The Good Son by Carolyn Mills (best novels for teenagers .txt) 📕

to the sidewalk, where I must look like a lunatic, standing alone on the dark street with my pyjama bottoms flapping around my legs. I wrap my arms around myself, briefly relishing the discomfort of being outside in the frigid air. It’s almost enough to knock the creeping uncertainty and dread from my brain.

The moon, pendulous and full, briefly disappears behind a scrim of clouds. The stars, too, blink out as if they have been erased by a veil of gauze. This hazy sky and the full moon would make for a great photo, if I had the energy to set up my tripod, toy with lighting levels, and wait for just the right diffusion of clouds to scud past the luminescent orb. But I don’t. As I stare up at the shifting sky, the night suddenly feels unbearably vast and lonely. Part of me wants to sag onto the wet grass, just let myself fall. I turn around to head back inside. I’m sick. I need to stay warm and get some rest so I can figure out what to do about Mom, and Ricky, and the fact that my life is quite literally falling apart.

I have stood outside in the cold like this before, overwhelmed then, too, with a despair not all that different from what I’m feeling now. How is it that my life keeps cycling back to these kinds of moments? I plod up the path to my front door, trembling with cold or fatigue or emotional weariness, and make my way back to the comforting warmth of my bed.

EVEN AFTER I MOVED INTO my bungalow on Pine Street, I still spent a lot of time on Lindell Drive. I continued helping Mom with some of the bigger chores around her house since she wasn’t supposed to do anything too strenuous. Sometimes, in the winter, I’d go to her house twice a day to keep the sidewalk clear. Every so often, while I was shovelling snow, or raking leaves, or mowing the lawn, I would see the family with the twins that had moved into the Nessors’ house. The boys were practically teenagers, all gangly arms and legs, while the mom looked the same to me under her cloud of poufy hair. Other than those brief sightings, though, the street was lifeless and quiet.

I took Champ with me whenever I went to Lindell Drive. He was still technically a puppy, but had grown into his full size and his head reached almost to my waist. He was a big dog. While I worked outside, he would bound around me in circles, leaping playfully across the front lawn. Often, he would go racing down the sidewalk before looping back again, barking with reckless abandon.

“I don’t know if you should let him run loose like that,” Mom said. “Shouldn’t he be on a leash?”

“He needs to run around,” I replied. “He won’t do anything to anyone.”

“Well, they don’t know that.”

Had it always been so easy for her to find fault with me? “He’s fine,” I said firmly.

WALTER CAME BACK TO DUNFORD a few more times, but we never hung out in his basement the way we used to. His parents got rid of the foosball table, he said, as if that was reason enough to avoid spending too much time together. He could have come to my place, but that seemed weird too. Almost formal. We tried, I think, to recapture something of our one-time friendship, but our conversations seemed to require too much effort and even going to Ice Cream Island together felt forced. Eventually, he stopped calling and I heard from his dad that he had a girlfriend in Waterloo. I was kind of surprised Walter hadn’t told me that himself. I figured either he wasn’t all that serious about this girl, or I had officially been reduced to a person not worth telling.

I had new friends, anyway. Not friends so much as people I spent time with. Guys from work. They’d started inviting me out for lunch at Mackie’s or a group of us would go out after work for beers. At first, they treated me differently, because I was the token girl in the group, but after a while I think they started to view me as one of them rather than potential dating material. On top of that, Roger and his wife invited me over for dinner at least once a month. It didn’t occur to me to think it was strange that I didn’t have any close girlfriends; I was comfortable being one of the guys, where everything stayed at a surface level.

When I wasn’t working, I mostly hung out at home, with Champ. I didn’t — at least, not at the time — consider myself lonely. In addition to my dog and the guys from work, I had Mom, so my life felt full enough. And as far as a welcoming committee went, Champ was one of the best. As soon as I opened the front door, he would bark out a joyful greeting and come skidding across the hardwood to meet me.

Then one Friday, I came home from work to an ominously empty house. I knew Champ spent a lot of time outside, but even when he was in the backyard, he always heard my car and would come crashing through his doggy door before I’d finished opening the front door. But that Friday, after I’d shut the door behind me, the house remained silent.

I opened the back door and called his name. Nothing. The yard was clearly empty. Heart thumping, I walked to the side of the house, to see if the gate was open. It wasn’t. I jogged back into the house and checked the bedrooms and even the bathroom, thinking he might be sleeping or sick, but every room I looked in was empty.

“Champ!” I called over and over, as if he might spontaneously appear out of thin air.

Mom was on her way over for dinner and