The Kent Farm Kitchen…
Saturday Evening
Jonathan Kent waited patiently until Clark was safely out in the barn before finally saying anything.
He stood quietly at the kitchen window, watching the yellow light click on high in the loft…
Clark’s light, the warm, comforting amber glow that always meant his teenage son was safely up in his private space with his telescope and his heavy thoughts…
and when he was absolutely sure the boy was fully settled, he turned slowly back to Martha.
“The football thing,” Jonathan started quietly.
Martha looked up steadily from the soapy sink where she was carefully washing the empty pie plates.
Her expression was completely neutral…
the highly particular, careful neutrality of a smart woman who had already firmly formed an opinion and was patiently waiting to hear if her stubborn husband had finally reached the exact same conclusion.
“Clark really wants to play,” she said simply.
“I know.”
“He is sixteen years old, Jonathan. Wanting to play high school football is a completely normal thing to want.”
“He could easily hurt someone.”
“He clearly knows that. He has always deeply known that.” Martha calmly dried her hands on a checkered dish towel and turned all the way around.
“Jonathan, we honestly cannot keep endlessly telling him no just because of what he secretly is. He desperately needs to actually live. He needs to just be normal.”
Jonathan was quiet for a long moment.
This was a very old argument…
old and totally unresolved and probably completely unresolvable.
The permanent, exhausting tension of raising an alien boy with the terrifying physical strength to casually crush coal into diamonds, but the gentle, human heart to openly cry at a sad movie.
“That’s not actually what I wanted to talk about, atleast not entirely.” Jonathan finally said.
Martha raised a curious eyebrow.
“The other boy,” Jonathan said slowly.
“Alex Carter.”
“What about him?” Martha asked softly.
“He seemed like such a wonderfully polite young man when we had him over for pie. It genuinely breaks my heart, really. How incredibly hard it must be for him, growing up all alone without his parents.”
Jonathan walked slowly back to the wooden table and sat heavily down.
He pulled his ceramic coffee cup toward him…
totally cold by now, but it gave his calloused hands something familiar to hold onto.
“I know, sweetheart. And it was definitely good to finally meet him, to put a real face to the name. He was perfectly respectful. But I’ve been really thinking about the bridge. The accident. The exact way Clark told it.”
Clark had come home from the terrifying river incident very pink-cheeked and quietly wired with the specific, highly nervous energy of someone who had just done something completely extraordinary and was trying very, very hard to act like they totally had not.
He had bravely told them the whole story…
the broken bridge, the silver Porsche violently going over, instantly jumping into the freezing water.
He had been incredibly careful.
He had told a very good, believable story.
But he had made a tiny slip-up on one highly specific detail.
“Clark specifically said Alex got the heavy door open,” Jonathan said slowly, his voice low.
“The driver’s side door. While they were completely underwater.”
“Mm.”
“Martha, that is a totally stuck car door. Underwater. Freezing cold water, massive impact stress, incredible hydraulic pressure from the rapid sinking. Those heavy metal doors are nearly impossible to force open from the safe inside, let alone from the outside.”
“Well, Clark has his super strength.”
“Right, but Clark specifically wasn’t the one who supposedly opened it. He clearly said Alex casually opened it. Then, Clark quickly pulled the rich driver out.”
Jonathan slowly turned the cold coffee cup in his rough hands.
“I asked Clark… exactly how Alex miraculously managed it. Clark instantly said he just figured the locking mechanism must have popped on the hard impact. A lucky break.”
Martha was deeply quiet.
“That’s exactly Alex’s phrase. Lucky break. That’s exactly what they told the driver.” Jonathan looked seriously at his wife.
“Alex was actively covering for our boy. He didn’t even blink. He just smoothly gave Clark a perfect alibi.”
The warm kitchen was completely silent except for the distant, low sound of a heavy truck passing far out on the county road.
“You’re deeply worried about Alex,” Martha said knowingly, expertly reading his troubled expression.
“I think something strange actually happened underwater, and Alex definitely saw considerably more than Clark is naively letting on. But instead of running away in terror, he actively helped him hide it.” Visit NovelPing for the full chapter.
Jonathan set down his cold cup.
“And when he sat right there at our family table last week… I watched him closely. Not because I don’t trust him, but… Martha, his eyes. They honestly don’t look like they actually belong to someone his age. There’s an incredibly heavy weight buried deep there.”
“He’s had to grow up terribly fast, Jonathan,” Martha said gently.
“Just like you said, he tragically lost his parents. That brutally forces a young child to mature.”
“I know,” Jonathan agreed quietly, his deep tone actively softening with genuine sympathy.
“He’s only fifteen years old. Yet he boldly pulled a billionaire’s son directly out of a freezing river and expertly performed CPR without hesitating for a single second. That’s not just basic maturity; that’s someone who has forcefully learned to completely handle a massive crisis entirely on his own because he has absolutely no one else to ever rely on. He sat right at our table, happily ate your pie, made lovely conversation, and politely answered every single question I asked… but he was so incredibly careful not to burden us with absolutely anything true about himself.”
Jonathan slowly shook his head, looking deeply troubled rather than overly suspicious.
“That’s someone who has painfully learned to be very, very guarded just to survive.”
Martha walked over and sat down directly across from him.
“What do you want to do?”
“I just want to make absolutely sure he’s okay,” Jonathan’s voice was deeply warm, filled completely with a good father’s fierce protective instinct.
“And I really want to make sure things are totally safe for him, and for Clark. Clark trusts people so incredibly easily. It’s easily one of the things I deeply love most about him, and it’s also one of the exact things that completely terrifies me. He’s totally opened up to Alex because Alex bravely helped him at the bridge, and Clark doesn’t easily forget things like that.”
“Do you really think it’s a bad thing? Their fast friendship?”
Jonathan thought deeply about it.
He thought about the quiet boy happily sitting at his kitchen table…
eagerly eating warm apple pie, asking polite questions, and smiling pleasantly in a strange way that definitely didn’t quite reach those old, deeply watchful eyes.
He thought about exactly how incredibly grateful he truly was that Alex had been down there for his son.
“I think he’s a genuinely good kid who’s had a really, really hard life,” Jonathan said finally.
“I appreciate exactly what he did for Clark much more than I can ever say. But he’s highly complicated. And I think highly complicated kids who get this close to Clark really need us to pay close attention, just to make absolutely sure they know they always have a safe place here if they ever need it.”
Martha warmly reached all the way across the wooden table and gently put her hand directly over his, squeezing it affectionately.
“Then we’ll definitely pay close attention,” she said with a warm, reassuring smile.
“We’ll carefully figure it out completely together.”
The warm yellow light in the barn loft burned steadily on through the quiet evening.
Clark Kent, totally unaware that he was currently being discussed, slowly tilted his telescope directly toward the front of the neighbor’s house and looked quietly at the love of his life.