Chip Chick
T didn’t say anything else, and after dinner, he walked with her son back up to his room to hang out. While they were upstairs, she started doing the dishes.
A few minutes later, her son came downstairs and told her that T wanted to go home. She asked her son why, and he only shrugged his shoulders.
She walked up the stairs to talk to T, and she asked him if it was true that he wanted to leave. He told her that it was, and she asked him to explain why he wanted to go home after he’d wanted to sleep over on a school night.
T only shrugged, not making eye contact, and he kept watching YouTube videos. Finally, she asked him if the reason he wanted to sleep over was that he assumed they would be eating pizza. Once again, T shrugged his shoulders and refused to look at her.
“I said, ‘T, look at me and answer now. Did you only come here because you thought you were going to eat pizza?’ He finally nodded but still didn’t look at me,” she explained.
“I told him, ‘I’m sorry, we’re not having pizza tonight, but you can still have fun with my son.’ He said, ‘No thanks. I really want to go home.'”
To get to the bottom of the matter, she asked T about a hypothetical scenario: If she would no longer order pizza for her son and his friends when they slept over at her house, would he still come over to hang out with her son? T pondered this for a moment before shaking his head.
She expressed to him that it wasn’t acceptable to exploit people for his own gain, and if he was pretending to be her son’s friend in order to eat the pizza she ordered, then she wouldn’t let him come over to her house anymore. T didn’t argue with this and just shrugged again and said, “‘Okay.'”
Then, she called T’s mother to ask her to pick him up after she informed her of the situation. T’s mother understood but also sounded a little annoyed, but she picked up her son less than an hour later.
“The next morning, I get a text from her saying I had no right to yell at her son like that, and I’m being petty over pizza,” she shared.
“I asked her what she was talking about, and I certainly did not yell at him. I explained to T that it was not okay to act like he wanted to be friends with someone in order to get things he wanted, and it’s manipulative and bad.”
