Terry Peterson’s life has been one of non-decisions. At fifty-four, most of what he is and does and believes are the results of either decisions he has failed to make or, in a few cases, decisions someone else has made on his behalf (whether he wanted them to or not). Like, for example, his marriage, which commenced shortly after his fortieth birthday and not because of some mid-life epiphany or even any greater-than-average concern about what the neighbors might think of a forty-year-old guy living by himself. As it happened, Clinton Pendergrast was his boss at the time—an executive of that all-too-common sort who deeply, viscerally enjoys terrorizing his employees—and he (Pendergrast) had also happened to have a daughter, Renee, who needed marrying in the worst way, what with her being by then in her late thirties and showing neither prospects nor inclination to generate any, a situation the father found both unsustainable and occasionally embarrassing. And so through a complex arrangement of harmless promotions and behind-the-scenes matchmaking machinations, the pair had been introduced, Terry all but threatened into proposing, and Renee more than a little intimidated into accepting.
Terry’s employment with Pendergrast Senior had lasted just fourteen months beyond the nuptials, said nuptials themselves only another nine months thereafter (both of which decisions were made for Terry by Clinton and Renee respectively). This though, was more than adequate time for the begetting and arrival of Bernard Winchester Peterson, named in his entirety (or at least the first two thirds) by Clinton and Renee, in honor of Clinton’s grandfather on his mother’s side. Terry’s token lobbying for Terry Junior had been met with general derision. To the extent that anyone on the Pendergrast side felt the need to offer an explanation, the principal one had had to do with the complete lack of acceptability of such an androgynous name as Terry, his father’s sobriquet notwithstanding.
The divorce proceedings had not been especially acrimonious as such things go, what with Clinton more than a little pleased to be rid of (in both the professional and familial senses) Terry. There had been no compelling reason for the matter to get into court. Clinton had simply offered a pay-off figure and encouraged his soon-to-be-erstwhile son-in-law to accept it and vanish. Still, there had been the matter of little Bernard’s dispensation—but not really so much of a matter at that. As part of Terry’s inducement, the understanding had been that the infant would be naturally better off (both financially and societally) with his mother, and that had been that. At this Terry had offered a modest, to some a token, degree of rebuttal, but was immediately assured that any ensuing legal altercations would not only most certainly be won by the Pendergrasts and their legion of attorneys, but would as well result in revocation of the admittedly generous severance terms already proffered. And so Terry Peterson had taken the money and his belongings and moved to Austin, because he liked the weather and because he had a couple of relatives in the area, neither of whom had ever expressed any special desire to see, much less live near, him. But still, in the end, we all need at least one root in the soil.
Seven years later, a week or so prior to the July fourth holiday, Terry had been languishing beneath a cool shower, cleaning up after an all-afternoon session of backyard vegetable garden weeding, when the phone had rung. Renee had tragically and unexpectedly passed away and, absent any other viable options, and as distasteful as the Pendergrasts had unanimously found it, the family had reluctantly agreed that the father was logically next in the boy’s rearing hierarchy. His daughter’s untimely demise notwithstanding, Clinton had arrived at this decision with more than a bit of relief, seeing as how the boy had, in recent years, begun demonstrating a number of characteristics that seemed uncannily like his father, in particular a remarkable lack of aggression or ambition, traits that would have served him poorly indeed in the Pendergrast social and professional circles. Two weeks later, on the hottest day of a hotter-than-normal Austin summer, the boy had arrived unaccompanied at Austin International Airport, and shortly thereafter moved into Terry’s three-bedroom ranch house on Gilbert Street.
“Dad, I like Mrs. Sutter’s chicken a lot”, the boy Bernie offers, plucking a piece of gristle from between not-yet-fully-formed adult front teeth, surreptitiously flicking the detritus onto the kitchen floor from whence it is immediately absconded by the ever-vigilant family cat. “The skin’s the best!”
Wendy Sutter lives two doors down and across the street in a one-story, three-bedroom ranch that is twenty-five years old more or less and, save for siding color and material, almost exactly like the other thirty-three houses on Gilbert Street, all having been erected by the same builder over a two-year period. She is a widower and has informally adopted the Peterson men for lack of any of her own to care for, which oversight includes the frequent delivery of meals. She is fifteen years Terry’s senior and the relationship is nothing but that of good friends, though she would be lying to suggest that other thoughts had not occasionally crossed her mind.
“I like it too, Bernie. Only don’t talk with your mouth full please. And eat your broccoli. Benson is not going to bail you out of that obligation.”
The boy and his father sit at opposite ends of the kitchen table, one of those sixties-vintage types with the slightly sparkly Formica top and a band of dull, frequently dented stainless steel riveted around its edge. Chrome legs, one with a slight wobble and a wood shim beneath its foot to counteract the slightly uneven floor. Matching chairs with small age cracks at stress points in the vinyl seats. The linoleum is turned up a bit around the edges, and the kitchen, though functional and clean, would last have been regarded as modern sometime late in the (Lyndon) Johnson administration. Terry is neither especially handy nor possessed of copious discretionary income, so he does his best to keep the place presentable, and having visited several of his neighbors on one occasion or another, feels he is at least on even terms with what he has seen in other homes. Benson, an old and ponderous tabby cat with one glazed-over eye and a bald spot on his tail from constant worrying, drifts between the chair legs, trolling for any food that should happen to fall, accidentally or otherwise.
“What do you suppose Pastor Cressey meant this morning with all that business about wheels inside wheels and beasts with four sides? Sounded like he was describing a science fiction movie or something.”
Peterson and his son are more-or-less regular attendees of the Second Baptist Church of West Austin. Terry had not been much of a church goer himself prior to the boy’s arrival four years ago, but he had, after some deliberation, determined that, his own ambiguous ecumenical beliefs notwithstanding, exposing the boy to a degree of religious experience couldn’t hurt him any. If he then chose to leave it behind when he matured, well he certainly wouldn’t be the first. It didn’t hurt matters any that the mother of the church’s long-time pastor, Alvin Cressey, happened to live five doors down on their side of the street. That had led to more than one personal invitation to attend, an invitation Cressey had made to every resident of Gilbert Street at one time or another. So far as Peterson knew, everyone on the street had taken Cressey up on the offer with at least a courteous if irregular frequency of attendance, with the notable exception of the Steins, who were Jewish, and the Grissom and Norton families, who were Catholics, or papists as the good reverend would let slip from time to time, though never from the pulpit. Roman or Israeli affiliations aside, Cressey had even invited these families at least once, what with his emphasis on not so much inclusion as conversion.
“Well, son, I’m no Bible expert—that’s Pastor Cressey’s department—but I believe he was describing one person’s view of what things will be like when Jesus returns to earth.”
“Sounds like it would be kinda’ cool from what he was saying.”
“I don’t think that was exactly the sense he was trying to convey. I think he was trying to give folks the feeling that it would be a horrible time, and that folks that weren’t saved by then would wish like heck that they had been.”
“So when’s that gonna’ be, dad?”
“Well, no one knows. That was part of his point too. No one knows so everyone should live their lives as though he might come back at any minute.”
“But couldn’t you just wait until right before it happened and then get saved just in the nick of time?”
“I expect there’s folks who think they can manage it that way, but they’re sure taking their chances. And besides, you never know when you’re gonna’ die either, and after that, it’d just be too late now wouldn’t it?”
“But what–”
“Bernie, hand me your plate if you’re done,” Terry interrupts, rising from his seat and stepping to the sink. The boy, left unchecked, would continue the conversation endlessly, not at all a bad trait unless there were other things that needed getting done before bedtime. And one of those things was Bernie getting in an hour of French horn practice. Terry smiles and executes a well-understood horn-playing gesture with his hands, in response to which the boy offers an equally well practiced aww-dad look of kids everywhere who are being made, more or less against their will, to play a musical instrument in a junior high or high school band. Bernie shrugs in resignation, holds his empty plate toward his father, and leaves the kitchen.
It isn’t even that he dislikes playing the French horn. What he dislikes is the feeling (accurate as it turns out) that he was drafted into both playing in the junior high band and in having to learn the French horn besides. The Benjamin Richards Junior High has, over the years, spent a good deal of money providing musical instruments for the band, and has, with unnerving regularity, experienced a dearth of willing incoming sixth graders enthusiastic about joining, which seems odd at first blush, what with Austin being one of America’s great live-music cities. But that is precisely the problem, as it happens. Plenty of west Austin kids come from musical families and many have more than their share of musical ability. It’s just that the live music in Austin isn’t about trumpets and clarinets and tubas. It’s about guitars and pianos and fiddles, which is the direction in which most of the kids who demonstrate any musical proclivities at all are guided. Which is what makes Mr. Ernest’s band recruiting such a living hell each fall, and his rehearsals and performances throughout the year such an assault on the senses. For with the talented kids drawn to the guitars and fiddles, that leaves the band director with a group of not only largely unwilling but also essentially untalented musicians with which to perform his thankless job each year. Which is how Bernie Peterson had ended up sitting in George Ernest’s office within two weeks of arriving for the start of sixth grade.
In fact, Bernie had, on that inauspicious day, been offered a choice of instruments—clarinet or French horn. He hadn’t really thought enough about the issue to have a strong preference on the matter (aside, of course, from avoiding it in the altogether, which did not, alas, appear to be an option), and Ernest had seized the opportunity to steer the impressionable boy away from the clarinet, which he had three players of already, and toward the horn, of which he had only one. He had accomplished this by employing two arguments: first, that with only one other French horn player, Bernie was guaranteed greater recognition than would be the case as the fourth clarinet player, and second, that his partner in the French horn section would be none other than Natalie Pynchon. This second revelation was a calculated risk on Ernest’s part, as he was unaware of precisely what stage of adolescent development young Bernie might by then have achieved, i.e., whether he would in fact find the opportunity to spend a full period each morning with a distinctly above-average-looking female an inducement or a deterrent. In the event, Bernie had found neither of these arguments terribly compelling and had instead simply judged the French horn to be marginally less feminine than the clarinet and hence somewhat less likely to elicit abuse from the other boys in his class, abuse about which he had heard more than ample reports as he neared the conclusion of fifth grade earlier that spring. Boys (particularly the non-athletically-inclined ones) learn at a young age to take whatever steps they can, however trivial, to minimize the pain, both physical and psychological, that is certain to come from one’s peers. As it transpired, only some of the pain of Bernie’s first-year in junior high would come from his peers. A good deal would come from an unexpected direction—Natalie.
Once one reaches college age or so, a one-year gap makes no practical difference in how humans interact with one another. But as any adolescent can avouch, the difference between sixth and seventh grade may as well be a difference of species. Natalie was a year older than Bernie and went to considerable effort to ensure that he never forgot that inconvenient fact. Not only was she a grade ahead of him, but she also had a one-year head-start in proficiency on the French horn (an advantage of dubious objective value in the opinion of all parents save Natalie’s own). Still, that meant she had a decent idea what she was doing and even, to a degree, where her particular deficiencies lay, whereas Bernie had little sense yet for what he had gotten himself into, concluding in those early few weeks only that a) the horn case was a good deal heavier than that of a clarinet, and b) that it was profoundly difficult getting one’s lips pursed into the precisely correct French horn shape.
Back in his bedroom, with the door closed and the single window open against the warm Texas evening, Bernie extracts the instrument from its velvet-lined case, places a piece of sheet music on a wobbly stand, and sets to abusing it in more or less the same manner he has since beginning about six weeks earlier. Mr. Ernest had talked initially about there being a steep learning curve, but so far Bernie feels as though he hasn’t yet even gotten to the start of the incline. By the time the tortured notes begin fleeing the bedroom Terry has loaded the dishwasher and is well ensconced in his Lazy-Boy in front of the television, which is just beginning to broadcast the first of three nightly airings of Wheel of Fortune, a show he watches with near-religious fervor and regards himself as being fairly skilled at, so much so that he has thought from time to time about applying to be a contestant on the show. Wedged tightly onto Terry’s head is a pair of headphones which provide, in Terry’s opinion, superior TV audio, while offering the ancillary and not-inconsiderable advantage of blocking out nearly all the cacophony emanating from the boy’s bedroom, whose thin paneled door does precious little to attenuate its volume or enhance its quality. Indeed Terry wears the headphones so often that there is now a more or less permanent indentation across the top of his scalp from the strap.
Terry doesn’t know a thing about music, nor has he ever had the inclination to learn. He does though, like many parents, particularly those whose lives are lived in whole or in part vicariously through their progeny, feel that it would do the boy good to expose him to as many different experiences as he can manage to afford (high school band being essentially a free one), and to then allow him to choose his own course when he becomes suitably mature to express an informed preference. This child-rearing philosophy applies not only to Bernie’s music lessons and church going, but also to various and sundry other pursuits his father has either suggested or, in cases where the boy has identified something, approved of, into which latter category fell chess club, junior high newspaper editor, and, paradoxically, the football team. This last interest Terry feels comfortable allowing the boy to have an honest go at, despite his significantly below-average height and weight, and heretofore utterly undemonstrated athletic prowess. Based on the father’s own similar experience of thirty-five years hence, the combination of physical and psychological abuse routinely meted out by the jocks in any school very quickly separate, as it were, the athletic wheat from the chaff. Besides which, it is going to be logistically impossible for the boy to play on the football team while simultaneously playing halftime shows in the band anyway, and so one way or another the conflict will naturally resolve itself.
And then there is Natalie. Natalie who Bernie had come home that first afternoon after brand practice apparently rather excited about playing in the band with. And Natalie who then quickly morphed from highly intriguing if completely serendipitous pre-pubescent opportunity writ large into Natalie the one-year-older drama queen who almost immediately made it clear that she wanted nothing whatever to do with this nerdy new kid who didn’t even know where to put his fingers on the horn for God’s sake and who sure as hell wasn’t going to find out from her how to play the thing. Oh, and Natalie who then proceeded to eviscerate and emasculate Bernie at every opportunity with her peers and even, just for good measure, with his as well, with whom she, of course, made it known that she would normally not have deigned to associate or even speak, seeing as how they were all a year younger than her, but who she made herself talk with at least occasionally, specifically for the purpose of making Bernie’s life that much more miserable, and her own, by extension, that much more fulfilling. That Natalie.
And so what had started in those first few days to look like a positive if unexpected benefit of having been drafted into playing the French horn in high school band, had morphed, with frightening velocity, into the principal reason he was now so unquestionably against it, viz that no matter how much he improved his playing (which in any event was not yet taking place to any measurable degree), it would in no way improve his relationship with his fellow horn player, and was, in fact, demonstrably worsening it with his friends, who he had precious few of to begin with. Indeed, Natalie had, for that first year before Bernie’s arrival, rather enjoyed her status as the only French horn player, seeing as how it had resulted in any and all solos coming, by definition, her way, and had resulted as well in more accolades and recognition flowing in her direction, irrespective of whether deserved or not. There was, after all, no other player against whom to compare her performance, and this was, in truth, the real reason for her aversion to the sudden appearance of Bernie at her side in the Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday early-morning band practice classes. For not only was she now forced to endure a measure of kidding from her own peers about her new “friend,” but there was, in the longer run, always the chance that the kid might turn out to have some ability and could, as a consequence, make her look worse, which possibility she was not about to stand idly by and tolerate.
And so, being above average not only in appearance, but also intelligence and creativity, Natalie has set about employing the full battery of techniques passed down from one decade to the next by adolescent girls when faced with a potentially threatening social situation, particularly one that involves boys, even more particularly one that involves younger, or in any other way more vulnerable, boys, i.e., to not only torment him to the fullest extent possible, but also to conscript the services of her friends to do so as well, thus making the boy’s life even more of a living hell, which indeed it is thus rapidly becoming. And none of which Bernie can, with any veracity or effect describe to his father, at least not in a way that will render the situation anything but worse, insofar as Terry, as fathers will, usually responds to Bernie’s diatribes with statements of how the boy is surely over-reacting, or how pretty Natalie can’t possibly be that mean, but if Bernie really insists, Terry will march right down to the school and do something about the situation himself, which after some thought, Bernie correctly realizes would only make things far worse, inasmuch as he would then and forever after be the kid whose dad had to fight his battles for him. And so, as with so many school-age dramas, this is one Bernie is going to have to come to terms with on his own. And so far it isn’t happening.
What exactly is it that Natalie is capable of doing that makes Bernie’s life so miserable? Pretty, sweet Natalie with the delicate brown tresses and innocent smile that she breaks out whenever an adult happens to come by, but which instantly vanishes when it comes time to interact with either her peers, becoming instead the haughty sneer of sophisticated superiority, or inferiors such as Bernie, in which case it becomes a look superficially similar to the peer look, but without even the feigned and vestigial element of equality that the peers see, meaning that all Bernie sees is pure meanness—meanness whose source Bernie is clueless to understand and thus powerless to either deflect or diminish.
She can, and does, object in plaintive tones and with annoying regularity to Mr. Ernest about how Bernie’s ineptness with the instrument is dragging down her own dubious level of playing quality and by extension that of the entire band. She can, and does, mock his attempts with anyone in or out of the band who will listen, a favorite technique being the mimicking of his lip shape and movements in attempting the admittedly complex bilabial motor skills required to master the instrument, and which movements she herself is required to employ to the same purpose and in more or less the same way. And most unnerving, particularly to an adolescent boy, she compares, with apparently great derision and hilarity, his oral efforts to certain other activities that employ similar shapes and movements of the lips, with which activities the boy has as yet no practical familiarity, but which he nonetheless has already heard plenty about, and which she soon has others in the school emulating as well, so that Bernie’s general level of abuse and derision rises rather rapidly as others in the school jump on the, as it were, bilabial bandwagon whenever they encounter Bernie in the halls, in class, or wherever.
All of which is a rather long-winded of saying that each time the boy is obliged to retire to his bedroom to practice, invariably at his father’s nudging rather than his own initiative, he spends the majority of his time reflecting on the past day’s indignities and those doubtless to follow the next day, leaving precious little mental capacity for use in focusing on getting better at his playing. None of which concerns Terry a jot, seeing as how he has effectively blocked out the issue, both its psychological and its musical impacts, the former by rationalizing that he has done all he can by offering to visit the school (said offer having been declined by Bernie, besides which Terry would, in actuality, almost certainly not have been willing to follow through on anyway), and the latter by virtue of his noise-canceling headphones. Having thus addressed both of his son’s issues with complete ineffectiveness, he leans comfortably back in his recliner, completely oblivious to the fact that a third related dilemma is brewing as well, and from an entirely unexpected direction, i.e., right here in his own neighborhood.
For while his own hearing is protected from Bernie’s musical machinations by expensive headphones, his neighbors up and down Gilbert Street are not so equipped and are growing, unbeknownst to the men of the Peterson household, increasingly impatient with what has become, in the past six weeks, an aural infringement on what they believed to be their personal liberty, viz the freedom to sit out in their yards, or lounge about with their windows open, and to do so without hearing for an hour after dinner each evening the unfortunate sounds that emanate (and carry for an altogether remarkable distance) from Bernie’s bedroom window, which at this still-warm time of year, is routinely left open throughout the boy’s practice sessions. Terry’s first whiff of a problem comes the Saturday morning he walks to the end of his driveway to fetch the paper, happens to encounter Red Argent similarly engaged at the end of his driveway across the street, and is greeted with what strikes him as a rather unneighborly lack of small talk and a slightly supercilious expression as he turns to walk back to his own house. There have, as well, been some new and unusual glances at the grocery store in recent days, the degree of strangeness and, it seems to Terry, ire, rising more or less in proportion to the proximity of the individual’s house with that of the Peterson’s. And because Terry thoroughly lacks the gumption to simply walk up to a neighbor, either on their doorstep or in the grocery store, and ask what the problem might be, the source of the agitation remains a mystery for some time. That is, until the day he comes out of the house to leave for work and finds the first note on his windshield.
It is a Post-It Note™ actually, only not of the traditional pale yellow variety. The author has gone to the trouble of using one of the neon orange ones, and then, as though the paper color doesn’t convey a sufficient degree of urgency, has written the message with a red pen in all capital letters, apparently not realizing until too late that the red-on-orange palette actually results in a lack of contrast that makes the message somewhat difficult to read, though of course the note itself is not to be missed. Still, it is, after all, readable, and, surprisingly, not entirely impolite, though this latter possibly with an eye toward satire:
We don’t mind the boy learning a musical instrument, but we would prefer not to listen to it. Please consider closing the window. Thank you!
Almost the sort of thing a reasonable person might have asked without the veil of anonymity. The messenger has even taken the time to clean a small area of Terry’s windshield down near the driver’s-side wiper, so that the note won’t peel off from the road dirt and blow away. Yet here it is, an unsigned note that bears the distinct tone of having been delivered on behalf of the entire neighborhood. Which is how it comes to pass that Terry spends the next few days looking askance whenever he encounters anyone who lives within a few houses of his. And it all might have ended there, i.e., with the window pulled closed and everyone happy (or at least as happy as they’d been previously), except for the confluence of several unfortunate factors that all more or less merge around this time.
The heat wave that will eventually define this summer had begun ramping up the day before the appearance of the note. It really gets going in earnest over the ensuing day or two and won’t let up for nearly three weeks. Austin is a place where late-summer temperatures regularly exceed one hundred, so for the weather channel to be calling it a heat wave in this part of the country calls for something extra special, in this case afternoon readings for eleven straight days in excess of one-oh-five, with an extra dose of Houston-like humidity thrown in, the normal absence of which is a main reason many folks move from Houston to Austin in the first place. It is during the third day of the heat wave that the Peterson’s air conditioner, which has been dubious for much of the summer so far, finally gives up the ghost. Long story short, Terry is, after waiting two days for a visit from the long-suffering repairman, looking at a fifteen-hundred-dollar repair bill and a one-week-minimum wait for parts to arrive off back-order from someplace up in New Jersey, the usually adequate stock having been consumed in the first two days of the heat wave by the numerous homeowners in Austin who are all discovering around the same time the latent deficiencies just waiting to be unearthed in their own systems.
All of which means that the Petersons are going to be living with exclusively ceiling fan cooling for the foreseeable future, which, in turn, does not, in any viable way, allow for leaving the windows in the house closed. The unseasonal heat also means peoples’ tempers are going to be a little shorter than usual, the consequences of which will become apparent soon enough. And to top it all off, the heat in the Peterson’s house makes practicing the horn, the need for which continues unabated, that much more annoying to Bernie, given that it takes more than a little physical effort, the result of which is that the quality of his output suffers as a consequence, the reduction in quality of his already marginal playing now made that much more noticeable to the residents of Gilbert Street who are themselves attempting to combat, or at least survive, the heat by sitting outside on porch stoops fanning themselves with magazines or, if stuck inside for some reason, inclined as well to leave their own windows open.
————-
And so in direct contravention of all the accepted rules that govern the craft of writing, I am going to simply stop here because I feel as though I have written myself into a bit of a corner, both from plot and character standpoints. Believe me, I realize that it’s really bad form to just quit like this, particularly what with the conflict and action (such as it is) having pretty much reached its zenith and all. There are plenty of unresolved conflicts, and the tension seems, if anything, to have mounted to the point where there really isn’t any good way out of this situation for Bernie or his father that doesn’t involve totally pissing off his neighbors and maybe even starting a fight with someone, which, trust me, wouldn’t go well for Terry anyway. Then there’s the whole Natalie thing, which, as anyone knows who has attended junior high school, is not going to end well for Bernie no matter how he handles it. For what it’s worth I was one of three tuba players in my high school band (the worst, least experienced one), and so, believe me, I feel the boy’s pain and wish more than anyone that I could cobble together some plausible way out of this whole thing for him.
Ah, but I hear you arguing, couldn’t Bernie just stop practicing for a while and give the neighbors a break? Fair point, but if the boy stops in anticipation of cooler weather or a timely repair of the air conditioner, neither of which we have plausible reason to believe is forthcoming, then surely his musical education will suffer, and the social problems already described will, as a result, only get worse. And I’m sure there are defeatists among you who are probably saying about now something along the lines of “Well, to hell with it then. Just quit band and be done with it.” As a former band member I won’t even dignify that point of view with a retort.
And it’s a pity really, because the hallmark of any great story is supposed to be getting to really know your characters, even to the point of caring about them, and then torturing them by placing them in situations of great stress or conflict to see how they work themselves out of it. Do they rise to the occasion, respond when events try to thrust greatness upon them? Or do they cower in a corner someplace hoping things will fix themselves? I think we’ve already got a pretty good idea how Terry will answer that question. Tougher to say with Bernie—remember, this is the undersized kid who still thinks he can play football.
So what we’re left with in the end is a fundamentally good kid who lives through much of his adolescence with his mother, only to have her die on him and foist him off on his father, who, recall, didn’t put up a particularly vigorous fight to get him in the first place and who isn’t actually much of a father figure, what with his general wishy-washiness and tendency to live vicariously through the boy’s activities. Hell, it will probably take an entire novel just to get to the bottom of the angst this kid’s going to have built up by the time he makes it out of high school. Best for now if we just leave him to sweat it out in the bedroom and hope that none of the neighbors is planning on having a late afternoon patio party.