Jason slammed the door more vehemently than he’d intended. It was so quiet inside the house from no one being in it that the force of the slam shook the walls and seemed to ricochet off every surface, ringing and echoing hollowly in his ears.
Jason had been counting on the sleepover all week. It had buoyed him up every day, he’d told himself he could make it through what had proven to be a really shitty time in his life if he could just survive until Friday night. It just seemed like everything that could go wrong lately had been going wrong. He was failing geometry and history. The basketball team had lost four consecutive games in a row, and their coach seemed to be blissfully unaware he took out his frustrations on the young impressionable boys he coached, and he screamed things at them in the locker room that, if the parents and faculty knew, would undoubtedly have him fired. But basketball was too important to the school. It was simply a big fuckin’ deal. Also, Jason’s car had broken down, and he’d had no time to work on it or take it to the shop.
People didn’t realize the pressure kids his age were under. It was also something unspoken and merely felt… His mom and dad had divorced that year. Jason knew he hadn’t really let it in enough to deal with it yet, he was successfully blocking it out to take care of more pressing matters. His mom was financially broke. His dad had been a wealthy and successful attorney, and they lived in a gorgeous two story in the suburbs. When his dad left, with no provision to her or his son (It was generally assumed but never talked about that a much younger woman was involved) Jason’s mom started to struggle to pay bills. She’d had to take a second job… She was very attractive and a younger mom, only 34, for she’d become pregnant with Jason at fifteen, and his father had come from a family whom honor and name meant everything. Jason’s dad had chosen to stay with his mom and support her and his child, and eventually he married her.
Kerri, Jason’s mom, was a very loving and doting mother to him always. She fussed over him and hugged him a lot and worried over him in typical mother style. But lately… Her attractive smooth unwrinkled face had been pained from stress. She seemed tired all the time. Her forehead was perpetually creased in worry. A couple of times she’d snapped at him uncharacteristically when he didn’t do something fast enough she’d asked him to. It was obvious she’d felt really bad when she did it. She almost looked like she’d been about to break down and cry.
Jason hated seeing his mom like that. The sleepover scheduled for Friday night at Pete’s had been the balm to his soul all week. He knew they could chill out and hang in Pete’s cozy room and crank up the music too loud and play video games and watch porn all night long because Pete’s parents were away on a trip to Pete’s. grandmother’s. The hell of the past week would simply melt away.
But suddenly that night without warning, before the pizza had even arrived, Pete’s dad had come barging in through his door.