Page 8 of Summer of the Boy

Friends invite friends home for dinner.

“Um… my mom is making her mac and cheese with bacon for dinner. She said I should invite you. Would…um…would you like to come have dinner with my family? I have a PlayStation. We can play or whatever after we eat.”

“Sure. Let me call my mom. She works late tonight. But she’d want to know.”

I nod, waiting while he leaves his mother a voicemail.

My mother is true to her word, only once breaking cool to shoot me a double thumbs up when Rid and I first arrived. She did it behind his back for him not to see. Ridley was kind of shy around my family, but I watched him try and make the effort to converse with them.

Because he has to interact around strangers every day for his job, I have the feeling his shyness comes more from thembeingmy family, though I guess I don’t know enough about autism to know for sure.

The rest of the fam are great too. My dad and sisters ask him questions intermittently between discussing various topics including what has been going on in each of their lives. Not making him the center of attention for too long.

Everyone works really hard at making Rid feel comfortable.

After dinner, he insists on helping my mom clean up because she fed him, then we go up to my room where I introduce him to MLB: The Show. A baseball video game on the PlayStation.

Playing against Ridley is more fun than I’ve had playing this stupid game in forever. No pressure to show off, probably because he deflates my ego pretty quickly.

I go in preparing—baseball is mythangand Rid never plays—to stand atop the virtual pitcher’s mound, victorious. A nice thought in theory as his keen eyes pick up on the strategy nuances of hits and runs and strikeouts to knock me down game after game.

A lesser man would cry. And I’d probably be that lesser man if not for Rid’s attempt at smack talk.

“Who’s your daddy?” He chides, controller in hand clicking away at the buttons. Concentration visible as he mounts another attack on my player, and as it turns out my ball-playing skills.

The ump on the screen yells, “out.”

I don’t ever remember laughing so hard. He jumps to his feet and dances an Irish jig after beating me for the fifth time in a row.

“Come on, Leif.” He tugs me up by my T-shirt. Irish jig it is. While we jump from foot to foot, I throw my head back in a full-blown belly cramping laugh.

After our initial meeting, I didn’t know what to expect. Falling into friendship with this guy is easy though. Only Amanda ever made it this easy. With her, I was all secrets and lies. To be fair, one secret and one lie, but their size and magnitude dwarfed every other truth in my life.

There’s a knock on my door and mom pops her head in. “I heard a strange loud noise, a kind of mashup between a sputtering fart and a lion’s roar,” she teases.

Which get her desired effect, I clutch my stomach, doubling over as I laugh harder.

My mom looks to Ridley. “If this is your influence, come over anytime.”

The tips of his ears pink adorably. I stand up to wipe the laugh-tears from my eyes. Mom winks at Rid and pops back out. Her job done.

We play for several hours, talking more, some of it smack and some real, until his phone rings.

His mom.

She yells in his ear, yells so loud I can hear her through the receiver. “Where are you?”

“Mom,” Rid says, his one word answer sounds placating. “I left you a voicemail.”

“I’ve never met these people. Ridley James, you’re old enough to know better than to go off with strangers.”

“Leif isn’t a stranger.”

“What’s the address? I’ll come get you. They’ll be lucky if I don’t press charges for kidnapping.”

“What? Mom, they didn’t kidnap me. I’ll come home.” Then he hangs up on her. “Sorry.” He looks away. Hands opening and closing at his sides. Open. Close. “My mom, she worries.” Open. Close.

“You don’t have to leave just because she orders you to. You are an adult.”

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