October came. The leaves on our street turned. Dustin stayed quiet.
But it was a different kind of quiet now. Before, he’d been sad quiet. Now he was busy quiet. He spent hours in his room on the old laptop I’d bought him for school, with his earbuds in. Whenever I knocked, I heard the click of the lid closing before I opened the door.
“What are you working on?”
“School stuff.”
“What kind of school stuff?”
“A project.”
“For which class?”
“Media lab. Mr. Hale’s class.”
Mr. Hale was the young technology teacher who ran the computer club. Dustin loved him. He’d started staying after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays for club, and he came home talking about video editing and sound tracks and something called transitions.
“Can I see it?”
“It’s not done.”
“When it’s done?”
He thought about it. “Maybe,” he said. “It’s kind of a surprise.”
I thought it was sweet. I thought maybe he was making something for my birthday in November. I didn’t push. I was so relieved to see him excited about anything that I would have let him build a rocket in his room if it made him smile.
I should have pushed.
Around then, I also noticed he’d started bringing the old phone to Nigel’s. It was Nigel’s old phone, actually, the one he’d given Dustin last year “so you can call your mom if you need to.” It didn’t have a SIM card anymore, so it only worked on wifi. Dustin mostly used it to play games.
Except now, before every weekend at his dad’s, he’d charge it all the way and pack it in the front pocket of his backpack. Not with the games. Just alone.
“You going to call me?” I asked once, teasing.
“Maybe,” he said, and zipped the pocket shut.
Then the school sent home a bright orange flyer.
OAKRIDGE ELEMENTARY ANNUAL FALL FAIR. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 18. BOOTHS, GAMES, BAKE SALE, COSTUME CONTEST. PRIZES AWARDED AT 3 PM. FAMILIES WELCOME!
Dustin held it up at dinner. “Can we do the bake sale? Our class booth is doing pumpkin stuff.”
“Absolutely.”
“Can we make orange cupcakes? Like, orange inside?”
“We can try.”
“And Mom.” He put the flyer down. “Can we dress up? Both of us?”
I blinked. “Me too?”
“Yeah. Matching. As pumpkins.”
“Honey, I don’t know if parents usually…”
“Please?” His face was suddenly so bright, so hopeful, so much like the kid he’d been a year ago, that I would have agreed to dress as a garbage can. “It’ll be funny. Everybody will laugh.”
“That’s what I’m worried about.”
“Not laugh at us. Laugh with us. There’s a difference.”
I looked at him. He was looking right back at me, very serious, like this mattered more than it should.
“Okay,” I said. “Pumpkins.”
He punched the air.
We spent two evenings building the costumes. I cut the felt. He held the safety pins in his mouth like a tailor and handed them to me one by one. We couldn’t figure out how to make the round shape until Dustin found an old hula hoop in the garage, and I sawed it in half on the back steps while he cheered. My pumpkin came out lopsided. His came out short. When we tried them on together in the hallway mirror, we both laughed so hard that I had to sit down on the floor.
“We look like we got run over,” Dustin said, gasping.
“We look like the pumpkins nobody picks at the patch.”
“We’re the sad pumpkins!”
“We’re the sad pumpkins,” I agreed, and he collapsed on top of me, felt and hula hoop and all, and for a minute we were just a pile of orange on the hallway carpet, laughing until it hurt.
It was the happiest I’d seen him in months.
Friday night, the night before the fair, I was icing the last tray of cupcakes when Dustin came into the kitchen in his pajamas. He watched me for a while.
“Is Dad coming tomorrow?” he asked.
“He said he’d try.”
“Is he bringing her?”
I put the frosting bag down.
“I don’t know, bud. I hope not. But if he does, we’re just going to have fun anyway. Okay? It’s our day.”
He nodded. Then he did something strange. He walked over to the junk drawer by the fridge, the one with the rubber bands and dead batteries and takeout menus, opened it, and took out a small blue flash drive I’d never seen before. He held it in his fist for a second like he was checking it was still real.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“My project.”
“For Mr. Hale?”
“Kind of.”
He put it in the pocket of his pajama pants. Then he came over and hugged me around the middle, hard, the way he used to when he was little.
“Love you, Mom.”
“Love you too. You okay?”
“Yeah,” he said into my shirt. “I’m okay.”
I kissed the top of his head. He smelled like toothpaste and orange frosting.
I didn’t ask about the flash drive again. I wish I could tell you I had some feeling, some warning. I didn’t. I just thought my son had made a slideshow for school, and I went back to icing cupcakes.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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