I believed my sixteen year old son slept over at his best friend house every single weekend until a shocking phone call changed everything. My close friend Brenda called me to ask when her son Gavin was coming home because he had supposedly spent the entire weekend at my house. Panic set in when we realized neither boy was where they claimed to be. We discovered that our boys had been lying to us for eight consecutive weekends since early August. We spent the night in a state of sheer terror and dialed their phones repeatedly only to be sent straight to voicemail. Brenda drove past all their usual hangouts but found no trace of them. We sat together at my kitchen table until early morning and nearly called the police to report them missing. Finally at almost five in the morning I heard a key turn in my front door. My son walked into the hallway completely alone. I demanded to know where he had been and why he had deceived us for two entire months. When he raised his head my anger quickly dissolved into absolute dread because I finally saw his true condition.
My teenage son looked absolutely terrible and nothing like a boy coming home from a normal high school party. He trembled violently under the dim hallway light while wearing clothes completely ruined by thick mud and dark grease. He smelled strongly of damp wood and motor oil. Brenda rushed out from the kitchen to demand answers about her own son. My son explained through tears that his friend was still down at the old train yard near the river guarding heavy equipment. He confessed that they had not been playing video games for the past two months but had been performing backbreaking manual labor. He explained that a homeless man named Mr Henderson was trying to fix a rusted diesel water pump near a low lying encampment under the river bridge. The city had turned off public access lines during the summer and heavy August storms had completely flooded the area. My son told us they felt compelled to help after seeing young children and elderly residents suffering in the stagnant sewage runoff. They decided they could not simply ignore the desperate situation.
He described how they used their weekly allowance money to purchase secondhand tools from a local scrap metal yard. Every Friday night they rode their bicycles to an abandoned maintenance shed to dig drainage trenches and weld broken pipes under generator light. They rebuilt the massive pump engine piece by piece alongside Mr Henderson and worked through the night to prevent rising waters from drowning out their power source. He admitted they kept their mission a secret because they knew we would worry about their safety and try to stop them. However a major emergency forced him to come home and reveal the truth. Heavy rains had caused the main river wall to breach and the entire encampment was currently flooding. His friend and several camp residents were desperately trying to hold back a sandbag barrier while the old pump engine jammed completely. His friend had sent him racing back home on his bicycle to retrieve our heavy hydraulic jack and spare fuel cans. He pleaded for our help because dozens of vulnerable people were about to lose their only shelter.