And then there is Jax.
Jax is sixteen. Jax is full-on punk, not kind-of-alternative, not “going through a phase,” not “expressing himself” in the carefully managed way that reassures other parents at school events. Full-on. Bright pink spiky hair that stands straight up, shaved on the sides, piercings in his lip and eyebrow, a leather jacket that has absorbed so many layers of his gym bag and cheap body spray that it has developed its own ecosystem. Combat boots. Band shirts with skulls on them that I have made my peace with not reading too carefully.
People stare at him everywhere we go. At school events I watch parents clock him from across the room and then find their way to me with a strained smile and the particular comment that is intended to be kind but lands somewhere adjacent to it: “Well, he’s certainly expressing himself.” I hear things that people say thinking I am not within earshot. Kids like that always end up in trouble. Do you let him go out like that? He looks aggressive.
I have one response, and I have said it enough times that it has become a kind of reflexive truth: he’s a good kid.
Because he is. He holds doors open for strangers without being asked or noticed. He stops to pet every single dog he passes on the street, every single one, without exception, no matter how inconvenient the timing. He makes Lily laugh on FaceTime when she’s stressed about exams in a way that I, her mother with thirty-eight years of knowing how to handle her, cannot replicate. He hugs me in passing, usually when he is moving through the kitchen toward the refrigerator, and then continues on and pretends it did not happen and so do I. He is louder and more sarcastic and more disruptive than his sister in every measurable way, and he is also, quietly and without making a production of it, one of the most genuinely decent people I know.
But I still worry.
I worry that the way people see him will become the way he sees himself. That the stares and the whispers and the judgments will accumulate over time and do the thing that accumulated judgments do to people. I worry that one mistake, the kind every teenager makes, the kind that his sister made and recovered from without lasting consequence, will stick to him differently because of the hair and the jacket and the look, because the world is not fair about these things and I know it and he is starting to know it and neither of us knows what to do with that knowledge yet.
Last Friday night changed what I was worried about.
