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“Just dumb.”
“I need a little more than that, Toby. What did you argue over?”
Toby hunched over his plate, still not looking at me. I slid the plate away from him to the side of the table.
“Hey!” he protested but finally looked up at me.
“If you’re upset enough to call me for a ride, then I expect an explanation.”
“He’s a jerk, okay?” Toby exploded. “He doesn’t like GrasshopPeers, and he makes fun of me because I like Clark. He calls me a teacher’s pet just because I follow the rules.”
“Oh, hey, there’s nothing wrong with respecting your teacher,” I said. “Clark is our friend, but even if he wasn’t, I’d expect you to follow the rules.”
“I know that,” he said, sounding annoyed.
“Is that all that happened? He called you a teacher’s pet?”
Toby shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know. Can we go home now?”
I suspected there was more to the story, but I wasn’t going to get it from him right now. I threw some cash onto the table. “Sure. Let’s go home and you can get some sleep, kiddo. We’ll talk more later.”
He didn’t look pleased with that idea, but he didn’t argue, so I counted it a win. I’d call Will’s parents a little later, see if they knew anything about the falling-out between the boys. I hoped it was just kids being bratty with each other, but Toby had never left a sleepover early before.
The fact their argument had somehow revolved around Clark worried me. Of all the concerns I’d had about dating Clark, I’d never considered that Toby might get flack from other kids over it. If Will was giving Toby a hard time, he wasn’t a good friend in the first place.
Still, the sooner Clark and I could be honest with Toby, the better. He deserved to know what he was really fighting for.
* * *
CLARK
“Are you finished, Toby?”I asked as I stood to clear our dinner plates from the table. “You didn’t eat much goulash. Did you not like it?”
Toby shrugged without looking at me. “It was okay.”
“It was better than okay,” Hunter said, flashing me a smile. It wasn’t his usual relaxed grin though. “Toby is just a little nervous because he needs to tell you something.”
I glanced between father and son, who were both oddly tense tonight. It had become routine for me to come by a few nights a week. Hunter and I took turns cooking and cleaning, and tonight he’d made dinner as usual, but it was obvious something strange was going on. My immediate thought was that Toby had found out about our relationship, but why wouldn’t Hunter warn me if that were the case?
“Okay,” I said slowly. “I’ll just put these in the sink and then we can talk?”
“Sounds good,” Hunter said firmly. “Right, Tobes?”
Toby shrugged, then nodded. He glanced at me and then away, and when he spoke, his voice was barely audible. “Okay.”
Toby had been quiet at school too. He and Will seemed to be giving each other the cold shoulder, but when I’d tried to check on them, they’d both clammed up, so I wasn’t sure what was going on.
I rinsed the plates, then left them in the sink rather than loading them into the dishwasher, too curious to finish before returning to the table. “What’s going on?”
Hunter reached over and squeezed Toby’s shoulder. “Go on. Tell him what you told me.”
Toby kept his head down as he said, “Will turned in a fake news column.”
I blinked. “He did what?”
Toby looked up at me, his expression a mix of stress and misery. “He copied something off the Internet and changed the names and dates,” he said. “Then he turned it in to the news blog.”
My heart sank. “Oh, no.”
