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@Matteo Good idea. He’s gonna need it.
I turn the volume down on my phone and throw it back on my desk. This trip is going to be one major fucking headache. I return my attention to my computer screen and open the next email. I think I get through five more before the door to my office swings open. I reach under the table for the pistol I have strapped there, then bring my hand back up when I see my sixteen-year-old son waltzing in.
“Pops, how’re things?” Dante says casually as he plops himself down on the white leather sofa that’s off to one side of the room.
I look at the clock that hangs directly above his head. It reads one thirty in the afternoon. “Dante, shouldn’t you be at school right now?” I ask him.
“Should be,” he says.
I wait for him to continue, to explain why he’s in my office right now, instead of at the school I pay thousands of dollars a year for him to attend. “And why aren’t you there?”
“Okay, but first, promise me you won’t tell Mom,” he says. “She’ll freak the fuck out and get all lawyery and shit.”
This has my eyebrows rising to my hairline. I might keep certain things from my wife, like most of the business my family engages in on a daily basis. Don’t get me wrong, sheknows. We just don’t discuss the finer details of shit. What I don’t keep from her is anything that concerns our children.
Okay, well, I might not have told her about that time I found our son balls-deep in some girl in our fucking pool house a few months ago. There are some things a mother just really doesn’t need to imagine. Also Livvy still thinks Dante is her sweet, innocent baby boy. I don’t want to be the one to tell her how verynotinnocent our son is.
“Seriously, Dad, she will go down to the school and threaten to sue them or something.”
“Dante, what happened? You can either give me your full version, or I can call up Principal George and get his version now,” I tell him.
With a huff and an eye roll, my son sits up straighter. “Okay, I wasn’t actually doing anything malicious, but I might have accidentally on purpose hacked into the school’s network systems and, in the process, took down all their firewalls.”
I blink. Yes, my son is a tech genius. What did you expect when Livvy and I combined forces and created him? My wife is the only person I know who’s smarter than I am. It’s no surprise our children inherited our academic abilities. If only they would use them for good, instead of evil…
“You hacked into the school’s network systems? Why the fuck would you do that?” I ask him.
“Josie wouldn’t tell me where she lived, so I figured I’d just look in the admin files and find out for myself,” he says.
“You couldn’t just follow her home after school one day like a normal fucking stalker?” I ask him.
“I didn’t think of that. That’s a good one, Pops,” he says with a confirmatory nod.
“You’re not talking your way out of this. What are we looking at? Suspension? How many days?”
“Expelled.” He winces.
“You’re not being expelled,” I tell him. “I’ll sort it out.”
“Are you going to tell Mom?” he asks.
“No.” I wait for him to relax, get comfortable, before adding, “Youare.”
“What? Pops, I can’t. She’ll freak,” he tells me, like I don’t already know this.
I smile. “You just got expelled from school, Dante. Of course, she’s going to freak the fuck out. What’d you think would happen?”
“Well, I didn’t think I’d get caught, obviously.” He rolls his damn eyes again—one more time and I’m gonna slap him upside the head and hope they get stuck there.
“Obviously. Either you need to get better at hacking without leaving a trace or give up on it altogether,” I say.I know.I shouldn’t be encouraging him to do shit like that. But, in my world, there are a lot worse things a kid could be doing.
“I get better,” he tells me.
“Dante, this Josie girl. She the one from the pool house?” I ask him with a questioning brow.
“No, she’s new. But she doesn’t want to talk to me. Which is fucking weird. Every other chick in that school wants to talk to me.” He shrugs.
