Growing Pains • Ben 10 [On Hold]

Chapter 5: No Place Like Home

.

Lennox only knew the room belonged to Kevin because outside of the bedroom door left slightly ajar, across the narrow hall, down the two flights of stairs that led first to the landing near the front door, he sat on the last step with his elbows propped on his knees, and told a woman in her early forties the girl sleeping in his room upstairs would be staying in his room upstairs until further notice.

She didn’t like hearing his, the woman in her forties. Her arched, pencil-thin eyebrows shifted almost comically, forming a triangle sans the base over her eyes on the pale white skin of her forehead. At war with herself over what emotion to let rule her reaction and school her features, she crossed her arms and uncrossed them. She put her hands on her hips and, after a hot minute, let them fall to her sides.

Lennox, crouched at the very top of the first flight, hidden in the shadow provided by the one dead lightbulb in the hallway, watched the woman open her mouth and close it six times in maybe three seconds, tops.

She didn’t say anything, though. Not then, not a minute later, not two minutes later. Like disappointment and the oddness of Kevin’s words were things she knew, and well. Perhaps not this conversation, but many in the same vein, she’d had with her son before. Lennox knew she was his mother when, as she walked into the house through the front door and put her bag down next to her heels by the coat rack, Kevin had sat on that step, held his head in his hands and exhaled, “Mom.”

The woman wasn’t happy. She called him Kevin Ethan twice, and each time, Kevin seemed to shrink in on himself. His shoulders hunched and his neck fell an inch or two. Lenny couldn’t see his face from where she hid, but she understood the clues of a flinch where she saw them. She often flinched herself when in the presence of her father, and all he had to do to elicit such a response was breathe.

Lenny considered staying a few more minutes to hear the remainder of the discussion. To hear the final verdict and the crunch of the gavel as Kevin’s mom ruled on the fate of the girl she and her son still believed to be sleeping. How they could think that, Lennox didn’t know. She usually slept like the dead and woke like a parade.

When she roused from her impromptu siesta some fifteen minutes ago on the detergent-smelling, plain covers of Kevin’s single cot, spread eagle with the tips of her fingers and her feet hanging over the edges, she’d done so recklessly. Thrown her limbs everywhere in her haste to stand, as no one she’d ever known had won a fistfight laying down. Which was what she thought she’d face once she awoke. A fight.

What she had encountered as soon as she’d jumped up, instead of the little grey frog-monster that had done something to her that put her on a commercial flight to a land of dreamless sleep, was the echo of a door being opened. Shut. A jangle of keys being twisted in a lock. Lennox had checked that her watch still clung to her wrist with a blind hand, her eyes focused on the half-open door of that bedroom, and curiosity had lassoed a rope around her neck and pulled.