Page 4 of Darkwater Lane

OMG! The host is talking about me and Connor.

Lanny

Excuse me: Lily and Brady

Lanny

WTAF?!?

Lanny

Like seriously?

Lanny

I’m already getting notifications from kids at school.

Lanny

Does Connor know about this?

Lanny

I just got to the barn. Connor’s listened to it already.

Lanny

Duck, Mom, what are we going to do?

It’s already starting. Again.

2

GWEN

“How do they even think this is okay?” Lanny demands around a bite of pizza. A trail of cheese stretches from her mouth to the slice, and she uses her fingers to twist it free. “The crap the podcast is saying, it’s all bullshit. It has to be illegal or something. Can’t we just call the cops?”

I glance toward Connor to gauge his response. He’s been uncharacteristically quiet since he got home. Usually, he’d be just as engaged as Lanny and equally enraged. However, ever since the school shooting several months ago and the subsequent events in Gardenia, North Carolina, he’s become a lot more introspective.

It makes sense; the whole ordeal put him through the wringer emotionally and physically. First, he had to deal with watching his best friend shoot two mutual friends at school and then implicate Connor in the shooting. Once the media realized who Connor’s father was, they had a field day with the information, speculating whether Connor would grow up to fill Melvin’s shoes. Which, of course, fed into Connor’s already existing fears that he might have somehow inherited his father’s depravity.

When I was offered a missing persons case in North Carolina, Ifigured it would be a good opportunity to give Connor some breathing room away from the media pressure. It did for a while, until two psychopathic teen girls started preying on him. He barely escaped after being shot and trapped in a house fire.

He’s been steadily working on both the physical and the emotional scars since. But the experience shook his fundamental belief in himself and the world around him.

I’ve spoken to both my therapist and Connor’s about his slow progress, and they both tell me the same thing: we all process grief in our own way, and I have to give him the space he needs. I get what they’re saying, and obviously, I’ll do what’s best for Connor and his recovery, but I still can’t help but miss my outspoken, energetic little boy. Though at fifteen, he’s not so little anymore.

“She can’t get away with it,” Lanny continues, her outrage growing. “Right? I mean, you can’t just lie like that. It’s illegal, isn’t it?”

“It’s not a crime to lie,” Connor says, not bothering to look up from his slice of pizza. “It’s a civil issue, not criminal.”

Lanny turns to face him. “How do you know?”

He shrugs. “I wrote a paper about it for school. We’re doing a unit on the Constitution, and I got assigned the First Amendment. I had to write about what kinds of speech are protected and why.”

Connor has been taking classes online for the past few months. Once he was out of the hospital in North Carolina and we could return home, he made it pretty clear that he wasn’t interested in returning to his previous school. Even though the feds exonerated him for any involvement in the shooting, the building itself held too many bad memories. I couldn’t blame him, and we set him up with distance learning.

Whenever I ask him how classes are going, he responds with “fine” or “okay,” and little else. This is the first time he’s voluntarily brought up anything related to his online school, and I perk up. “Oh, really? That sounds interesting,” I say, hoping to encourage him to share more.