“They’ll call me brave. Then adults will fight about phones and kids and stuff.”
“Definitely.”
He almost smiled.
Then I said, “But you might be the only person in the room who can stop them from making it stupid.”
He looked at me.
“That’s your pitch?”
“That’s my pitch.”
“It’s bad.”
“I’ve heard worse.”
He rubbed his thumb over the edge of the console.
“What would I even say?”
“The truth.”
“No one wants that.”
“People say that until someone has the nerve to tell it plainly.”
He was quiet for a while.
Then he said, “I’m not anti-screen.”
“I know.”
“Everyone keeps acting like the lesson is that games are bad.”
“I don’t think that’s the lesson.”
“What do you think it is?”
I took a sip of coffee.
“I think the lesson is that tools are only useful if you know when they fail.”
He thought about that.
Then he nodded once.
“That’s actually not terrible.”
“High praise.”
He finally took a sip of the hot chocolate.
“It’s cold.”
“You waited twenty minutes.”
“That’s your fault. You made me have feelings.”
The next morning, Sarah called me crying again.
But this time, the tears were different.
She had gone into Leo’s room to put away laundry and found a note on his desk.
Not hidden.
Not exactly left for her either.
Just sitting there beside his dead console.
It was a list.
Things I Need To Learn Before Next Winter.
How to jump a battery.
How to use the jack.
How to read a paper map.
How to fix the heater if it stops.
How to drive if Mom falls asleep.
That last one broke Sarah.
She sat on the edge of his bed holding the paper.
“He should not be thinking about that,” she said.
“No,” I told her. “But maybe he already was.”
“What kind of mother makes her kid worry like that?”
Leave a Comment