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“Calm down, Alex,” Matt instructed, placing a firm hand on my knee. “He needs you to be calm. We’ll get this sorted, whatever it is.”
Thatwehelped me breathe more easily. Matt spotted Ryan before I did, waiting outside the school gates, all alone, his shoulders slumped. He raised his arm in a half-hearted wave.
“Hi, sweetheart.” I greeted him, as brightly as I could. He slung his bag across the back seat, his rumpled body following suit. Red-rimmed eyes told me he’d been crying, and as he grunted a sort of hello, more tears started to fall. A sharp pain tugged at my chest.
“Come on, sweetheart. Let’s get you home and then we’ll talk. I’ll drop Matt off on the way.”
“You don’t need to,” he mumbled. “I know you were supposed to be going out for the day. Sorry.”
“Gosh, that’s okay. You come first. Matt and I can go out any old time.”
“I don’t mind if you prefer to drop me off,” Matt murmured. I shook my head. If Ryan said he could stay, then I was only too keen to have him alongside.
Ryan stared miserably out of the window until we reached home. The house stood as I’d left it, less than an hour earlier. “I’ll put the kettle on,” Matt suggested, making himself scarce. Ryan slumped onto the sofa, drained, and I made myself comfortable next to him. Whatever he revealed, I would follow Matt’s advice and act in a calm, reassuring manner. No matter what.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on then, sweetheart?”
Tilting his head back, Ryan squeezed his eyes shut. A single tear dribbled down his cheek and he wiped it away with the heel of his hand.
“Chloe’s finished with me.”
Oh. Relief whooshed out of my lungs. Thank God. I could deal with that. Nothing too serious, although not to be belittled either. First love and first heartbreak. Christ, I knew all about that. Thank goodness he hadn’t bullied anyone. Or sniffed glue, which had been an outlandish idea, to be honest. I didn’t even know if that was still a thing. Moreover, he hadn’t downloaded porn on the school computer network nor mainlined heroin. My shoulders relaxed.
Ryan’s face, however, tinged with colour and the single tear was joined by a steady trickle. “She wanted…she kept wanting me to…to sleep with her. And I said no because I didn’t want to. I don’t want to sleep with anyone yet. But she kept going on. And now she’s telling everyone that I’m scared and everything. She’s telling them all it’s because I’ve…I’ve got a small…you know, knob. There’s, like, some meme going around that she started. And I don’t want to be at school, because everyone’s taking the piss.”
Tears were in full flow now; his last words had come out in a rush. Grabbing him, I hugged him close as his body shuddered. “Shh, sweetheart, it’s okay.”
He heaved against me, great, wracking sobs and I rubbed his back, rocking him like I’d done when he was much, much smaller. I couldn’t recall the last time he’d cried. Not even when he’d broken his collar bone last year and the sharp bony end had looked about to erupt through his skin.
My intense relief swung into vitriol so quickly I risked whiplash. I kept my voice as even as possible. “Can I get this straight, Ryan? Are you telling me that this girl, this…um…friend of yours, is spreading vile rubbish about you because you don’t…don’t want to have…um…full sex with her?”
His head moved up and down my shoulder. “Yeah. I don’t know what I did wrong. I wish I’d just said yes now.”
“You did nothing wrong, Ryan,” I answered fiercely. “Nothing at all.”
An overwhelming desire to roar, beat my chest and kick something very hard surged through me. How dare they? How fucking dare someone bully my boy? My sweet, sixteen-year-old boy? So what if the body in my arms belonged to a man? The person inside, sobbing on my shoulder, was only a bewildered child. And if everything he said were true—and why the hell would he be making it up—then my child was being sexually harassedandbullied. This was most definitelynotokay.
Over the last year or so, the school had sent correspondence galore about boys’ behaviour and how they should respect girls. That our sons should be aware that no means no, even if no had been preceded by a yes, because all girls had a right to change their mind. Even if they were drunk, even if they led you on, even if they bought the fucking condoms and were halfway through unwrapping one and rolling it onto your knob. And, as a responsible parent of a boy, I was totally on board with that. One hundred and ten percent. Hell, I’d even watched one of the educational videos with a mortified fifteen-year-old Ryan sitting next to me. We’d had the chat. That bad behaviour should be called out, stamped out, never tolerated.
But what about when it happened the other way around? Where were my letters and videos and lectures about that?
I let him cry it out. Mostly because I needed space to curb my anger and had no clue what to do next that didn’t involve stampeding the school and demanding they sort this shit out. Ryan’s crying settled into occasional sniffs and heaves. My shoulder was drenched with tears.
At some point, Matt padded into the sitting room with two cups of tea and a glass of water. I took the water from him and offered it to Ryan.
“Come on sweetheart, drink some of this.”
Without comment, Matt followed the water with a handful of tissues. I threw him a helpless look. In the face of a medical crisis in the operating theatre, I was reliably unflappable. Cardiac arrest? Ruptured aneurysm? Bring it on, Dr Valentine was your man. Yet here, with my desperately miserable son, aside from a burning rage to lash out, I felt utterly impotent. Thank God Matt still had control of his senses.
“Ryan.” His voice was gentle, as he took the soggy tissue from Ryan’s hand and offered a fresh one. “You did the right thing. Not only in telling your dad, but in being brave enough to say no to Chloe in the first place.”
Ryan snivelled, still wrapped in my arms. He nodded once, listening to Matt’s calm, rational words. “You should never feel forced to do anything you don’t want to, just to fit in. You’re your own man. Well done for sticking to what you believe to be right.”
Christ, why couldn’t I have come up with that sensible speech?
“I know,” Ryan mumbled. He gave his nose a noisy blow. “But it’s really hard, isn’t it? Because they’re all laughing at me, and I’ve got to face everyone again tomorrow. And I don’t want to.”
“Yes, it is hard,” agreed Matt with a nod. “It’s absolutely horrible for you. School can be brutal sometimes. But you’ll get through it. You’re strong and loved by your mum and your dad. And while it seems enormous now, all things pass with time.”
