William would never have actually harmed his wife. He loved Maddy more than anything in the world. But every now and again he felt that he had to resort to a bit of bluster to carry across his point, especially to his oft-times addle-pated son. He stopped shaking the sheet and held it at arm's length, as if it were somehow contaminated, glowering down at the brown-haired, brown-eyed, and totally unmanageable Robert as his mother pushed him forward.

"Spelling: D, Arithmetic: A+..." Though he could never have admitted it in the middle of what was supposed to be a lecture to set Bobby on the straight and narrow with his school-work, that A+ made accountant Will Drake damn proud of his kid. "Reading," he continued relentlessly, "C-, Science: C, Social Studies: B, and finally conduct..." Robert squirmed and looked away from his father's gaze, suddenly finding the dust-coated toes of his Keds unaccountably entrancing. "AN F, ROBERT! How can anyone flunk conduct? What about the concept of sit still and be quiet can't you understand?" Sullen silence from the boy. "Answer me, young man, or I'll have my belt off so fast!"

Robert had to duck his head back down to hide a smile. With his father's words had come the image of his dad's gray slacks falling down around his ankles without the belt's support. But he knew better than to let that smile through or to say anything about his mental picture. He was a class clown, but he was no dummy and he knew that trying to be funny while his dad was in this mood was to court disaster or grounding at the very least.

"I understand, Dad..." he muttered, trying to look and sound sorry about his grades. He wasn't really, though. Mr. Peeve was OK, but his classes were as boring as mud. And it wasn't Bobby's fault that the old tortoise didn't have a sense of humor.

"Not according to your teachers!"

Bobby winced inwardly. He knew that tone...

"Until your grades show a marked improvement, young man, there will be no watching television in this house. At least not by you. Now go to your room and think about these grades." William heard a soft mutter from his son's direction. "What?"

"I said that if you had to sit in Mr. Peeve's crummy ol' class all day long, you'd get bored too!"

Before his father could react, Bobby shot out of the kitchen and up the stairs to his room. The door slammed shut before his dad had taken a single step. When he finally puffed up to the door, William found it locked.

"Bobby, open this door!" he yelled, pounding on the poster of Annette and Cubby covering the top half of his son's door.

"Leave me alone!"

William opened his mouth to respond in kind to the insubordinate little snot, when Maddy lay a gentle hand on his arm. "Honey, your friends will be here soon. Just leave Bobby alone and let him think it over."

"Dammit, Madeline, we can't just let him start getting away with behavior like this. He's having discipline problems enough without us coddling him."

"You're both angry, Will. Try talking again when you've both had a change to cool down." She ignored he husband's derogatory snort. "I'll hurry up and clear away the dinner dishes. Your friends should be here in a few minutes."

William stifled a groan. It was his turn to host the office's poker night. "I forgot," he sighed. "That kid... you know, sometimes I don't think he's ours. He acts like such an air-head in school. I don't think he'll ever amount to anything."

Madeline clucked her tongue in disapproval that she knew her husband wouldn't catch, but didn't say anything. Will went on like this all the time, but she just knew that he couldn't possibly mean it. Her husband was a good man and provider. She gave herself her usual blithe reassurances. 'He's just had a bad day, that's all. The workload's been so heavy lately, he'll come out of it.'

"I mean, it's bad enough that he hung around with that little colored kid down the block," he continued. "He shouldn't be associating with those people."

"Will, you're positively paranoid. Del was Bobby's best friend and the Thomas's are a very nice family."

"Christ, Maddie, I didn't mean it like that. They're good enough neighbors, I guess, but they're just not our kind of people and I still think that their moving here was a bad idea. Birds of a feather, you know?" His wife tried to placate him with a smile, which he took as a signal to continue. "I don't want Bobby learning to talk trash is all.

He's got a good enough hang on it as it is." The doorbell rang. "I'll get it. It's probably the boys."

Upstairs, Robert Drake pulled his ear away from the air vent set in the floor and blinked back his tears. His own dad thought he an air-head and worse! He didn't even want him for a son! And his mom hadn't even stood up for him.

"See if I care," he muttered, throwing himself full-length on his bed.

Bobby actually had a set of bunk-beds, the top one waiting for that brother or sister, that potential ally, that had never come along.

Feeling totally alone in the world, Bobby muffled his sobs in his pillow until he finally cried himself into emotional exhaustion and fell asleep .

William Drake hated hosting card night, even if it was only once a month. The guys always wanted to play poker, a game that he had absolutely no skill at, and always wanted to eat pork rinds and cheese curls, foods he had little tolerance for. Someone always brought those damn filterless cigarettes instead of a nice, relaxing cigar. None of these men were even really close friends of his.

Drake's gaze wandered around the kitchen table. Maybe they weren't his close friends, he admitted, but they were the crowd that he was supposed to associate with. CPAs quickly approaching middle age, most with thickening middles and receding hairlines. Except for the new guy, the one that had just been hired onto the firm a month ago. He was young, fresh out of college, and, excepting the wire-rimmed glasses and the short ponytail he had his jet-black hair tied into, fairly good looking.

But the glasses and the ponytail were enough to kill Will's opinion of the kid. The boy looked too much like a damned hippie.

"Hey, Drake, your bet," someone, either Smith or Jones, reminded him.

"Huh? Oh, yeah." He studied the pot and threw in a blue chip paused for a second, and threw in a red one. "Raise."

The new guy... Christian, that was his name. Christian Dehnly... looked over his carefully fanned cards and threw in a few chips. "I will call." He pronounced each word carefully.

With a soft curse, Will dropped his cards (a nothing hand to Dehnly's two pair) on the table and shoved his chips over to Christian. "Here, take 'em, Chris."

"My name is Christian," he said, raking in his winnings to the fair- sized pot. "Please don't call me Chris unless you feel comfortable enough with me for me to call you Willie." The guys got a chuckle out of that, and Drake bristled.

"Aw, take it easy on the boy, Will." Frank Miller went to the fridge and brought out a few cold beers. "He's still trying to learn the ropes.

" The words and the beer soothed William's ruffled pride. Christian made no comment.

The night wore on, with no one except Willam seeming to lose continuously. Topics went from this to that, getting a little more heated as the beer bottles on the floor grew in number.

"I tell you..." Sam Smith paused to take a swallow from his bottle. "It makes me sick. Did you know that Carl Wilson's daughter turned out to be a lesbian?" He said the word as if it were a level somewhere below 'spread-legged whore' in a ranking of women.

"That pretty little girl? I don't even want to know what kind of dope she must be into, then," snorted Jones. "I told him it was a bad idea to let that girl go off to college. See what it leads to, giving a wild girl too much freedom?"

"Don't talk about that kind of trash in my house," Drake snapped. "I've got a kid upstairs."

"Sorry, Will. Place your bets."

Christian tossed in a couple of red chips. "I don't believe she had a choice."

"Come again?"

"That girl. Do you gentlemen honestly think she woke up one morning and decided that all she wanted to do was make love to women?"

"Oh?" Jones sipped his beer. "All right, let's hear your theory. What happened? Kidnapped by little green men who gave her a man's brain?"

"I just think she was born that way. She couldn't help it any more than those new phenomenons." He searched for the word as he studied his cards . "Mutants."

William made a face, as if the cold beer in his mouth had just turned to warm piss. He swallowed with difficulty. "That's just unnatural!" His cohorts nodded, all except the new-comer, whom William was really starting to dislike. For him, this Dehnly was beginning to represent everything that was screwed up with life today. "Freaks and monsters. They ought to round the whole bunch of them up and..." He stopped, unable to think of a way to finish the sentence. He didn't have to.

"And what? Shoot them? Gas them? Do you think Hitler had the right idea , Mr. Drake?"

That 'Mr. Drake' got under William's skin, making him feel old. Making him feel as if he couldn't adjust to the way things seemed to be changing so quickly. Making him feel useless...

"Sit down, wildfire," said Smith. "You're not getting any points for being socially conscious. Face facts, mutants aren't human and they aren't natural. I bet you can trace every single on of them back to drugs their parents did or something. Radiation, maybe."

"That doesn't mean we don't feel sorry for the kids," chimed in Miller.

Drake nodded, happy to have found some support. "He's right. It isn't their fault that they are what they are, but something has to be done about them."

Christian closed the fan of cards in his hand, set them down on the table, and stared at William over the rims of his glasses. "That makes it so much easier, doesn't it, Mr. Drake? To put things in terms of black and white. To think it's someone else's fault, or someone's mistake that things like this happen. Maybe that's why you can almost predict that mutants are going to have it as rough as any other minority in history. Maybe worse, because there's no way to predict what your child's going to be born as, from what scientists know so far."

"Look, Chris, if I want a sermon, I'll go to church."

Christian stood up and took his poker chips. "I'm sure you will. I'll be going, I guess. But just think about it, Mr. Drake. It can happen to anyone. Your neighbor, your boss, your kid..."

William shoved his chair back and charged across the couple of feet that separated him and Christian. There was no bluster this time, just anger. He used his momentum to shove the kid all the way out of the door . Poker chips went flying as Christian Dehnly stumbled down the steps and landed on his back.

"Don't you ever, EVER say anything like that about... my son ever again , you little punk! Or I'll tear your damn ponytail off and make you eat it! Get the hell off of my property!" He turned and went back inside, trying to stomp down his doubts.

'I was NOT about to say 'me' instead of 'my son',' he insisted to himself. 'And if Bobby was a monster... a mutant, that wouldn't be my fault. I'm no freak. I've never done anything horrible enough to do that that to my own kid. I don't even know why I'm thinking this. I lead a good life, so there's no way I could have a kid who's a mutant. Robert's little hyper, maybe, but not a freak.'

"Look, guys, I think the game's a bust," he sighed, coming back into the kitchen. "Let's just call it quits for tonight, all right?"

Half-an-hour later, with the kitchen reasonably clean and all of his buddies on their way home, William dug out the key to Bobby's room, unlocked the door, and carefully opened it. He smiled. That Dehnly fellow was on acid or something. All you had to do was take a look at that face, so peaceful in sleep, and the perfectly average features to know that there was no way Robert Drake could be abnormal, genetically or otherwise.

Mind at ease, the elder Drake started to leave the room, but changed his mind. With utmost care, he tip-toed over to Bobby's bed and pulled the blanket up to his son's chin. Despite the warm night, it was awfully chilly in this room. Satisfied, William Drake left and let his son sleep on.