Donorboy by Brendan; Halpin Read Free Book Online

read it. There’s a whole thing in there about how silence implies consent. Thomas More tries to use it as a defense to stop Henry the Eighth from cutting his head off. Anyway, so if I say, “We’re on the same side,” for example, and you say nothing, for example, we can take that to mean that you assent to the statement.
    RB: Whatever.
    SC: Do you want to stay here?
    RB: You mean now?
    SC: I mean do you want to keep going to school here? Because I think this guy is an idiot, and you should stay here just to spite him, but if you’d rather start over somewhere else, we can do that. I just want to help you get what you want here.
    RB: Yeah, you care a lot about what I want. Drop me off at Karen’s then.
    ( Silence. )
    SC: Okayyyy … Well, I guess we’re done here.
    END OF RECORDING
    To: [email protected]
    From: [email protected]
    Subject: Counselor meeting
    Good afternoon. I’ve just returned from a meeting with Rosalind’s guidance counselor, which, apart from providing the food and shelter, was supposed to be my first official real dad act and ended horribly. The guidance counselor essentially wants me to put Ros in some kind of group home for troubled teens, and Ros doesn’t want me to call her Ros and wants to live with Karen.
    I really didn’t know what to do, and it just went horribly. I started getting all lawyerly with the counselor, which didn’t appear to make any progress, though I thought up a good line to use: “Do you understand that I sue schools for a living?” But I want to save that one for something special.
    In any case, it’s clear that Rosalind is having a hard time with her grief, and I appear to have hooked her up with a real dud of a therapist, at least to start with, and the school is just flummoxed. I suppose they have fifteen hundred kids there and just have nothing in place for the small percentage in crisis, but it really made me angry. The counselor made it clear that Charlesborough is not a school for kids with problems.
    So, at the end of the day, the counselor is angry at me, I am angry at him, and Rosalind appears to be angry at both of us.
    Then again, she pretty much appears to be angry at all times, but her playing the Karen card seems to indicate a spike in her anger level.
    I am once again finding that I have no talent for this parenting business, which may be why the eligible bachelorettes have been less than inclined to stick around in the last few years. Do you think they have some sort of radar about that? Well, given the number of troglodytes who father children, I suppose the answer there has to be no.
    Ugh. Please tell me that this is going to get better.
    â€”Sean
    To: [email protected]
    From: [email protected]
    Subject: Re: Counselor meeting
    Hmm … so the counselor was a tool and the teen was sullen? Sounds like every parent meeting I’ve ever been to. Seriously, I go to like five or six of these a year, and if you didn’t scream at anybody, you did good. I’ve seen parents look like they were about to hit their kids and also sat there for twenty minutes with the counselor and the kid and no parent while the kid looks at us like, “Well, failing stuff to get attention was evidently a bust.” But I have also seen people who appeared normal and loving hit a brick wall with their kids. Nobody knows what to do with teenagers, and most administrators are dicks. Give yourself a break.
    I don’t know what to tell you about the bachelorettes and why they haven’t stuck around except what I’ve already told you a million times. I will say that whenever I am at the playground with just Max, there are many opportunities to mingle with the single moms if I wanted to, so maybe taking Rosalind in will pay some unexpected dividends, like you will meet some nice woman when you are both bailing out your kids or something.
    That was supposed to be