dress in bacon grease. "Who hit you?"

She reached out and took hold of his other wrist. She could feel the pulse galloping inside it, could see him swallow against the Adam's apple that surfaced every now and then from certain perspectives. "Um. . . I did," Drew said.

"You hit yourself?" She didn't care that she was ascending toward shrillness.

"Yeah. It was part of - um - an experiment. About the human body. And pain receptors. And what happens when blood vessels burst under the skin." Drew picked up his fork and poked at the bacon, which slipped between the tines and retreated to the edge of the plate, and he nodded. "I think it was a very productive session."

She gripped the sides of her head to keep them from bursting open. "But - your wrist!"

"Oh. Yeah. My wrist." Drew glared at it. "Um - I did that to myself, too. Because - um - my hand just didn't want to punch my eye all on its own. See, the body has natural resistance to doing anything that would cause it pain, so I had to overcome that resistance by, errr, grabbing my own wrist and forcing my fist into my eye!"

It was close to unbelievable. But if there was anything that could numb her Drewbie's sensitivity to pain, it was that science he was so crazy about. On the day he broke his wrist, the only way she'd been able to stop his screaming and thrashing was by begging him to tell her how black ink secretly ran with stripes of every other color.

She closed her eyes for a moment. That had been one thing. This - this seemed like a sickness.

"I'm sorry," Drew squeaked. She knew it bothered him so much that he still squeaked when he wanted to croak along with some of the boys in his class.

She let her eyes open to see Drew begging her with his good one. "You should be apologizing to yourself, Drew," she said. "I don't - ever - want you to do an 'experiment' like that again. Are we clear?"

Drew chewed his bacon in utter concentration for a minute. "Scientists have to do stuff like that sometimes," he said, as if he stood in a classroom giving a lecture.

"Scientists who aren't in eighth grade," she countered. "Adult scientists who can make their own decisions and live with the consequences. You're just a baby!"

As soon as it left her mouth, she knew it was the wrong thing to say. Drew threw his napkin down with a huff of disdain and started to scramble up from the table. She reached up and pulled him back down.

"That wasn't meant to be an insult," she said to the face that didn't believe her, that used to accept whatever she told him. "You just worry your poor old mother, that's all."

She expected another display of teenage attitude. Instead, Drew slouched down his seat, his vulnerable shoulders nearly poking through Eddy's hand-me-down shirt like a pair of pickaxes, and began to blink at a dangerous speed. "I know," he said, his voice far away. "Believe me, Mom, I know."

14

"Smile for the camera, Drewbie!"

Drew squinted at her. "Aw, Moth-er!" he protested.

The two rolled-out syllables sent a quick skip across her chest, one that had become all too familiar since high school had started and they'd replaced the cropped grunts of "Mom." The extra syllable would have taken her back to the days of "Mama" and "Mommy" if it hadn't always come out with an aloof air more in line with an old English king.

"Don't 'Aw, Mother' me!" She had to use both hands to raise the camera. "A big day like today - why, it would practically be a sin not to take pictures!"

Drew rolled his eyes, but the corners of his mouth inched upward, proud in spite of themselves of the metal they'd shed.

"That's more like it!" She directed Drew with her thumb until he stood in the center of the lens she peered into. "Come on, give Mama a big old smile!"

The name rolled off her lips like milk. Only much later did she wonder whether it posed a threat to his image of himself, the Poloroid of him as a man that had been slowly developing from the day she'd bought him his first deodorant stick.

He flashed her Richard's smile. The light caught his teeth just the way it had glinted off his braces for the past three years. She would be surprised if a halo didn't crop up around his mouth in the photo.

She snapped five or six pictures until Drew's skin began to tighten, trying to hold on to patience. As she released the camera and let the strap drag it down to her waist, her misty-eyed gaze had to tilt backward to find her son's.

He was growing up so fast, so well. On the first day of ninth grade, he had stared at the blocky building that slithered along its groomed grass for only a few minutes before he'd taken a deep breath and pushed himself from the car. She'd watched from the back as he'd crossed the lawn at a stiff walk that would have an Army recruit proud. The double doors had inhaled him, and the crush of kids behind them had carried him away. There had been no tears that day.

Not on Drewbie's part, at least.

15

"I just don't see why we even have to go."

She glanced across the dashboard at Drew in surprise. Those were the first words he'd said since he'd folded into his seat and glowered out the window at the passing driveway. His sweater dangled rebelliously from one shoulder, the cuffs rolled up to keep from overwhelming his waifish wrists.

"What do you mean?" she said.

"I mean that I don't get why people pay money for a spot in the bleachers where they have to sit in the dark and watch a bunch of jocks" - Drew's words snapped off in their teenaged frailty - "smash their heads into each other's just so their team can be the ones to hold a ball. Do you know how that's going to look five thousand years from now when archeologists excavate the ruins of a football stadium? They'll either conclude that we were completely uncivilized, or that we thought the ball had mystical powers - which would make us stupid -"

"One of those 'jocks' happens to be your cousin, Drew," she said. "And he's finally found a way to channel that risky energy of his, and we're not going to be the ones to discourage that. And his parents were kind enough to pay for our tickets."

Drew dropped into sulky silence, though not before she saw a dollop of guilt fall across his face. She hated putting that there - she really did, but there were times when she had nothing else left in her bag of tricks.

She pulled the car to a stop in front of Middleton High School and stick-shifted into park. Drew climbed out, his backpack clamped under one arm. "So, can you tell me why it's more important than me getting more homework done?" he said. There was no sarcasm, just curiosity.

"Because you finished your homework two hours ago." She shrugged a cardigan closed over the front of her dress. "At least that's what you told me, and I've never known my Drewbie to tell me a lie."

Drew swallowed hard. His Adam's apple jerked like a cherry stuck in a milkshake straw. "Right. Because I don't do stuff like that, Mother," he said.

"That's my boy," she responded, giving his hand a squeeze.

They handed their tickets to a junior-varsity girl wearing bell-bottoms and a fringe vest over the skimpiness of her uniform. Her precious Drew glanced at the ground anyway.

She scanned the bleachers until she spotted Eddy's parents waving at them three rows from the top. Drew, who ordinarily did everything but stand on his head to get some attention from the extended family, gave his aunt and uncle only the greetings he was instructed to, burrowed down into the bleachers, and planted his attention on the tiny notebook he always kept in one pocket.

It didn't stay there for the entire night. Every now and then, Drew would look up, track the ball with his eyes, mutter to himself, and then return to the notebook that swam with letters and numbers and alegebra signs that symbolized concepts far beyond her.

For the most part, however, it was nearly impossible to stop watching Eddy. The nephew who had always reminded her of a big shaggy sheepdog had finally found a flock of sheep to herd. When he decided to tackle someone, he wrapped his entire upper body around their legs and slammed them to the grass. With one flick, he'd spiral the ball through the air, bolting it straight into his teammates' waiting hands without fail. On the one occasion when another player pulled him down, Eddy had flipped over and pinned the kid before they'd even hit the ground together, and then he shot upright and made off with the ball, leaving the other kid flat on his back and blinking. He hadn't become graceful overnight, but every twitch, swerve, and sprint rippled with confidence.

The Mad Dogs' triumph over the Lowerton Lemurs was inevitable, but the crowd whistled and stomped at the end as if it had been a nail-biter all the way to the end. Players' last names were chanted, and "Lipsky" was one of the favorites.

For the first time in a good long while, she was proud of Eddy.

"There, that wasn't so bad, was it?" she asked Drew as they walked back to their car.

Drew shrugged. "Well . . . I did get a lot of practice using physics to calculate the odds of our success, so I guess it wasn't a total loss."

It hadn't been enough to channel his energy. A tic jumped in Drew's neck as if he'd plugged himself in, and the disheveled hair and eyes set adrift didn't do anything to calm the look.

Drew wrenched open the car door with more force than seemed necessary. "It's just all so. . . pointless."

"Pointless?"

"Those guys out there understand formulas like the ones for velocity and trajectory." Drew jammed his seat belt into its holder and sighed with the door as it shut. "But they're not going to use it to design rockets that can fly us to Mars or to build safer airplanes or anything. They could be engineers if they ever stopped fighting over that stupid ball."

"I've heard pro football players earn a lot of money - " she began.

"I know, and it stinks!" Drew cut her off. "What do they do to deserve that, huh?"

She forced herself to laugh. "So I take it I can count on you never to try out for football?"

His answering nod was an enormous relief. The child was half again her height but couldn't have outweighed her by more than a pound or two. She'd watched the entire team prepare more than one avalanche this evening, a rockslide of boys that would have flattened her Drewbie into the dust. She shivered at the thought.

"No, I'm going to be a chemist." Fists formed in front of him, as if Drew were ready to strangle the zesty autumn breeze sneaking in through his lowered window. "The chemists are the real heroes. They're the ones who are going to, you know, find the cure for cancer. Make sure our water supply stays clean. And they're the ones who invented awesome stuff like tie-dye!"

Drew delivered that with a firm nod before rocking his head back against his headrest. The speech must have tired him out, because he was asleep before the car rolled into the garage again.

She took that opportunity to study him in that deep way he would never permit when he was awake.

Adolescence had slimmed his face considerably, chiseling his daddy's taut cheekbones. They, combined with the thick black bristles of hair that now linked his eyebrows, gave him a constant alert, on-edge look. Yet viewing him in slumber, his sweet little lips parted, lashes dusting the tops of cheeks that still clung to traces of baby fat, he was as innocent and helpless as when she'd first held him in her arms.

At least there was a part of him that would always need her. And she would protect him from football players and stern teachers and all other sources of teenaged angst if she had to chew them up and spit them back out herself.

16

"Does this look okay, Mother?"

She glanced up from her crocheting, startled by the baritone in the room with her. Her son stood in the doorway.

Drew's voice had deepened to something bigger and more robust than his young body's boniness. Sometimes when he spoke, she could almost see his new manly vocal cords straining against his scrawny throat.

Right now a blue necktie was looped around that throat like a child's lanyard, the ends pitifully far apart, emphasizing the screaming white of his dress shirt and the nervous rustling of the oversized khakis she'd just ironed that afternoon. Even his thick lenses has been treated to a careful polish. She didn't have to touch the hands splayed across his knees to know they were dripping uneasy sweat.

Of course they were - she wouldn't have expected anything less on his first date.

First date. The phrase was still a surprise to her. It was hard to believe that he was finally old enough. Even harder to believe some little high-school girl hadn't called him up earlier, cutie that he was.

"You look. . ." She took a moment to work around the ache pinching the sides of her heart together. ". . . so handsome, dear!"

His eyes got stuck halfway through a roll, clearly dying to believe her.

"Ohhh, look at this," she said. "My little boy all dressed up and going on his first date."

"How's my breath? Did I get the peanut butter off it?" Drew tripped over to her and bent down to huff into her face. "I don't want her to know I ate a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for dinner. That's so - babyish!"

The whiff she took was dry and stale with anxiety but no trace of peanut butter. She gave him a nod and re-straightened his collar while she had him within reach. Somewhere in the six showers and seven tooth-brushings after supper, it had turned itself inside-out with fear.

"Actually, you smell lovely," she said once Drew had finally squirmed away. "Is that cologne?"

"Yes. Um. No, actually," Drew said. "It's err - well - I just rubbed deodorant pretty much everywhere. Cologne is expensive, or so I've heard, and I don't remember what kind - "

He trailed off to adjust his black socks.

The ache gained another layer. She gripped his arms in a hold tighter than the one it had on her. "That works just fine, dearie," she said, smiling at him. "I just wouldn't recommend sharing that with her."

"Yup." Drew's head bobbed frantically. "Not sharing that. Not sharing that. Not sharing that."

She got the impression he no longer had any concept of what he was saying.

"You'll hold open the doors for her?" she prompted him.

"Yes, Mother."

"And pull her seat out for her?"

"Yes. At dinner, right? Not the movies - their seats don't pull out."

She nodded again, biting back the giggle that would surely have rocketed Drew straight through the roof at this point.

A horn honked in the driveway, and Drew's eyes jumped in every direction before coming to rest on the door. His tongue came out, went back in. "That's her!" he hissed, and this time his voice was a perfect match for the rest of him.

"Your tie!" she hissed.

He looked at her with blank hysteria. "What about it?"

"You need to tie it!"

Drew's elbows crooked like the breaking points of twigs. "What? I thought it was already tied - thought it came that way - thought that was why it was called a tie!" His pitch was hiking upward, an inch at a time.

"It's okay," she told him. "I'll do it for you."

Drew fidgeted, his face chalky, as she tucked the sides together, looped them around each other, and cinched the tab. She reached up to pat his cheek and met a thin film of moisture, a perfect match for what collected every evening on the front of the icebox.

The front door quivered with an impatient knock.

She saw Drew's throat pumping as he took one final hard swallow. He spread a smile on the way she applied her blusher. The doorknob slipped away from him as soon as he touched it, and he had to grasp it with both hands and wrench it sideways to get it open - so different from his father's deft yank of that same knob all those years ago.

"Okay, gotta go, Mom, bye!" Drew called. He thumped the door behind him before she could even catch a glimpse of the girl who went with the darling little green Volkswagon bug parked at the curb.

"Good luck, snookums!" she called after him. Drew wrenched the car door shut behind him as if she had fired a bullet at him.

She wandered into the kitchen, dropped herself into a chair, and pulled her knees up to rest her fingers there. As much of a cypher as this girl was, at this very moment, her mother was probably sitting in the same spot, also veering from proud sighs to worries. She wished she could tell that mother that she had nothing to be afraid of. Her Drewbie was as honorable a young man as there ever had been.

The clock above the microwave clicked away, slow and ominous without her son's liveliness to drown it out.

She returned to the framework of a blanket hooked onto her knitting needles. Every purl reminded her of arranging Drew's tie. Every stitch stuck a picture in her mind of him accidentally tucking the restaurant's tablecloth into his belt.

Black-and-white I Love Lucy reruns served as the only sound for an hour and a half. That was when someone's fat tires screeched onto the driveway and stayed there, the cranking of the motor ripping apart the night's silence. A set of keys fumbled in the lock. It was too early to be Drew - and the motor's percussion told her it couldn't be anyone but Eddy.

The thought of her nephew put a sinkhole in her chest. Now there was the type of boy a mother would warn her daughter about.

It was Eddy's car she saw when she pulled open the front door for whoever was struggling with it. But the boy who stood in front of her was her own Drewbie. He had himself wrapped in a hug that unfolded as soon as he registered her presence. The porch lights cast dingy light on him from their greasy sockets, turning him yellow and frail.

"Drewbie! You're home early," she said.

Drew nodded, his eyes still on the scuffed-up toes of his loafers.

"And Eddy brought you home?" she asked.

That apparently didn't warrant an answer because Drew did everything but shove her out of the doorway as he marched into the kitchen, his fists clipped at his sides as if he were walking through a sandstorm. Every visible inch of him was pink-spotted, she saw when he went stock-still in the kitchen.

"Drewbie?" she asked.

He kept his back to her. It seemed to have shriveled since he left, hollow spaces flanking his spine. His shoulders were pulled high and tight, nearly meeting over his head.

When Drew finally spoke, it was a low growl that would have been frightening coming from anyone else. "Dinner was okay. I wiped my mouth with my napkin and pulled out her chair for her and everything. And I only mentioned chem lab three times and theoretical physics once. But then when we got to the movie theater, she wanted to go see Screamfest VII. And, yes, that is as bad as it sounds, and yes, it is rated R."

"But you're not seventeen yet!" She didn't bother to hide the horror that smothered her words.

"She is. And she told me she'd cover for me, too." He went up into a mocking octave. "'What's the big deal, Drew? I swear, everyone else in our class has already seen it. Don't be lame.' But I told her you didn't let me watch R-rated movies. And she laughed at me. In my face. And left with the car. I had to use my ticket money to call Eddy to pick me up."

Drew pointed the whole speech down at his scuff marks. She clutched the tabletop until the feeling drained from her fingers and from the impulse to feed the little vixen her knitting needles.

"You're too good for her," she said instead. "My Drewbie's just such a good boy!" She squeezed one arm around his waist.

As she expected, Drew jerked away from her touch - but not her words. She watched them drape over him and smooth his frown into a thoughtful line that almost looked like peace.

"Thanks, Mother," Drew said at last.

The next thing she knew, his head was inside the pantry. A pang burst inside her for him. She hated that his first dating experience had to turn out this way, that any parents could somehow raise a daughter to think that was an acceptable way to treat their date.

But she was every bit as proud as she'd be on his wedding day - because the right girl for him was out there somewhere.

17

"Taylor Patrick Landis!"

She pressed the backs of both wrists to her eyes to keep them from spilling over. They'd flooded as soon as she'd heard the first strands of "Pomp and Circumstance" rising from the pep band and they'd leaked off and on as the valedictorian - a redheaded girl named Julie whom Drew couldn't seem to look away from - gave her speech honoring endings and beginnings, shedding cocoons and spreading wings.

The Taylor in question strolled across the stage and accepted his diploma with a modest duck of his head. The entire second row of bleachers erupted into cheers.

"Elizabeth Marcella Levine!"

Her Drewbie hovered at the very edge of the platform now. He took one timid step forward, glancing up at the sky as if he were afraid aliens would swoop down at any second and abduct him right before his big moment.

"Drew Theodore P. Lipsky!"

A nasty guffaw rose and was snuffed out before she could find the person responsible and teach him his manners. Drew crossed the stage, one hand twirling the lovely gold tassel that swept down from his graduation cap. When he stopped at the principal's side, he turned like a marionette to face the audience, and his gaze paddled over the crowd until it found her, and she clenched inside for him. Most of the other kids' support section wasn't limited to one chair.

She whooped and hollered and clapped enough for ten parents as the diploma rolled from the principal's hand into Drew's. She waited for him to beam and outdo the stadium lights, but instead pure relief wiggled its astonished way across his face. It was a little nugget of himself he'd been hiding for the past few years, even from her. Drew had always been so confident about his future. Now here he was overcome at the prospect of having a future at all.

Other kids walked the length of the stage and accepted their first keys to the future, but she couldn't have named any of them even five minutes later. After she had snapped photos of her baby from every angle, no other part of the ceremony mattered.

Afterward, she plowed through a layer of blinking graduates and crying parents, to where Drewbie sat alone in a plastic chair. One hand was stroking the diploma, the other clamped around its crease, as if it were an old hunting dog that might bolt after another scent if he didn't keep a tight hold on it. He'd found a smug expression somewhere and put it on, though it was as baggy on him as the black gown.

She ran to him and smacked her lips all over him. "Drewbie! You were magnificent!"

"Thanks, Mother." Drew fell against the chair's back and continued to search the sky like a weather forecaster. "At least that's over with."

She felt her forehead pinch. This wasn't the joy she had pictured. "What are you talking about?"

"I'm way too smart for this school. I have been for a long time," Drew said, eyes still glued to the stars. "The other kids, even some of the teachers - none of them took any of it seriously. Not the important stuff, anyway. I can't wait until college."

She could. She could wait forever to drive through a flurry of autumn leaves and have the seat next to her not be filled with someone's happy chatter about the life cycle of chloroplasts.

"But I'm an adult now." Drew accentuated the second syllable as he stood up - and up and up. He wasn't as big as Richard - and now it looked like he never would be - but his weedy five-nine still lurched nearly a foot above her. "And I get to choose what's important for myself. And at college, there's gonna be someone to appreciate me."

She caught the passion that seethed from him like hot tar. For a second, she had the urge to step away from how it would burn if she touched it.

The thought was so ridiculous that she tossed it aside. Einstein's mother had probably heard something similar at his graduation. The frustrated boy genius was nothing new.

Still, she circled his waist and hung on with a little more force than usual. "I appreciate you. I always have."

Something glimmered in Drew's eyes and got rolled away just as quickly. "Yes, but you're my mother. You don't have a choice. It's practically the next law of thermodynamics."

She pressed her face even closer to his chest. In a naive way he was correct. It was a choice no parent should have ever had the right to make for themselves.

And for Drew to say so meant he hadn't spotted the graduation announcement she'd sneaked into the mail with all the others, the one sent to the address displayed on her most recent child-support check - three months ago. Richard may have forgotten when her son would turn eighteen, but a tiny part of her had hoped that he might carve some time out of his six-figure life for this.

It was best that Drewbie never know she'd been wrong. Goodness knew he would have said something if he had picked up on it. Her Drew didn't keep secrets from her.

18

"Are you sure that's everything?" She scanned the dormitory one more time, hoping its fullness was a trick of the mind somehow. It seemed as if it had been only a few minutes ago that she'd cut the car's engine, which had shuddered like it had the mumps, and taken her first blurry look at the Middleton Institute of Science and Technology.

But Drew's belongings were spread from one aqua-paneled wall to the other. The lumpy-looking mattress was piled high with the textbooks he'd bought - he'd decided not to bring either the special blanket or Mr. Cuddlelumps, which had admittedly both seen better days. Records stood haphazardly against the back wall in their sleeves. Even the refrigerator, well-stocked with Drewbie's favorite grape juice pouches, enough cheese and lunch meat to feed a rat pack, and seven different flavors of frozen yogurt, had already absorbed her son into its fold.

"Everything but my suitcase," Drew said. He made another sweetly awkward jump for the door. She was all too happy to follow him back to the car, the backs of her eyes stinging. When Drew made a lunge for the deep-chested blue suitcase twice as wide as he was, it stabbed deeply enough to blind her.

"Do you have everything you need in there?" The desperate lump stood between her question and the calm voice she'd prepared to deliver it.

"Yup." Drew patted his suitcase. "Pants, shorts, socks, shirts - short- and long-sleeved, formal and casual -"

"Underwear?" she prompted him.

Drew's entire body wrenched to the right, and she half-expected steam to shoot from him. "Moth-er! Not so loud!" His own statement was enough to turn heads at the frat house across the street.

At least he wouldn't be living there.

Drew finagled his suitcase out a back door that was almost smaller than it was. It wheeled across the pavement in a clunky turn.

She squeezed her hands at her waist. She knew any second now she was going to crumple like a wad of her toddler Drewbie's favorite Play-Dough. If Richard were here, he would have been tapping his leathered toe, pointedly checking his watch, adjusting his cuff links, silently arguing for a quick, clean cut of the umbilical cord. He would never know what either sensation was like.

"I'd probably better get in there," Drew said. He hopped onto the sidewalk and grumbled as the curb snagged his suitcase.

"So this is goodb -" The word dissolved, and she had to squeeze tighter to keep from going with it.

"Oh, Mother. It's not like I'm moving to Paris or something. I'll be right here in town still." Drew's eyes jumped from side to side, nervous but dry. "I can come home over the weekends. You know, sometimes. Once in a while."

But who's going to protect you?

It was the '80s, after all, and college had changed tremendously from the safe haven she'd attended several decades ago. There were cheating rings in colleges these days. Underage drinking. Drug abuse. Sorority girls interested in hanky-panky and such things. Drew was a good boy - he'd never have knowingly waded into any of that - but he was also naive, a little baby chick who had yet to shed his yellow feathers. And the dean wasn't obligated to sympathize with good kids who messed up.

"I love you," she said. It fell out like a plea.

Drew gave her a softened glance. "I love you, too, Mother," he said in the closest thing to a whisper she had ever heard from the child. "I'll call you tonight, okay?"

He bent and kissed her mole - something he hadn't done since he'd had to reach up to it instead of down. For the shortest of moments, an adult looked out at her from her son's cherub face. The pain was kicked away to make room for pride.

"Oooh, look at my little scholar! All grown up and heading to college!" Yes, she was cooing. She was a mother. They had a right to coo in these situations.

Evidently Drewbie didn't agree, because he wrenched at his suitcase until it popped up on the sidewalk beside him and then turned and marched, tense-shouldered, into the building. The suitcase's wheels clacked on the uneven sidewalk squares like typewriter keys. She'd never realized before what a lonely sound it was.

She went back to the car, drummed her thumbs on the steering wheel, and stared at nothing until she could see to drive.

19

"I'm sorry." Papers rustled on the other end of the phone. "There's no one by that name on our attendance sheet."

She bull-penned her first response - You're lying - and laced her voice with compassion. "Really? Why don't you check again? I'm sure you'll find it if you just look a teeny bit closer."

This was ridiculous, as far as she was concerned. All she'd tried to do was call and speak to her son. Flu season was closing in and she wanted to make sure he'd remembered to get the shot this year - he usually needed the extra reminder, what with his fear of needles and all. She wanted to make sure he wasn't forgetting to eat the way he so often did when he was in the middle of an experiment. The last thing the boy needed was to lose any weight.

Instead, she'd been told by some secretary girl who didn't sound any older than Drew himself that the Institute had somehow lost track of him.

"Ma'am, I've been over this list six times," the girl said. "If there is a Drew Lipsky at MIST, he hasn't attended any of his classes this semester. Sorry."

It was impossible. She'd been there the day he re-enrolled for his sophomore year. She'd seen the glow in his eyes as he'd received his class schedule, watched him jab his finger at the "Advanced Chemistry" entry until he nearly punched through the paper.

This was ridiculous. Or something worse.

"No, I know he goes there. Check the dorm records. He's in the Copernicus dorm. Right next to the cafeteria. Around the corner from the music hall," she said.

She heard the office chair shove backward and the secretary match it groan for groan. A file cabinet flew open, and papers were slapped around on the desk as if they'd been caught sneaking off campus.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Lipsky," the girl said yet again. "Copernicus's record doesn't list a Drew Lipsky."

"How does this happen?" she said. "How can a student just disappear like this?"

Everything from binge-drinking to abduction cartwheeled through her mind in scenarios too hideous to let in.

"Look, I've only been working in the office the last two weeks," the girl said. "It could be that his information just didn't get copied down at the beginning of the year for some reason. I'll do some more poking around, and then I'll call you as soon as something turns up. Okay?" The girl's voice jittered, for all the world like she was squaring off with a mother bear.

She was.

Her stomach punched. "Thank you, dear." She heard herself gentling in the face of another frightened child. "That would be lovely."

The girl jotted her phone number and then hung up, no doubt to go collapse in a corner and try to cross-stitch her composure back together.

She was pretty close to collapsing herself. As soon she managed to claw her way into bed that night, the night gushed around her as if she were at the bottom of a well. She would have given a month's salary to have Richard lying beside her, draping an arm with its muscles like bricks over her shoulder, murmuring beside her in the dark, accusing her of being paranoid and overprotective. Her only companions were the red numbers on her bedside clock, ticking away toward dawn in ten-minute increments.

When the phone rang at seven the next morning, she could barely see her way down the hall to pick it up. "Did you find him?" she barked into the receiver.

"Wha?" said the person on the other end, losing the T. The way he had ever since he first learned to talk.

She forgot about the bucket of sand under each eyelid. She forgot every crick in her spine and the poor baffled girl who'd had no answers for her.

All she heard was her child's voice.

"Drewbie! Ohhh, you're alive! You're okay! I was sooooo worried!" She plastered her face to the mouthpiece, as near as she could come to holding him. "Do not ever scare me like that again!"

"Yeah, I'm okay. I meant to call you earlier, but I - I forgot. You know how we absent-minded genius types are." Teenaged cracks crinkled every word.

"I called the Institute yesterday, and they said they had no record of you this semester?"

"Oh." Drew coughed. "That's probably because I - uh - I dropped out."

Something hot and thick worked away at her chest, shoveling a hole. It took her a minute to realize it was disappointment. It had been ages since her son had given her reason to feel that.

"You did what?" she said.

"Well, no, 'dropped out' isn't the best word. In fact, it's two words, so it's automatically disqualified. What I meant to say was. . . transferred. I transferred. To a different college."

"Where?"

The silence on the line was deep enough to swim in. She couldn't picture where Drew was standing as he talked to her, and the ambuigity slashed at her like a straight razor.

"Um, we're up near - Denver. Nowhere nearby. I, uh, gave up on being a chemist. That's in the past now." She imagined her son going white, the Rockies in the background. "The only reason I didn't tell you was because - because I didn't think you'd be as proud of me if you heard what I'd switched to."

Her breath rushed back to refill the hole in her chest. "Oh, Drewbie. You know I'd be proud of you no matter what you became."

She heard Drew hiss softly. Exactly the way he used to do when he took a tumble off his bicycle and insisted, even as red ran down his elbows, that he wasn't hurt at all.

"I'm - I'm going to be a doctor."

"A doctor?" She frowned. Her son, who got queasy at the sight of blood? "You don't have any background in medicine, sweetie."

"Not that type of doctor. A radio talk show doctor. You know, the type that people call to get advice about their problems? I'm going to be one of those."

"But why?" she said.

Another steely pause. When Drew finally spoke again, he sounded as if he'd aged forty years.

"Because the world is a cold and cruel place, Mother. I'll make it better if only they'll let me."

Of course. That was her Drewbie all right. Always looking out for the greater good.

20

"Hello, Dr. Drakken speaking."

She pulled back from the receiver and frowned at it. That was definitely her son's deep, bouncy voice - but since when did he refer to himself as "Dr. Drakken" and stamp the name down as if he were sealing a letter with it?

"Drewbie?" she ventured.

"Mother!" The voice was no longer deep or bouncy. It sprinted every which way in what she'd almost swear was panic. "Yes, yes, it's me! I've been trying out - um - a stage name. Do you like it?"

"It's a little" - she examined a cuticle, hunting for the right word - "a little stern."

"Authoritative! That's what I'm going for!" She heard Drew's head bob against the phone. "So why are you calling?"

"Same reason I always call on Friday nights. Just checking in on you."

"It's Friday already?" Drew's newly acquired rumbling chuckle was sheepish. "See, all the days blur together when you're working on. . . your homework."

Her throat knotted. It was tempting to get in the car and drive straight through to Denver, force-feed him some of the potato salad he loved, and glue his head to his pillow if she had to. Would it kill those professors to look out for her son, even if that wasn't what they were getting paid for?

"You haven't written all week," she began.

"That's because. . . I've been practicing taking calls. From people who need help. With their. . . lives. Why, I had a kid call in yesterday because he and his best friend - they both like the same girl. You know, in the romantic sense. And he wanted to know whether he should give up the girl or the best friend." She could imagine Drew's hands circling through the air, pinching at the ends of his thoughts for emphasis before they stretched wide to begin the next one.

"What did you tell him?" She thumbed through the week's mail, a pile-up of bills and ads that invited her in for a massage at a spa she could never begin to afford.

"I said - uh. Um. Well, that was what I said at first, and then I - err - pulled myself together." Drew chuckled again. "I - um - I told him that the only reason to give up a friend for a girl was if the incident proved your friend wasn't as good a friend as you thought. Crushes come and go. It's more important to have friends."

She dropped the spa ad on the floor. It didn't matter. Nothing could massage her more than the wisdom she'd just heard her son demonstrate.

"Drewbie, that's brilliant! Oh, you'll make a perfect radio talk show host!" She smiled. "As soon as you get over that little stuttering problem of yours."

"Yes." Drew's voice stiffened. "Yes, I'll take care of that. Listen, I've got to run. I've got an appointment - err, class - with HenchCo - Henchcock. Hitchcock. Man, that guy's name is hard to say!"

"Oh. And what does he teach?"

"Something else hard to pronounce. Philopyschology neustatis or something like that. Anyway, very nice chatting with you, Mother! Talk to you later! Love you."

The line went dead in her ear. She didn't move.

"I love you, too," she said.

21

"Hello, Mother."

Drew bent and gave her a one-armed hug that he quickly pulled back into himself as he plastered his body against the wall, inching across the wood. It denied her the chance to squeeze his cheeks, to feel the plump supple flesh and know that not everything had changed.

That she had wait and grab across the length of the kitchen table for - thankfully it wasn't a long reach. Drew batted her hand away and growled under his breath - a gristle-filled rumble that would have sounded frightening from anyone other than her son - and then sat like a hunchback in his chair, studying his lap.

"How have you been?" she asked. "Still at the top of your class?" As if there were any doubt.

"Fine. And yes." She waited for him to grin and illuminate the dim room. Instead, Drew's neck shrunk back farther, almost disappearing down his shirtfront.

She recognized guilt on her baby when she saw it. She prided herself on it. It was so infrequent, since he was such a good boy, that it practically inflamed his skin like a case of measles when it did show up.

"I know that face." She cut a glance at him. "What did you do, Drewbie?"

Drew didn't say a word as his head came up, but he might as well have screamed OH NO, SHE NOTICED for the fear that stampeded across his face. He picked up his fork and picked at nothing with it.

"Don't play with your silverware."

"I'm just reaching for the potato salad," Drew squeaked.

"Dinner isn't even on the table yet." She sank into her own seat and folded her hands before her on the tabletop. "You're feeling guilty about something - out with it!"

Drew's eyes closed and his hands plucked, as if he needed them to usher the words into the right formation. "Okay. You're right. I am feeling a little guilty about something." The plucking got faster. "You know how I turned twenty-one last week?"

Dread roped her tongue, but she nodded him on.

"Well, to celebrate, I, um, bought an alcohol. And I drank it."

She sat back and waited for more. When there was none, she fired across the table and snatched him up by two handfuls of his collar. "Drew Theodore P. Lipsky, did you get drunk?"

"No, ma'am," Drew said. A nervous squiggle formed on his forehead as if he stood before the dean.

"Did you lose consciousness? Throw up?"

"No! And no!"

"Did you drive after drinking?" Her own temples had relaxed somewhat by that question. It was the most obvious of the whole batch.

Sure enough, Drew yelped, "No! I would never - you raised me better than that, right?"

"All right, then." She withdrew and re-straightened his collar. "In that case, you do not have to apologize to me for legally buying and drinking alcohol."

Drew fell back against his chair, knocking a huff of relief out of him. The way his body seemed to slacken was ridiculous, even for him.

You'd have thought the boy had tried to stage a power coup at the UN or something.

Her son and his overactive conscience. He did her proud.

22

"Are you sure you're okay, Drewbie?"

"That's the fifth time you've asked, Mother," Drew said. "And, yes, I'm fine."

He didn't have a whole lot of proof to present. He was sitting on the emaciated old couch, his knees drawn up in points to his chest, his gaze cartwheeling around the room and right out the windows. She blamed that coffee she'd caught him drinking the last few months. Turned an already active boy into a twitchy tumbleweed of nerves.

"You don't look fine," she said. She waved at his navy shirt with the tangerine stripes and the faded denim trousers he wore with them. "You could be mistaken for the Grim Reaper if your clothes weren't so loud."

Drew flipped his eyes back to hers just long enough to blink them at her. "Okay, so I am a little lonely. Ever since I dr - ever since I graduated college - which I completely and genuinely did - and started trying to break into the radio talk show business."

She could almost feel the stiffness slipping out of her pantyhose as she wedged in beside him. "That's to be expected, I suppose."

"Yes. I suppose." Drew searched the ceiling for a moment. "At least once I get a job, I'll be talking to people all day long. Not a lot of room for loneliness there!"

"Ohh, and you'll be such a comfort to them!" she said.

Just like you've always been to me. Even now, Drew had positioned himself understandingly upright, and his eyes held all the warmth of her father's old potbellied stove.

"That's right," Drew said. He wiggled in place. "I'm going to make the world easier for them."

She reached up and brushed a thumb across his nose. "Just remember: even the comforters of the world need comfort themselves."

"Yes," Drew said and, to her surprise, he snagged her hand in a clammy grip and held it between both of his. After a solid two minutes had gone by, his touch hardened and he pulled away from her, back into his profession.

23

"Why, good morning, Mother!" her son chirped on the other end of the phone. "And how has your day been so far?"

"Ohhhh, Drewbie! My morning has been good. And it's complete now that you finally remembered to call!"

"Delighted to hear that!" Drew said. "Sorry I wasn't there to serve you breakfast in bed when you woke up, but I was - um, working the late shift. At the radio station."

The yawn that bridged his sentences left a bruise on her mother's heart. She frowned. "I didn't expect breakfast in bed today," she said. "Or is it just that you love me so much?"

"Yes, yes, yes, yes! I do love you! I love you a lot! Absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt! I don't need any other reason to do it, you hear me?"

Everything Drew said started to heave like a heifer going into labor. She nudged the receiver closer to her and reached for the voice she'd once used to smooth his nightmares. "What is the other reason?"

"Because today is Mother's Day?" Drew said. Guessed.

She looked at the calendar. The bold red of the date matched the silent scream building inside her. "No, it's not."

He'd forgotten Mother's Day entirely this year. It didn't seem worth bringing up now.

"Really? It isn't? I was so sure - I had it all - planned - "

She stopped for a moment, teeth ground against the pain. Drew's pain. It was about to come barreling down through the phone line and make a straight dive for her.

Which she would have been more than glad to accept if it took some of it off him.

"That's because today is Father's Day, Drewbie," she said.

A black void gaped in place of her son's reaction. Her fingertips were about to lose the battle with the receiver when he finally said, "Oh. Right. Are - are you doing okay with that? Do you need anything?"

She could hear the skin gathering tight under his eyes, and it tore something open inside of her. He still cared about her in light of what today meant to him.

"No, honey!" Her laugh sounded too light and too obvious, even to her. "Your grandpa's still alive and well. I was just about to drive down to the farm and spend some daddy-daughter time with him. You're welcome to come along if you'd like." She went ahead and decided to overemphasize those last few words.

"Oh. No. Sorry. It sounds like fun, but I've got - I've got a big project. At the radio station. That I just remembered. So I've got to say toodle-oo for today. Say hello to Grandma and Grandpa for me!"

She agreed, of course, and reassured her hardworking son of her love for him. By the time she tucked the receiver back into place atop the phone, she felt like a woman sawed in half by a magician whose fuzzy-chinned apprentice now couldn't puzzle out how to reassemble her.

The pieces didn't come back together until the beater turned into the spray of gravel that served as her parents' driveway. Until she heard her father say, "Heya, Sweet Pea," as if her hair wasn't growing stiff knots of gray. Until she fell into his leathery arms - the one pair she could always count on.

24

"So? Do you like?" Drew asked. His voice had a hopeful perk to it.

She stared into her shimmering reflection in her son's new contacts. She'd always thought the smudged spectacles magnified his eyes, but they seemed rounder and sweeter than ever with less standing between them and the outside world. More vulnerable, too. She reached up to pat him. His upper half had started to fill out, but it only dragged more attention to the childish shrivel of his waist and legs, and the chest her hand rested on was more broad bone than muscle.

He was still the third-grader who would do his homework right through the dinner hour and into the middle of the night, only now there was no one to fix a plate and bring it down to him, to point to the clock and order him to bed. Thinking about made her own bones seem weaker.

"Do you like it?" Drew repeated. He swiveled in place, jacket tabs swinging out behind him.

"I do," she said slowly. "You just look so - so - so much -"

She didn't say "older." He was still young enough to take that as a compliment. Something had changed in the few weeks since she'd seen Drew last, something that had put a decade behind his eyes and blanched him down to the knuckles that rode the air beside his insubstantial hips.

Finally, she went with, "Why did you get rid of your glasses?"

"Because I'm going for a new look." Drew's big, beautiful lashes batted in something far beyond the expression that begged for a cookie before dinner. They hadn't adjusted to the contacts yet. "For my new career as a superrrrr- super-radio-announcer! No more of that nerdy look, you know?"

A vision of high waists and neckties scampered across her mind, and unexpected anger shoved down on her from all sides. "Nerdy? Who ever called you that, Drewbie? I'll whip the -"

"Nobody!" Drew's hands whipped up to flank his face. "Nobody. Ever. I just - just came to the conclusion on my own. I read some - um, fashion magazines."

She took another step and squinted at the hair that flipped away from his neck. He was long overdue for a haircut.

"Well, anyway, I've got to run!" Drew consulted his watch and shook back the bangs he'd stopped gelling into submission. "Got to report to my p - personal trainer!"

Ah, so that was it. He'd started working out, probably pushing his body at a rate it couldn't sustain. She pressed her fingers to her mouth as he even now jogged down the street, puffing and panting.

"Don't overdo it!" she yelled to his retreating figure.

He groaned like he was going to be sick, and she ignored it. What was she supposed to do when someone threw down a set of barbells, ran off with her son's innocence, and brought him only some hollow brawn in return?

25

She shook the thermometer and watched the mercury settle. "One hundred and three."

It was a shock to her system - but not a surprise. Drew Lipsky did nothing halfway, including get a fever.

"Uhhhhhhhhhhh," came from the couch.

"Did you hear me, Drewbie?" She squatted down to talk directly into the feverish haze that surrounded her son. "I said one hundred and three degrees. You need to go to the hospital."

"NoIdon't," Drew slurred from his tilted sprawl on the couch. He got himself up on one elbow and promptly belly-flopped again; a throw pillow lodged under his armpit rolled tipsily down his long, lean side. "I juss need some more - s'more chlorophyll."

"Chlorophyll?" She heard her pitch sharpen.

"I juss said that."

"Drewbie, chlorophyll is for plants! You'll never need it." She draped a hand across Drew's forehead, and it simmered beneath her palm like road tar in mid-July. Her next breath hissed. "Can you walk to the car?"

"I can walk anyw'ere." Drew lurched himself off the couch. His feet shuffled for an aimless second before they formed a split, ankles scissored straight up and down.

She caught his pajama sleeve before he could crash to the ground and steered him by the arm down to the garage. He fell into the passenger seat, meek as a sleeping newborn, lolled back against the headrest. She suspected, hoped, that he'd dropped into sleep until he mumbled, "Ya know what would be reallllllllllly cool?"

"What's that, dear?" She readjusted the wet washcloth currently dribbling between his eyes.

"Chemical warfare. If you won, I mean. You'd be in charge of th' whole wor-rld." Drew's laugh was dark and delirious. "And then you'd live in a palace made of butterscotch."

"Yes, Drewbie, a butterscotch palace would be lovely," was all she could say.

She knew better than to pay much attention to what came out of him once the fever spiked past a hundred.

26

"Hi, Mother, it's me. Drew. I'm - I'm just returning your call."

"Three days late," she snapped. She rubbed her tired eyelids and took another peek at the clock. "Almost four. Do you know what time it is?"

"I know. I was busy with - with work." Drew's words took hold of hers and seemed to ease them toward a garbage can. She knew that tone of voice exactly the way she could still smell the winter-green aftershave.

She thought about using that. She'd thought about it a lot as the hours had ticked by without a call, a letter, a visit. It was the one guilt trip she'd never employed before, and maternal instinct told her it would be an atomic bomb dropped on their relationship. Victory - but at a price she wasn't sure she was willing to pay.

"But better late than never, right?" Drew begged her now. She could imagine his head tilted to one side, unsure whether he was about to be rewarded or have his ears boxed.

"Yes, that's true, I suppose," she said, picking her way among the pieces of rubble she was tempted to throw his direction. "I would have called you back, but I can only afford so many long-distance calls."

There. That was the perfect reminder.

Drew let out a pitiful whine that destroyed any satisfaction she could have registered. "Mother. . . are you okay? Do you need money?"

Her heart jumped. Richard would never have asked that.

"No, dear, I'm all right," she said. "I've got enough to get by."

"Phew! I mean, oh, that's good, Mother. Because I can absolutely support you if you need me to." She heard Drew gulp. "As soon as I - uh, land a steady - err - gig on some radio station. I'm looking into one in New Zealand!"

"They'd have to be crazy not to want your show, Drewbie. You're touching so many people's lives. . . it isn't really about the money, after all, now, is it?"

Now that she didn't have a bottomless stomach to feed anymore, she could say that with a lot more sincerity. Serving as the junior high's on-call secretary kept the lights on and the water heated. Her son would fill in the gaps where he could.

He might have chased his dreams every bit as aggressively as his daddy did, but he didn't leave his soul behind to do it.

27

The edifice she stepped into seemed to be soaking, by choice, in its own depression. Shadowy walls painted red as scabs loomed in a seemingly endless path in front of her before finally meeting at a vaulted ceiling that magnified every click of her heels across the floor - the floor that had, by her estimation, never seen a rug. In its absence, controlled-looking cracks ran across the dingy surface, steel showing through their narrow edges. Rectangular blocks, garnished with three circles she could have fit through in her slimmer days, sat perpendicular to the walls as though they needed to be supported.

Drew came up behind her, and it was as if someone had flicked on the lights. Her good boy always brightened up whatever room he entered.

"So? What do you think?" Drew said. The expectant tilt of his head didn't belong in this cold, empty place, and a wave of protectiveness broke over her.

"It's a bit. . . grim, Drewbie," she said at last.

Drew darted his glance back and forth, a look she'd learned to interpret as What are you talking about? When his eyes finally came back to her, they were coated with something almost bitter. "Maybe it reminded me of home."

The words were like a bite from a faithful old horse, and she gasped out loud. Their house may have been dark and musty, but it was also tall and tight and slanted, charming in its own way. This place had no charm to speak of, certainly none of the cozy pieces she'd decked their house with - the rosy curtains she'd hung in the kitchen to shield it from the constant draft where the window gaped away from the sill, the inexpensive vases filled with whatever wildflowers she could find in the neighborhood, the pastel throws she'd hand-knit for each room to match its decor.

"Well, this place certainly isn't homey," she said.

"It isn't necessarily supposed to be," Drew said. "It's a l - living-area-slash-work-studio. It could do with some jazzing up, though. Just wait until I redecorate it."

"You're not going to leave it like this?" She tried not to let her relief audibly bounce off the floor.

"Of course not, Mother. I'm going to add -" he wiggled the eyebrow that had been singular for about ten years now - "my own special touch."

She clasped her hands. "Ohhh, perfect! I can get you wallpaper samples! We can look at paint colors, and I'll start on an afghan to match whatever you decide! I think a little yellow in the kitchen would look lovely. . ."

The more details she added, the deeper Drew's frown dug. She ignored it this time. It was bad enough that her only baby had moved to some godforsaken island so far from home. She wasn't about to let him willingly toss out her warmth, too.

28

"Happy Birthday, Mother."

She had to clamp her teeth together to keep from screaming. "Drew Theodore, what in the world is this about?"

"What do you mean?" Her son's voice sharpened to a squawk. "I'm just calling to wish you a happy birthday. . . " His pause yawned open, something close to dread. "It is your birthday, right?"

"Two and a half weeks ago," she said.

The other end of the phone seemed to faint dead away.

"Oh no, oh no. Oh man, oh no, oh man no! I must have marked the wrong day on my calender!" Pages flipped in the background in time with Drew's frenzied gulps for air. "Oh, Mother, I'm so sorry. . . I got far too wrapped up in working on my destruct - my - my Destructive Behavior Kit. For a client. I'm still trying to figure out where her issues stem from."

"Probably from not calling her mother enough," she said, only partly joking.

"Look, Mother, I'm sorry! I'll make it up to you, I promise!" Drew was long past squawking.

"I know you will. It's just that. . ." She only meant to lower to a whisper, but when she found the sniffle waiting there, she went ahead and used it, too. "You're about the only one I have left in the world. I can get absolutely beside myself with loneliness waiting for you to call."

"Yes. I get it. I'm sor-ry." She'd expected Drew to be a finger-snap away from crying. Instead, she heard a sharp edge of annoyance, so familiar it made her heart stammer.

Before she could even get her mind around it, it disappeared, chased away by Drew's usual lilt. "Did you - did you have a good birthday, at least?" he said.

Just like that, he was her son again, and the pain relented. She fought to keep from going limp against the wall. "Quiet. But good. Your aunt and uncle dropped by with a casserole, bless their hearts."

Two days later, she received a bouquet of baby's-breath in the mail, along with a "Sorry I Missed Your Birthday" card with a blushing cartoon snail on the front. On the inside, Drew had scrawled an elaborate apology and signed his name in the untidy cursive she remembered from when he was a fourth-grader.

It was better than anything she'd ever received from Richard.

29

The man who opened the door to her son's living quarters was easily two heads taller than Drew with skin the shade of homemade rye bread. His mouth - the only facial feature she could see beneath a hooded jumpsuit and sunglasses that could have been clipped off a gas mask - fell into an oval when he saw her looking back at him.

"Yes, hello?" she said, trying to peer around the form that filled the doorway. "I'm looking for my son. Drew Lipsky?"

The mouth drooped further.

"Oh! You might know him as Dr. Drakken," she said.

At her son's stage name, the man gave an eager nod and stepped aside to let her pass, extending a hand as big as a cow's hoof. "Hey. My name's Fred."

"Very nice to meet you, Fred." She carefully stuck her hand between two of his beefy fingers. "Do you work with my son?"

"Yeah. He's cool." Fred jerked around to holler, "Hey, Boss! She's here!"

She could hardly hold back a squeal as Drew bounded toward her across a floor littered with boxes in various stages of unpacking. He tripped over one and went into a somersault that landed him at her feet. "Oh. Hello, Mother," he said when he looked up, and then he cleared his throat.

It was all he needed to do before a whole crew of men zipped toward him. The man who helped Drew upright again wore the sunglasses and the same jumpsuit as Fred in three sizes smaller - that still would have swallowed her Drewbie alive. "Boss," he said, even as Drew sprang out of his grasp and dusted off his shirt, "we finished carrying in all your -"

"Cassette tapes!" Drew cut him off. "You finally got all my cassette tapes organized, and I'm so grateful!" He curled his fingers around the man's wrist, and in four steps he'd flounced both of them into a corner. "Remember what we talked about?" he said in a harsh hiss. "I'm a radio talk show doctor."

The man nodded as if it were painful.

Drew turned back to her and shrugged. "My he - helpers can be just the teeniest bit dingy. They haven't been employed long, and sometimes I have to remind them what they're actually doing here! They've just bounced from one job to another for most of their adult lives - you know the type."

He waved his hand in a fan in front of him, as if he had to get rid of some disagreeable odor. It wasn't a look she liked on him. She reached out and pulled him against her so that her face nearly grazed his belt buckle.

"What. . . what's this about?" Drew said.

"Ohhh, Drewbie, you have friends! I'm so glad! I got so worried about you being cooped in here all by yourself day in and day out!" She tightened her grip and felt the sternness layer over her. "You have friends, Drewbie. Hang on to them!"

"So, with them here, you're not as worried about me?" Drew asked.

"Not half as worried."

"Well, then - " A blurt of laughter sent Drew's stomach forward and then back - "in that case, they're definitely keepers."

And then he stood there and let her squeeze him for another solid minute before he ducked beneath her arms and stepped away, claiming a need to check on the organization of his cassette tapes.

30

She flung open the door as soon as the bell chimed. Drew didn't have one foot inside before he said, "You look different."

"Oh, that's a fine way to greet your mother when you haven't seen her in months!" She gave him a playful scowl and swept him in. "Get in before the whole neighborhood hears you."

"No, really. You look different." Drew bent down to her level. "Urrrgh, I just don't know how! You're not any taller - or any shorter - and you're not super-skinny, and you're not super-fat - um, forget I even said that - and ummm - are those new shoes, perchance?"

She gazed down at her green flats and shook her head. "I've had these for about two years, Drewbie."

"Yes, and they're lovely on you!" Drew chirped. His face folded into its round wad of dough. "Mgggh. Come on - why can't you just tell me?!"

"Nope." She padded into the kitchen, gave the cornbread batter another quick stir, and turned to shoot a glance of encouragement back at her son. "It'll be good practice for when you're married."

Drew grumbled his way to the table and sank into the chair that had always been his. They were midway through dinner before he exclaimed "A-ha!" and jerked his spoon to the side. Baked beans dribbled across the tablecloth. "I finally figured it out!"

"What is it, then?" She pointedly handed him a napkin.

He took it and made a couple of blind dabs at the tablecloth with it. "Your hair! It's not gray anymore." Drew's napkin finally found the spill and cleaned it up with a rough swipe. His eyes seemed to nestle more snugly into the ever-growing bags beneath them as they drifted to a distant dream. "I didn't know that process was reversible."

"Not naturally." She patted the puffs of hair that had been swept up off her nape. "I had it dyed. It was just starting to look so lifeless."

"Ohhhh." Drew reached forward and snagged a red strand between his fingertips. "So. . . it's a chemical reaction, then?"

It was also the first time he'd voluntarily touched her in almost a year.

"How does it work?" he said.

She sat back in her seat and began to explain - as best she could - and watched Drew track it with his nods and the way his body leaned ever closer across the table. If this was what it took to get him interested - so be it.

31

Hers wasn't the only birthday he forgot to mark on his calendar.

Drew also forgot his own.

Her call at noon had found him sounding groggy, as if he'd just woken up - or had never gone to bed at all. When she mentioned his birthday, his response - "Oh, really?" - was borderline stupefied.

That boy and his darn workaholic genes.

The only remedy she could imagine was a celebration of him. She insisted he accompany her to the Middleton mall for an ice-cream cone.

Drew didn't protest.

As they sat in their booth beside the fountain, she watched the children shriek as they wove in and out among the potted plants. Parents trudged behind, muttering warnings to their offspring and apologies to the strangers they'd almost toppled. She turned to look at her own child and found him scrunched into a tight-shoulder knot in the corner, exactly the way he used to when she picked him up at the end of a school day.

A pang bounced off her chest. "Are you embarrassed, Drewbie?" she said, a little more crisply than she had planned.

"Who, me? No. I'm just - there are some people I'd rather not run into. Nothing serious. It's fine!" He examined the chocolate chips in his top scoop of mint like he was the first person in the world to discover their existence. "I'm not embarrassed. I'm not a child anymore, Mother."

"No, you most certainly are not," she agreed. "Thirty-one - that's a pretty big number." She licked her own strawberry cone and bent her head toward him. "So - when am I getting grandbabies, huh?"

Drew let out a groan that almost blew their napkins off the table. "Moth-er. . ."

"It's a reasonable question. My father always told me that grandkids were God's reward for letting our children go." She put her hand over his for a beautiful moment before he snatched it away. "If I can't hold you in my arms anymore, I at least want to hold your babies."

Drew took an enormous bite of ice cream and actually went to the trouble of chewing it. "I just haven't met the right woman yet."

He said it with the finality of a movie announcer. She hated it.

"Most of the women I meet are clients, and that's completely against the law," Drew continued. He tilted his head closer to hers, and she saw Baby Drew again in his blink. "And most of the other women don't tend to like me. Not in that way."

He flashed her Richard's smile - the one that negated everything he'd just said.

"You know Mrs. Demper from church?" she said. "Her daughter's just out of grad school and she's single. I don't suppose you'd like to meet her?"

She could almost hear Drew's pink cheeks sizzling. "No, that's really okay. . ."

"Work with me here," she told him. She twisted around in the booth to get one last glimpse of the children tossing pennies into the fountain and then trying to fish them back out again when their parents weren't looking. It would be worth all the dirty diapers and midnight feedings in the world to see a grandbaby through to that age.

Or to take her son back to it.

32

"Good evening, Mother."

She hesitated for a moment before saying, "Drew?" The baritone that had answered was definitely her son's, but something new dampened all the vowel sounds and drove the end of every word down into some exotic place.

"Yes, it is I," the slicked-up accent said.

"Drewbie? What in the world? You have an accent now?"

Drew let out a refreshingly normal chuckle. "Sorry. I - I just got back from London, and I guess that was the only souvenir I could afford to bring back!"

While he went into hysterics at his own joke, she frowned into the receiver. "What were you doing in London?"

"Definitely not trying to steal the crown jewels!" Drew exploded. "I was - on a tour. A radio talk show tour. Getting publicity. And - uh - notoriety."

"And an accent," she teased.

"It's not really a British accent," Drew said. The heavy inflection was still there, but his voice had warmed and relaxed. "It's just my supervi - supervisor-of-an-internationally-famous-radio-talk-show accent. Do you like it?"

Even though the last sentence came through loud and clear, it was still hushed for her Drewbie. Nearly shy.

"I think you sound - very professional," she choked out.

All shyness disappeared as Drew chuckled again. "Ah, yes. Isn't it grand? Drew Lipsky, reborn as Dr. Drakken!"

This time she said nothing. He was right, and that disturbed her far more than the accent. There was no trace of the nervous little boy who clung to her skirts and had to be coaxed into giving a book report before the class. This was someone mature, someone strong and self-sufficient enough to be almost frightening - at least to her mother's sensibility.

33

The piercing ring of the phone in the quiet minutes just before bedtime seemed to startle everything in the room except her. She knew as she reached for it that it had to be Drewbie. Her boy kept odder hours than anyone she had ever known, including his daddy.

She lifted the candlestick mouthpiece. "Hello?"

"M-M-Mother?"

It was her son's voice, all right. Breathless with sobs.

His pain exploded in her veins. Scenarios wreaked havoc on her mind, one at a time - a doctor's diagnosis. A romantic rejection. A threat to his career.

She sat up straight, wicker pressing into her spine. "Drewbie?" she nearly shrieked. "What's wrong?"

"Oh, I'm fine, Mother." The frenzied hiccups told a different story. "I'm okay. I'm just - just sad."

That was putting it mildly. The last time she'd heard him weep this hard was within six months of Richard's leaving.

"What are you sad about?" she said.

"Well - oh, I'm being silly. But I turned on the TV this evening and I saw that Bambi was on. And I thought, Now that I'm a big, tough vi - errr, now that I'm big and tough, I can probably handle it. It turned out I c-can't." Drew's words collapsed like a tower of playing cards.

She just sat there for a moment, wrapped in a bundle of little-boy angst he almost never presented to her, knowing she was the only one who could mollify it. It was a duty she had never forgotten, an opportunity she would never think of missing.

"Easy, baby," she coaxed him. "Breathe." She could hear him try, panting as if he were doing laps around the hollowed cavern he called a living room. "There, there. It's just a movie."

"I know that!" Drew's annoyance sang into her ear. "But. . . but. . . when the Great Prince says, 'Your mother can't be with you anymore. You need to walk alone,' it got me thinking - that day's going to come for me, too."

Her throat locked around everything she wanted to say to him.

"And just because I'm all grown up now, and I'm brilliant, and I can take perfectly good care of myself and all of that, I still - still I don't want to walk alone!" Drew said.

She pushed over the clutch in her throat enough to say, "Of course you don't. None of us are meant to walk alone. That's why you have friends. You do have friends now. Hold on to them."

The sniffling at the other end grew thoughtful. "My hen - helpers? Oh. Yes. They're - they're good, I suppose. But they're not you, Mother."

For an instant, she was sure she had already been transported to heaven.

"Oh, but that day is going to be a long way off, sweetums. Your mama's still young," she said, for her own sake as well as his. No woman needed a reminder of her own mortality when she was fighting off menopause.

"Okay." Drew paused. "I just. . . yes, I am definitely being silly. That's all there is to it." She imagined him pulling his body taut, folding his arms behind his back. "I love you, Mother," he added, his volume at an all-time low.

She swallowed. "I love you, too, Drewbie."

It was the most useful she'd felt in a good long while.

34

So far it hadn't been a bad birthday. There had been no huge celebration down at work, but her colleagues each took the time to squeeze her and wish her well, and Principal Bowers gave her a wink and a whisper of, "One year closer to retirement, eh? Where will I get another secretary as good as you?"

When the doorbell chimed around sundown, she was pretty sure it would be Eddy's parents with their annual casserole. She turned the knob and fixed a smile in place - a smile that immediately sprang to genuine life when she saw who stood on her stoop.

Drewbie. Beaming.

"Happy Birthday, Mother!" he bellowed. "I didn't forget this year! I marked it on the calendar, double- and triple-checked it, the whole twelve yards!"

He wasn't holding flowers or chocolate or a gift bag. Instead, a set of keys dangled between his doll-like fingers.

"Would you like to go for a ride in my flying car?" Drew asked.

"I'd go for a ride on the world's tallest rollercoaster if it meant being with you," she told him.

Drew took off down the driveway toward the disc-shaped hovercraft that looked barely big enough for two people, even one as small as her and one as skinny as Drewbie. He ran his hand over the hood, caressing it with the type of pride boys like Eddy handled their first cars with. "It's perfectly safe," he said as if reading her mind. "I've carried my helpers in it before - it can certainly bear the two of us."

She approached the craft at a wary pace and found herself too short to even get a grip on the passenger seat. Drewbie, darling gentleman that he was, dove across the driver's seat, clamped onto her wrists, and gave her a gentle hike so that she dropped in like a coin into a bubble-gum machine.

"This is my birthday present to you," Drew said, wringing the ignition to life. "It's all I can afford. I - err - we faced some unexpected financial losses recently. My show did. I've had a hard enough time paying off my water and electric bills. But we - we have hard evidence that things will get better in the next fiscal year."

She brushed his sleeve. "Well, no one else has ever given me a ride in a flying car. You're such a good boy, Drewbie!"

Drew's cheeks plumped into a pout, and she couldn't resist giving one of them a pinch. He thrashed away and punched a button on the dashboard so hard she almost thought he would drive it out the other side. The flying car lifted off the ground, and within seconds she had forgotten all dreams of chocolate and flowers.

Her son had taken her to a whole new world.

She'd ridden in airplanes before, of course. But never an airplane with the sides and top down so that she could feel the wind ruffle her hair like flirting fingers or glimpse the luscious undersides of pink-tinted clouds or have the scent of dry leaves and bonfires blown directly into her face. She threw her hands up and screeched for joy, and Drew looked as if she had just awarded him a Nobel prize.

A honking V of Canadian geese passed them, close enough for her to count every individual feather on the leader's left wing. Ahead of them, the autumn sunset melted orange and bled purple, serene in a way the world below it had never been. She leaned her head against her Drewbie's shoulder as the warmth came nearer and nearer. Even the glare off the hovercraft's metal side was somehow pleasant.

They rode until the sun disappeared and the stars took over the sky.

Drew skidded the hovercraft to a landing on her driveway under a quilt of night. "Well, I'd best be getting home," he said, sounding almost as reluctant to end this as she was. "Those clients aren't going to cure themselves, after all." He helped her down with a gracious bow and then stood there, gaze on the ground. "Was that a - was that an okay birthday present?" One sneakered toe bent under, digging at the drive.

She turned to him in surprise. "That was a wonderful present! I'll remember this for the rest of my life!"

"Someday, when I'm rich and famous, I'll be able to give you more. You'll be able to have anything you want." He finally glanced at her and took her hand between both of his, which he had spread out as though to encompass the possibilities. "I want to give you the world, Mother."

There was a moment where she couldn't speak. She just basked in her son's gentle touch and the fudgy devotion sparkling in his eyes.

"Just knowing you're helping people is present enough for me," she told him at last.

Drew's head ducked, the same modest gesture he adopted whenever anyone paid him a compliment. But his Adam's apple rode up and down in a way she couldn't quite read.

35

It was time.

The ache inside her didn't agree. But that bedroom in the basement had sat empty for nearly fifteen years. Drew had left his elementary-school report cards and his old stuffed animals behind for a reason, and he wouldn't be heartbroken to see them moved to the attic.

This wasn't his home anymore, and she needed to accept that.

She reached, wet-eyed, under his bed and came back with a lollipop that had obviously been there long before graduation day, a crumpled five-dollar bill, and Mr. Cuddlelumps, whose head was one stitch away from rolling off. Drewbie had carried the thing around by the neck back in his younger years. Another dig brought up a dusty old photograph. She saw herself with real red in her hair and Drew in his first pair of glasses, and when she moved it closer she almost cut herself on a corner that shouldn't have been there. The remainder of the picture had been snipped away by a child's scissors, leaving an uneven landscape of forks and dings.

And she knew immediately who he had clipped out.

She abandoned her project and headed upstairs for the phone, already spinning the numbers before she'd even picked up the mouthpiece. Drew answered with his usual brusque "Hello, Dr. Drakken's lab" that sweetened once he heard her on the other end.

"Drewbie, do we need to talk about your father?" There was no point in weaving around the subject with Drew.

Silence. Cold silence. Finally Drew said, "What father?" in a voice that matched the sharp edge of the photo.

Sarcasm. Something her baby rarely ever pulled, even at the pinnacle of his exasperation. Her stomach clutched.

"Drew." Dropping the bie felt like grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him.

"Ohhhhh-ho, you mean Richard Lipsky?" Drew pronounced the name as if it belonged to a convicted murderer. "Him? What is there to say about him?" She could almost hear him shrug. "I hate him."

Her mouth dropped open, but it didn't get a single word out before Drew cut her off. "Oh, come on, Mother. You can't tell me you don't hate him too!"

She closed her eyes, and Richard's log-solid arms were around her again. Then they were off as he spit insults at everyone within range, and then his feet turned and trod out of her life, making their son her son, their mortgage her mortgage, and his presence a phantom tingling like a lost limb.

Part of her did hate him. Heaven knew Richard deserved it. But her son - her precious, innocent son - should never know that kind of hate.

"It's hard not to," she said, and even to herself her words sounded like stiff clumps of mascara. "But, honey, we're the lucky ones. We still have each other. He chose to walk away from everything and live a pathetic little life all by himself. Now that he's older and probably getting ready to retire, he must have all kinds of regrets."

She wasn't sure whether or not she believed that, but she needed her son to.

"You know, I hear from a lot of clients who have father issues," Drew said. "It can drive people mad. Why, I wouldn't blame them if half of them became supervillains!" There was a sharp swallow. "Err, most don't, of course. But I've heard of drug addiction, eating disorders, fear of commitment. All sorts of things."

Her grip tightened on the phone. Her son had always spoken like the most professional radio talk show host she'd ever known. Now it was as if he were five years old again and playing policeman, mimicking words he'd picked up from television but didn't truly understand.

It must have been so hard for him, as sensitive as he was, to deal with such damaged people without going a bit mad himself.

For a second, a sliver of doubt sliced her like a shard of glass. She tugged it out and threw it away.

36

"Drewbie, do not be ridiculous." She pulled her sweater closer and looped the sleeves together over her chest. "Of course this will be my treat. Let a mama buy her baby some food every now and again."

Drew's face flushed. "I'll just have a junior cheeseburger," he said from ahead of her in line.

"Get an order of fries, too," she replied. "And a malt. You need all the calories you can get." His waist didn't nip in like his daddy's - it dented in, as if someone powerful had kicked it and it had never popped back out to a proper shape. That wasn't a thought she could entertain for long.

Drew rolled his eyes at her and flipped himself back around, leaving her staring at the back of his neck, which had never gained the Lipsky cords the way his cousin's had. It was kind of charming, actually - what she could see of his neck behind the hair that slipped down nearly to his collar in hanks like overused paintbrush bristles.

She poked him in the back. "When was the last time you got a haircut?"

Drew's entire body flinched. "Do you. . . do you not like it?"

"It's a bit. . . 'hippie' for my taste."

"Oh, Moth-er." He made a clean transition to Teenage Drew. "I am not, nor will I ever be, a hippie. I just like my hair this length. And I don't like haircuts."

"Why?"

"Because scissors can be weapons!"

"No, why do you like it this length?"

"It feels better." Drew blinked as he ran the soft, ragged ends between two gloved fingers. "It feels. . . safer."

"Safer how?" She tried not to picture him being knocked in the stomach.

"Than being - you know - exposed," Drew said, as if she had just asked him why he didn't leave the house in just his boxer shorts. "This way, I have something standing between my neck and the rest of the world."

His lip curled as he finished, and she knew it wasn't meant for her. It raised gooseflesh on her scalp. She'd thought she was privy to everything "the rest of the world" had done to him.

"By the way," Drew said, his voice eager to change the subject, "thank you for the gloves you sent me. They go very nicely with my new lab coat. You know, the one I wear when I'm experimenting. In my spare time."

"You're welcome," she said. "I just hope you don't lose this pair."

"Oh, not a chance!" Drew peeled one black glove off and dropped it smugly into her hand. "I had a tag sewn in."

She took hold of the tag that flapped at the cuff and rolled it backward. Looking back at her were the words If found please return to Dr. Drakken. It was a gift from my mother.

And in spite of how hard it was to think of her little boy as "Dr. Drakken," she grinned as widely as she had in months.

37

She pressed her son's doorbell - the one fashioned to look like a reptile's eye - her son's words still ringing in her head:

"Mother, I'm blue. And it's not coming off."

Words no mother had ever thought to fear.

"It's open!" Drew called from inside.

She tapped the box-shaped door open just far enough to slip herself through and stepped into a room with at least seven hallways branching from it. "Where are you?"

"Bathroom! Third hall on the left - then third door on the right! Easy peesy."

She didn't bother arguing. At the third door, she knocked and yelled, "Are you decent?"

"If being blue doesn't count as 'indecent,' then, yes." Drew's words mumbled around in some sludge of embarrassment.

She swung the door open, and there was her son, cowering in the back of the bathtub, fully clothed, his baby face blue. His chin, looking larger and more awkward than ever, trembled at the sight of her.

"Oh!" she said.

It was actually a lovely color, the shade of the sky at dawn right after the sunrise had burned away. His old nursery had been painted a similar hue. Every visible inch of her son had been smoothly brushed with it as if by God Himself.

"Oh!" she said again. "Well, that's not as bad as I was expecting."

Drew laughed, a sickly sound that all but snapped in half. She crossed the room and hiked herself into the bathtub, scrunching her knees to fit next to Drew. Holding onto his lab coat with one hand, she licked her finger and hauled it down the length of Drew's cheek. Not a smear came off on her hands.

"Well, good news!" Drew said. "We know it's not contagious."

He was being so brave, it hurt.

After several more hand-wipings, a wet washcloth, and a stack of seven paper towels drenched in her toughest makeup remover, the blue still wasn't moving. Drew hauled both of them out of the tub and swayed between the sink and toilet. His arms dangled at his sides, tree branches where Richard's had been tree trunks.

"I'm sorry, Drewbie," she said. "I don't know what else to try."

Drew gave another weak laugh. "Oh, I wasn't really expecting you to get it off. I mean, if I can't figure it out, it's probably unfigure-out-able, right?" He dusted his knuckles on the lab coat. "I just wanted you to be here, you know? Tell me I'm -" what little jaw he had worked - "not a freak?"

She didn't even have to consider her reply. "Of course not, Drewbie! I didn't raise a 'freak'!"

He didn't bother to thank her. Instead, he chose to wrap his arms around her and lean against her, not hugging her so much as buffering himself off the ground. She reached one hand up to his head and pushed it down until it rested on her chest. "There, there," she murmured.

Drew squirmed, as always, but this time she was pretty sure he sighed, too.

38

She shifted her heels on the welcome mat as she pressed the doorbell. She'd have to ask about that lizard-eye design sometime. Drew had never gone through the adolescent fixation with reptiles that Eddy had.

The graffiti on the welcome mat had been worrisome enough - blue paint slapped on so that it read "YOU'RE NOT WELCOME GO AWAY." She'd asked Drewbie about that, and he'd gazed with horror at the words before coming to the conclusion that some prankster must have defaced it while he was working on his radio show.

"It's open," someone called from inside. The voice bore the unmistakable warble of a day spent in anguish.

She slipped through the mud room and found her son, standing tiny and alone in the center of an enormous cavern of a space where computer terminals encircled a pole thicker around than a sequoia trunk. The urge to go to him and comfort him was in such control of her legs that she didn't even bother to pick her way around the crumpled notebook papers, the empty potato chip sacks, and at least two mismatched pairs of socks - she just plowed right over them and kept on going. She would have stomped through baling wire if it kept her from her Drewbie's side.

Drew looked blearily at her when she reached him. His clothes were tangled across his front, the shoulder seams tweaked so that they were nearly in his armpits. The sturdy, adobe-colored bandage that wove its way from just below his left eye down to a corner of his frown testified to his trauma.

The sight went through her like a knitting needle. Every rapid blink burned.

"Hello, Mother," Drew said.

"Are you sure you're okay, Drewbie?" she demanded. She flung her arms toward him, not flinching when he sidestepped them.

"Moth-er! Of course." Drew tried to roll his eyes but couldn't seem to find the strength. "They wouldn't have released me if I wasn't. Weren't. Was not. Were not."

She plunked herself down on the couch that leaned halfheartedly against one wall and patted the cushion beside her. Drew shook his head at her. She knew that churning look on his face. It meant his backside would no sooner come in contact with that cushion than it would a bed of tacks.

"Just what exactly happened?" she said.

"I was working. As a radio talk show host. Well, I wasn't on the air - that's the professional way of saying 'playing right now,' you know. I was - one of the helpers had brought in a radio antenna for me, only he isn't the brightest bulb in the drawer, so he brought me one that was about twice as long as it should have been. So I went into our technical room" - he nodded vacantly toward one of the six hallways branching out - "and I was climbing the ladder to cut it with my Machinery-Blade-Cutter-Thing, and then halfway up I slipped and dropped the Machinery-Blade-Cutter-Thing. It grazed my face. It was ugly. Still is ugly."

"There is nothing ugly about you, baby!" she said.

As if she'd never spoken, Drew picked up the flattest throw pillow she'd ever seen and pressed it flatter still between his palms. "Probably always will be ugly. The doctors said it's going to scar."

His fingers wandered back to the bandage, startling against its blue backdrop. He had just now begun to adjust to that change. . . and now this.

She glanced dubiously at his surroundings. Without any of his enormous helpers around, the place seemed entirely too large and lavish for just her skinny little son. Much as she knew her Drewbie hated to be closed in, he looked so isolated against the mahogany-and-black color scheme, without even Mr. Cuddlelumps waiting in his bedroom for him.

"Can I see it?" she asked.

Drew didn't protest. He grasped the end of the bandage and yanked it off in one quick swipe and a clenched-in hiss. Pallid areas gave way to a grisly chasm of skin ripped apart and sewn back together. The stitches were already turning black. It was as if she were watching her son decay right before her eyes.

Her hand flew to her mouth, but that didn't stop her from absorbing every detail - the curve of the line, the number of stitches poking from it, its precise start and end. If it did scar, it would be no small thing.

Drew must have thought something similar, because his gaze slid away from hers. He traced underneath the wound as if it were a cattle brand that signed control of his future to someone besides her. He was as lost as a steer separated from the herd.

She knew how to handle lost steers.

Another nauseating look at her son's stitches, and she had them committed to memory.

"Okay? See? There it is. Can I put the Band-Aid back now?" Drew descended to a whimper. "It really stings. . ."

He glanced down at her, pleading out of a face that would never be smooth again. That mark would always rest there, a constant reminder of the pain he had been in today, in a cold hospital room where she hadn't been there to hold him.

She hooked her arms to hold herself together. Without that brace, she would have fallen to pieces and spiraled away. She was barely able to grant her permission to paste the bandage back on.

Her mind had already started to list off everything she would need from the craft store.

39

"Oh, hello, Mother." She heard Drew switch the phone over to his left hand. "Is - is something wrong?"

"No," she said. "Just calling to see how your day was, pumpkin."

"Long. And exhausting." Drew yawned like a lion, matching the voice that probably made all of his listeners peg him for a heavyweight boxer type. "We had some really stubborn - clients. I had to tie them - I almost had to tie them up. Together. To prevent a major catastrophe."

"My word! What was their problem?"

"Hero complexes," Drew said without hesitation. "They're convinced it's their job to protect the entire world from what they've deemed 'evil.'" He was openly scoffing now, not letting any fear of marring his professionalism hold him back.

She tapped the receiver. "But you took good care of them?"

"More or less. I mean - yes." Drew let out another mammoth yawn. No doubt he was sprawled across the mattress he'd recently bought that could have supported a small whale, five or six times larger than it needed to be, draped in red sheets like chiffon. The picture wasn't quite so lonely when she added the teddy bear she had hand-knit for him, with its single eyebrow, its ragged scar, and its pouty underbite to mimic the one even three years of orthodontics couldn't fix.

"Of course you did." She had to laugh at herself. "Why did I even bother to ask?"

Drew's chuckle joined hers. "Oh, man, it's good to be back in my own bod - b-b-bed. My own bed. Yesterday, you see, I was in this time-share warehouse I'd rented from a - a friend." Drew spat the last word as if it bruised his tongue.

It was a tone she rarely heard him adopt. She opened her hand and began to tick off his bedtime routine on her homemade manicure. "Did you brush your teeth? Take your contacts out? Put your pajamas on?"

"Yes! Not yet! And yes!"

She sank onto her own bed as he rattled on, all signs of bitterness vanishing. Poor thing had had a tough day with his clients, and as disconcerting as it was to listen to his exasperation, she was the one he had chosen to take it to, as if there were no question she could be trusted with it. A few times over the years, she'd suspected that he didn't always bring her the grittier moments of his life.

If there were anything Drewbie was more than honest, it was considerate.

40

She waited until they had safely disembarked from the top of the train cars and had filed back into Drew's living quarters before she voiced the obvious question. "So when do I get to meet this Kim Possible, anyway?"

Drew spun his face toward her, and the soft blue made an abrupt leap to talcum-white. His newest hire, the black-haired girl who appeared to be made of talcum herself, snickered as her long legs made the hike to the doorway.

"Well?" she asked, resting her hands between the flowers printed on her dress.

Drew took a blast of breath that shuddered his entire body. "You met Kim Possible today, Mother," he said. "That little teenaged meddler who always thwarts m - her own chances at happiness! At every turn!" The skin under Drew's eyes balled up and grunts puffed from his mouth as he made a notable attempt to uncoil his fist, staring at it like it was someone else who had curled it in the first place.

"That's her problem, you know," Drew burst out. "She's a meddler. That's what she's in therapy for. Meddle, meddle, meddle - she drives everyone insane. That's why I had her all roped up on the train. She's a - a hard case, that one."

"Oh." She felt her heart sag like the bumper on her old beater. "So she isn't a love interest?"

The black-haired girl nearly choked.

Drew actually doubled over and groaned into his fingers. "Mother, please! She's in high school!" he cried, disgust oozing between the words.

"Oh, certainly not, then." She leaned toward her gentlemanly son and jerked her thumb in the direction of the luscious-maned beauty in the doorway. "How about her, though? She's awfully cute."

The girl froze in mid-step. Even the pouch strapped to one ankle seemed to stand at a point while she waited for his answer. Her eyes were a pair of penknives.

"Shego?" Drew was wracked by another shudder, and he clutched his own elbows the same way she herself warded off a chill. "She was in high school, like, two years ago. Don't be weird."

A smirk of what seemed to be pure relief spread across the girl's black-painted lips.

"Oh," she said again. It was difficult to remember that her Drewbie wasn't as young as he looked - and sometimes acted.

The renewed interest in the Peter Pufferpuff toys still bothered her. Two months after Richard had left, Drew had dumped the entire set he'd been so proud of into a storage box and declared, "I'm too old for these now." Into the attic went the box, and he hadn't removed the lid for the rest of his childhood. He'd only hauled it out when he'd moved here nearly twenty years ago, and even then she'd figured it was for his future children, not to regress to a state of immaturity she frankly had never seen him in before.

Drew's neck quivered now, his shaggy hair flopping back and forth. He actually wore it tied back these days, like some child defying his school's dress code. A stranger might not be able to tell at a glimpse what a nice boy he was.

She scrutinized her son through narrowed eyes for a moment. He probably was about the right age for a midlife crisis. At least he hadn't bought one of those ridiculous ATVs and ridden it through downtown traffic like his cousin had recently, and he'd just vividly demonstrated no interest in dating women half his age.

He was a good, well-adjusted boy, she reminded herself - he just needed a better haircut and better hobbies.

41

"Excuse me, ma'am?"

She lifted her head from its bridged position between her kneecaps. A policeman with bristling whiskers was crouched down beside the table, reaching a hand beneath it for her to take. Around her, the neighborhood storm shelter creaked and groaned and ran thick with the sounds of people at their most frightened.

"Yes, officer?" she said - two words that could have been mistaken for the peeping of a newly hatched chick.

The square edges of the officer's jaw softened. "It's safe to come out now."

She crawled toward him, hand over hand. "Truly?"

"Truly. The attack has been aborted, and the perpetrator is in custody. We just need a little more time to inspect the city, and then we'll start sending everybody home."

He was kind enough not to add, "If they still have homes." He wore the shock of the whole night in stiff, rapid blinks, the way her Drewbie-dearest had worn his contacts for the first six months.

Drew. Her legs trembled atop her green pumps as she crept out from underneath the table and found her way upright again. She could feel a blister starting to bubble on each heel.

Mrs. Rodriguez had received an urgent phone call on her cellular phone as soon as they'd packed in here - her new son-in-law, in the Philippines, confirming the attack was worldwide. It was ruining the honeymoon, he'd added in a daze, and she'd felt sorry for the man. But he was far from her first concern.

Worldwide.

That meant her Drewbie was out there somewhere with those walking monstrosities that had the devils' faces painted on their fronts and sported weapons capable of chopping up cement. She could picture him now, cowering in the corner of whatever studio he'd been using this week, sick with fright as he watched the rampage, with maybe only his pretty young assistant and the hulking helpers in red for reassurance.

Children chased each other around the shelter, already spinning the crisis into a game. Behind them, a mother with exhausted eyes cooed to the baby who'd fallen asleep on her shoulder. Mrs. Rodriguez punched her phone's "redial" button over and over. Police radios croaked from all four corners of the shelter. One officer was plugging a pancake-sized television set into an outlet, while another pulled out a key and unlocked the doors.

She flew to them and peered out into the night. Her arms chilled at the sight.

It was as if a snow globe had shattered, cut glass raining down over the picturesque scene inside. The street had been carved open straight down the middle, garnished with the burned-out husks of cars. In between their remains, small figurines lay dropped at random, haunting impish grins directed to the starry sky. Across the wounded road, what had once been Middleton's community center sat in a huddle of boards and plaster, although she could see the high school from here, untouched and still lit up inside. She wondered what the machines had been programmed to destroy and why.

She grabbed one of the door handles. Her son was out there, and she wouldn't have stopped running until she was at his side - if the next sentences that rasped from the TV hadn't frozen her feet to the floorboards.

"We have confirmed reports that the attack was halted by Middleton's very own teenage heroine, Kim Possible. The villain responsible, Dr. Drakken, is being arrested as we speak -"

She spun around as if she were strapped into a pair of her father's old waterlogged waders. She'd heard wrong. Surely in all the noise and confusion and panic, she'd heard wrong.

At first, the screen showed nothing more than a hard, rigid back draped in a bejeweled turquoise suit.

Her relief never had a chance to be born before a police officer gave the back a hard shove.

The man shot away from the touch in a way that was at once achingly familiar. Terror evident in his muscles, he swiveled toward the camera, revealing a face possessed by anger. But the sky-blue skin, the wonderful protruding ears, the underbite-forced thrust of the chin, could belong to no one else.

One side of Drew's mouth curled back at the camera. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to; she could see it charging out from his eyes, something she'd never seen on her little lamb before.

Hatred.

He had never looked more like Richard.

But he's a radio talk show doctor.

Drew jutted his marvelous chin even farther forward, working for pugnacity he couldn't possibly achieve. He never was as tough as he thought he was.

This was insanity. Yes, her son had had a run-in with the law a few months back - that whole flying-car incident that she was sure the local police had undoubtedly blown out of proportion. Anyone who knew Drew could tell the authorities that he would never actually hurt a soul.

But the people onscreen smiled grimly when he was paraded past them, as if he were a killer bear on its way to be put down at last.

From far away, the baby began to wail, and the mother pulled him close and whispered words of comfort into her baby boy's ear. Onscreen, hers was shoved into the back of a paddy wagon like a horse up for auction, amidst cheers from the crowd.

Her heart - which had squeezed into itself and locked itself shut when the first devil weapon appeared - burst into flame.


Skyscrapers had been toppled. People had been killed. No one was sure just how many yet.

The one thing everyone agreed on was that her Drewbie was to blame.

He was held in solitary confinement until the day of his trial. The courthouse overflowed that day, to the point where even a woman less than five feet couldn't elbow out a place for herself. It was impossible to sleep more than four hours a night. Every time she rolled over, she saw her son, crouched all alone in the dark, shriveling smaller and smaller with every minute he spent there.

When she showed up at church for the vigil for those who had died, she felt half the congregation drop cold stares on her the second she walked in the doors. She could read what was behind them - If it weren't for your son, none of us would have to be here.

She'd returned home to find a group of reporters on her front stoop. They wanted to know if her son was on drugs. If he was on the TSA no-fly list. If he had any previous history of torturing small animals.

If she'd been capable of even seeing straight at that point, she would have given them a mouthful about her son's true character. As it was, she simply shut the door right on the head newswoman's microphone.

At last, the call came granting her permission to see her son and, "in deference to his condition," she would be allowed into his cell rather than a busy visiting room.

His condition. He was sick. She wasn't surprised. Drewbie had always had a delicate immune system, and of course the guards in prison wouldn't know how to take care of that.

Once she arrived, she was subjected to scans and pat-downs and confiscations as if she were an inmate herself. In the end, all she was able to wrangle in with her were a couple of tissues and a hairbrush.

The cell wasn't actually as bad as she had imagined. A light buzzed from the ceiling, the harshest shadows on the other side of the bars. No layers of grime stuck to the floor. Even the sink and toilet in one corner shone from a fresh scrubbing.

Her son, however, looked worse than she could have imagined. He lay stretched on a thin cot, limp as a wet rag, his belly button about to scrape his spine. When he saw her, he couldn't even manage a smile.

"You are sick, aren't you?" she cried. It sounded more accusatory than she'd meant.

Drew sat up, a motion that appeared to leech him of any strength he had left. His entire body shivered as he stared at her. "I think it's just a stomach bug," he said weakly. "I'm not that sick."

She bit the inside of her cheek.

Before she could say anything else, Drewbie ran a miserable hand over hair like nails. It had grown even longer, the ends of it meeting in greasy wisps behind his neck. "So - you saw the news."

"I did." She planted her hands on her hips. "Drewbie, I don't know who framed you, but I'm not going to rest until I find out!"

Drew kneaded his hands in his lap. "I wasn't framed."

"What do you mean?" she said.

"Mother, that really was me, trying to take over the world. And it's not the first time I've tried it. I'm a supervillain."

For a moment, it seemed perfectly natural. Any person cruel enough to set her little boy up for to take the fall would be cruel enough to brainwash him into believing he was the real villain, too. She nearly laughed aloud when she realized the more likely reason, and she brushed her lips across his forehead. "Drewbie, honey, you must have a fever. You're hallucinating."

"No. No. No." Drew snapped his head sharply to one side, away from her. "I'm not hallucinating, okay? I'm evil!" He'd never raised his voice to her before, not like that, but she didn't think to back away. "Ask anybody! Ask the guards! Ask any of the other prisoners! Ask Shego! Ask Kim Possible! I'm a villain!"

He cringed, as if those words somehow made him not the baby she'd held in her arms. Not the boy who presented her each year with homemade birthday cards, the words marker-smudged and misspelled. Not the man who had adopted the most unlikely of rescue dogs because he felt such compassion for the strays.

Either Drewbie had been lying to her for years or he was lying now. Either way, for the first time his word wasn't enough.

She turned to the enormous guard standing by the sink. "Is this true?" she asked.

Please, Lord, she begged, if you make this not be true, I swear I'll never again nag him to get his hair cut or call more often or give me grandbabies.

The guard's nod was slow. The face that ducked away from hers had met her son before, many times.

She rocked backward, reeling. Impossible. Even as a child, the only times her Drewbie had ever gotten into trouble were when Eddy had talked him into something.

"This is Eddy's fault, isn't it?" she said. "He corrupted you!"

"No, it's not." Drew pressed his hands together. "I was a supervillain before he ever got arrested."

"Then it's that girl - what's her name? She led you down the wrong path!" A bad girl can do horrible things to a good boy.

Drew's mouth puckered. Lines appeared there that she hadn't seen last time she dropped by his studio. For a moment, the anger returned as well. "It's not Shego's fault!" he snapped. "I put out an ad for an evil sidekick, and she answered! She didn't do it, either."

Stones filled her chest. She put a hand to her breastbone and looked at the floor. "Then - is this my fault, Drewbie? Have I been a bad mother?"

"No," Drew said. "You've - you've been great. Really. I'm just evil, that's all. Sheer evil. Guess I'm just a bad egg. It happens." His eyes were downcast, apologetic, even now desperate to please her.

She gazed up at her son, the son who had never been a radio talk show doctor, the son who was admitting to a scheme brilliant enough to have come from his mind but too twisted to have come from his heart, the son whose snarling mug shot graced the front of every newspaper delivered to her for the past two weeks, and she had never wanted more than to fold him into her arms.

A solitary tear dribbled down his sweet blue cheek. The wrenching sobs he obviously wanted to give in to stayed stuck in his chest.

The ones burning her throat couldn't be held in much longer, either.

42

She was moving through a recurring nightmare as she ran for the shelter doors.

That Mexican restaurant down the block had already collapsed. She didn't risk a backward peek to see if the high school with its massive crowd and its ConGRADulations banner was about to suffer the same fate. She just squeezed between two long-legged college-aged boys into the room and past the generator that cranked in the corner.

Black machines as tall as the Empire State Building and infinitely wider clawed their way along outside on crab-like supports, indifferent to whatever happened to be crushed under their feet. The air out there was smothered with smoke, the ground littered with wood and stone and debris that had once been important to someone - the bottom half of a stuffed animal, a single mostly melted earring, a chunky tricycle wheel, a leather belt with silver studs.

The motive was all too easy to guess and all too familiar. The execution of it was nearly an exact replica. The destruction was the same.

She shook herself and bolted for the back wall, where she clung to it just the way she had a year ago. Her prayer then had been, Please, please, please - not my Drewbie.

It meant something entirely different when she offered it up now.

Both hands found the sides of her head and she brushed back a few stray strands of hair, wiry with hairspray and fading out of last month's dye job. Those crab machines didn't look like Drew's handiwork, but then, the demonic walking weapons last year hadn't borne any trace of the boy she knew, either. Her son's dainty hands had shaped things she had never dreamed of, constructed the types of monsters she had spent her life trying to keep away from him.

And she hadn't known.

"Ma'am?" a voice said. "You all right?"

She glanced up at one of the young men she'd pushed past. She'd been right about his age - the letters MIST were emblazoned on the chest of his T-shirt. Middleton Institute of Science and Technology. The college Drewbie had attended for a season, before he -

"I'm not hurt," she answered. "I'm just - worried about my son."

"Oh," the boy said. In its fright, her imagination cooled his eyes and shaded his brow, as if he'd spied the hated Dr. Drakken in her features.

She slid all the way down the wall to the floor.

Beside her, a mother blessed enough to have her junior-high-school-aged daughter in her arms pulled her even closer. The girl, whose plunging eyelet top needed a cardigan with it and whose skirt looked to have been ripped off at the thighs, clung back. "Does anybody know what's happening?" the mother asked.

The college boy squatted down beside her and blew out a hard breath. "Not exactly, no. I've been hearing rumors, though. They say it might be -"

He paused.

"Might be what?" she blurted. Her fingers stiffened in the air, and she could barely keep them from clenching shut around his T-shirt to shake him.

"Aliens."

"Aliens?" The disgust in the girl's voice couldn't conceal its shrill shaking. "Do you know how ridiculous that is?"

"I know how ridiculous it sounds," the boy said. "But think about it. All those weird symbols being carved into the golf courses these past few weeks - none of the villains are bragging it was their idea. And you remember back in October, when that green mystery woman broke that one guy out of jail?"

Both mother and daughter nodded. Her head wouldn't have moved if someone else had tried to turn it for her.

"In Kim Possible's statement to the police, she said it was an alien." The boy tucked a thumb into his belt loop. "She doesn't lie to the police."

She stared down at her open palms. Kim Possible. The sweet little teenage heroine who had put her son behind bars.

The collegian's friend had joined them by now. "Dude, it's not just Kim Possible's word anymore, either," he said. "You know Lynette Chen?"

"Yeah," said the first boy.

"Dad works at the observatory?"

"Dude, I know."

The second boy squared his shoulders wisely. "The observatory was one of the first places to be hit. Right before the machines hit, Lynette's dad called her and told her she had better get somewhere safe, because he was seeing a gigantic spaceship headed straight for Earth."

"Really?" The girl folded her arms across her deeply forked neckline. "Couldn't it just be, you know, a satellite?"

"Coming toward us? And after the stamps on the golf courses and right before all this breaks loose?" The first boy shook his head. "Nah. Either somebody's playing a -" he glanced from her to the girl and back again - "dickens of a prank, or. . . this is the real deal."

She said nothing.

Aliens. If her darling son hadn't told her he was a supervillain, it would have been the most ludicrous statement she'd ever heard. But if it were aliens - then her Drewbie was innocent, wasn't he?

That fear seeped away, and another jumped in to replace it. If Drew wasn't the mastermind behind the attack, if he wasn't in charge, than he could have been hurt - killed - as easily as anyone else on the planet.

She turned around and rested her forehead on the wall.

"I'm hungry," the girl said.

The familiar complaint brought her head up. "I think I might be able to take care of that," she said. She dragged her purse across the floor to her, unzipped it, and came out with the chocolate chip cookie she'd stashed among the tissues for just such emergencies.

"Can I eat it, Mom?" The girl took the cookie between her fingers like it might explode. "Even though we didn't have dinner yet?"

The mother made a stunned half-laughing, half-crying sound. "Absolutely you can." The woman glanced her way and mouthed, Thank you.

She managed to get a handful of children into a "Telephone" line, which was Drewbie's very favorite when he was small. They giggled at their twisted-up messages while the world outside crashed, banged, and roared. The occasional blast of light sneaked its way around the frames of the locked doors.

As the night wore on, several of the younger children dozed off. She drifted, too, on a thin mat the college boys had insisted she take, and dreamed of Drew aboard an alien spacecraft, blasting away at the Earth as if it were a video game target.

When she awoke with a start, the first few blooms of fuzzy gray light had appeared under the doorframe. A cacophony still rang outside, but it didn't sound violent anymore - just hundreds of running footsteps and harsh, hushed whispers. She dared to breathe.

The police arrived not long afterward. One officer carried a backup generator, another a tiny TV. The third raised his hands over the crowd and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for your patience. We're just about ready to let you go."

A collective sigh went around the room. "What happened, though?" someone yelled from their crouched position against the back wall.

The officer glanced upward before he said, "According to our men at the scene, the rumors are true. This was indeed an extraterrestrial invasion."

Several people gasped at that. She didn't, though she supposed the announcement was worth a gasp. Through the crack in the door, she saw one of those machines tipped on its side, lying lifelessly against the grass, flowers threading its way through its battered sides, trying to bring some beauty from the ashes. Drewbie would have taken one of those machines home with him - if one of them hadn't taken him first.

Where's my son? she wanted to scream. Give me my son!

"And word is that the extraterrestrials have been -" The officer shifted his gaze to a boy no older than six who eyed him back with one finger in his mouth - "have been taken out of the picture. Give us a few hours to sweep the city a couple more times, and then you are all free to leave."

The backup generator began to hum, crackling the TV to life. On the fuzzy screen, she barely made out a cheerful reporter standing in front of dozens more deactivated machines, each decked with vines. A blond boy in a spacesuit whom she'd never seen before stood at her shoulder. A redheaded girl smiled in exhaustion at the camera while a young woman with more full, dark hair than body stifled a yawn. Both struck her as vaguely familiar.

Behind them stood a skinny, scraggly-haired man. Fluffy, canary-yellow flower petals fanned around an expression of purest bewilderment.

She gaped into the angel-blue of her son's face.

Her heart jammed, refusing to acknowledge the moment with a beat, and she prepared to recoil. She couldn't watch this happen twice in one lifetime.

But there were no handcuffs in sight. Plenty of armed officers and even a few soldiers poked around in the alien rubble, and none of them seemed even the slightest bit interested in Drew.

"And we are live," the reporter said, "with the four heroes who saved the world from hostile alien forces."

She lurched closer to the television.

"Five," the blond boy corrected her. "Ya gotta count Rufus." He held up what appeared to be an overgrown baby mouse, bald and pink.

At any other time, she would have shuddered. Now she couldn't, not with her son stumbling closer and closer to the reporter. His eyes stared out at the audience, baffled yet brave, and the same bottomless black-brown they'd been since he was seven months old.

The reporter turned to him and nudged the microphone up to his lips. "Dr. Drakken, how does it feel knowing you've saved the world?"

The pride on his face was as naked as a newborn babe. It wasn't the type of pride that had flashed when he brought home an A-plus on a science report or when he'd finally learned to tie his shoes at age eight. It seemed newborn itself, still wet and raw, but when he gazed at the reporter and grinned straight from ear to ear, she saw it rooted in a place so deep that nothing anyone did would ever shake it loose.

Drew nearly licked the microphone. "Egh. Blarr. Gleep. It feels. . . it feels. . . good."

He'd lost so much weight this year, but his smile still rounded out his cheeks like Christmas ornaments. His joy rose up, traveled through the screen, and reached out to find her.

"That's my son!" she heard herself cry right as her knees hit the tile. "That's my Drewbie!"

And for the first time in over thirty years, she pitied Richard.

After that, she wouldn't have cared if she'd returned to her own house to find it in ruins, but it still stood long and frail in the new daylight. The porch swing had snapped off and sunken lazily into her azalea bushes, and the roof looked like a crossword puzzle of missing shingles. Even the thoughts of repairmen and expense couldn't have kept her from skipping up the steps and into the kitchen, where she flicked the switch and got nothing. The police had told her it might be a few more hours before the power lines were fixed.

The phone lines, however, had already been snapped back into working order. She discovered that when the candlestick phone on her bedside table jangled.

She snatched up the receiver and spoke into it. "Hello." She didn't bother to add Lipsky residence. It could only be one person, and he knew full well who he had reached.

"Hello, Mother," said the voice on the other end.