I want to start with who Leo is on his best days, because the best days are the context for everything that followed and because it would be easy to tell this story in a way that makes him a villain, and he is not a villain. He is fourteen and he is mine and both of those things require saying clearly before anything else.
Leo has been a reader since he was four. He reads the way some children play sports, with his whole body involved, hunched over the book with his knees up and his feet tucked in, rereading favorite passages the way athletes replay their best moments. He has opinions about books that are serious and specific, not the performed opinions of a child who wants to seem mature but the genuine ones of someone who has thought about something and arrived at a position. He told me once, when he was eleven, that he felt sorry for people who didn’t read for pleasure, because they were going through life without the tool for it.
He is funny in the precise way, the kind of humor that requires paying attention to find. He does not perform jokes. He makes observations and lets them land without announcing that they have landed, which is a more sophisticated comic sensibility than most adults ever develop.
He has, since he was small, been the child at birthday parties who goes to sit with the kid who is sitting alone. I have watched this happen at six different birthday parties across eight years, the particular moment when the social geography of a children’s event becomes visible and Leo quietly positions himself next to the person who needs it. I have never said anything to him about this. I have never pointed it out afterward or praised him for it. It is simply a thing he does because it is who he is.
I am telling you all of this because I stood in a restaurant and looked at my son making fun of a human being who was doing his job carefully and with dignity, and I did not recognize what I was seeing. Not because it was impossible to believe, but because it was such a departure from the Leo I knew that I had to hold both things at the same time, the boy who sat with the lonely kid at birthday parties and the boy who pulled his shoulders forward and tilted his head to mimic a stranger’s disability.
