Chapter 5 (by TorNesorNerob)
Harvey arrived home. Who ever saw a teenager now who wasn’t completely captivated by the little screen in their hands? But Harvey wasn’t looking at his phone the way gossiping or dramatic teenagers would. No, he was looking at it as if studying something.
“If you keep staring at that phone like that, you’re gonna go blind, Harvey,” his mother said as she walked around her distracted son in the kitchen with a hot pot of soup. “How was your day?”
“Huh?”
“I said if you keep staring at that phone, you’re gonna go blind and how was your day?” She repeated, mildly annoyed as she set the pot on a trivet.
“Oh, yeah, good,” said Harvey without looking up.
“Harvey?” she wiped her hands on her apron.
Harvey didn’t seem to hear and keep looking at his phone as if it held the meaning of life itself.
“Harvey Johnson, I am talking to you!”
“Yeah, ’ma. I said it was good.”
“Will you put the bloody phone down?”
Harvey shifted the phone down a couple of inches to make eye contact with his mother for the first time since he arrived and only briefly.
“What is it, ’ma?”
“How are you really? I know your friend -- ”
“I said I’m fine, ’ma!” and he lifted the phone to his face again. He started for the stairs, “I’ll be in my room.”
Macy sometimes wondered if she’d been too much of an enabler to her children. Harvey’s older brother was in college, but never called home or answered his parents calls anymore. They only knew he was doing well because of social media. His little sister was non-verbal, but other than that a completely normal child. Autism had been ruled out, but she was 10 years old and the only thing about her speech that had changed since her birth was that she no longer wailed when she was suffering discomfort. Now she just pouted.
The most seemingly-normal of the Johnson children was Harvey. He was a handsome boy and always seemed to have a new girl on his tail, but the last one, Amy, had apparently killed herself and Harvey hadn’t batted an eye. Macy herself felt terribly about it, but Harvey had refused to go to the funeral and pretended he’d never even met Amy.
When Macy heard rumors that Amy’s mom suspected foul play, her stomach churned. She loved her son, but there was an unsettling coldness about him, as if he had no idea what it was to have human emotion. He could feel pain, but he didn’t seem to realize when he was causing it. Or he didn’t care.
https://theprose.com/post/262170/chapter-5
https://theprose.com/book/2114/the-third-patient-collaborative-writers
https://theprose.com/challenge/8377
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