“Goodnight, Zero.”

He stomped off toward the bedroom, carrying his dinner bowl. “Tell my dad I wanna kill him.”

“Don’t make a mess. We’ve got another camper waiting for your bed.”

            Next morning Zero was up and dressed early, cheery as I’d ever seen him, shirt fresh, blue jeans pressed. I punched the cell phone repair shop address into my iPhone GPS and spewed gravel down the driveway toward Whitestone Boulevard, Zero navigating, my phone in his hand.

            “Go left,” he said.

            I’d been there, knew the route. I turned right.

            “Wong way,” he said.

            “You’re holding it upside down.”

            “I was testing you,” said Zero, grinning.

            On to our destination: a strip mall near a convenience store. Trash, water, and pop cans littered the cracked asphalt parking lot, power poles leaning this way and that, a vandalized newspaper stand with the local rag, “Green Sheets,” spilling out. Here, a broken glass window repaired with plywood. In red letters over the door: “Cell Phone Repair.”

            It wasn’t a Dell Computer campus, but it was a start.

            “Stay heah,” said Zero. “I don’t need help.”             

             “Good,” I said. I gave him the owner’s business card. “Go get it.”

            Zero: “Ummm …”

            Risky? Nope. I’d already met the shop owner. Zero was as good as hired. “I’ll wait next door,” I said.

            I ducked inside the Stop ‘N’ Go. Hot dogs rotated on a spit. I thought about the botched convenience store robbery in Zero’s favorite show.

            In Smallville, teenager Clark Kent, an orphan with superpowers and a secret identity, is marooned on a farm in Kansas, stranger in a strange land: a fantasy world of heroes and villains, girlfriends and boyfriends, love and betrayal, high school angst, family secrets, and a mysterious destiny waiting to be discovered. On the way to saving Earth from a meteor, Clark, broke and hungry, robbed a filling station, grabbed a hot dog, and then politely paid the store owner with the stolen cash.

            Who writes these things? Someone like Zero.

            I bought him a Sprite to celebrate. Walked back out into the parking lot with the

Sprite and my Starbucks Cold Brew coffee in hand, expecting to sit in the car until he’d finished his interview and sealed the job deal.

            But Zero was waiting. Not good.

            “What happened?”

            “Nothing.”

            “Did you get the job?”

            “No.”

            “Why not?

            “There’s a two week twaining pewiod, no pay.”

            “You’d be learning a trade for free.”

            “I’ll be home in two weeks,” said Zero. “My dad’s comin’ to pick me up.”

            Didn’t Harland tell him? Looking back, I wish I’d said, “Zero, Smallville is over. Austin is your new home. We’re your family now.”

            But I didn’t. I held onto the hope that this abandoned child would find friends and set his feet on the path that I had chosen for him. He’d get a job, buy an old truck, settle down with a partner and live happily ever after.

            But no one had consulted Zero. I turned right, but he turned left. What future did he see for himself?

            It was time for us to have a good long talk.

Dan E. Burns, Ph.D., is the father of a 29-year-old son on the autism spectrum and the author of Saving Ben: A Father’s Story of Autism.  Dr. Burns is a Contributing Editor to Age of Autism and serves on the Executive Leadership Team of Health Choice, advocating for vaccine-injured children and their parents. As a writer, Dan inspires parents to organize businesses and communities where their adult children on the autism spectrum can live, work, play, and heal. As proprietor of Appleseed Ventures, he is developing and marketing the Fountain of Life, a small indoor aquaponic system for teaching ecology and growing herbs.