That's 24 in Dinosaur Years

Story Sent in by Jenny:

Ken and I met online. He was 24, just like me, and he lived in my town. We spoke, found out that we had a lot in common, and he asked me if I wanted to meet him at his house to grab lunch on a Saturday.

The agreed-upon Saturday, I went to his house and found a teenaged boy, around 13 or 14, playing with an even younger boy, around seven or eight, in the front yard. They had dinosaur toys and they roared at me when I came up the walk.

I smiled at them and asked, "This is Ken's house, right?"

The teenager went rigid and asked, "You're Jenny?"

"Yes. And you are?"

He said, "Crap! You're early!" and ran inside the house. The younger child roared at me again. I roared back and went up the front walk, assuming that the teenager ran inside to let Ken know that I had arrived.

Minutes passed, and there was no sign of anyone coming to the door. I knocked. An older man, mid-40s, came to the door. "Good morning," he said.

"Hi," I replied, "I'm Jenny. I'm meeting Ken."

He gave me a funny look and asked, "For what?"

"We were supposed to be going out. Is Ken your son?"

The man dropped his shoulders and said, "Oh, Ken," then turned and yelled into the house, "Ken! Get down here, now!"

Over the older man's shoulder, I saw the teenager tumble down the stairs, give me a look of pure fright, and tear away, further into the house. The man hurried after him. There was the sound of a slamming door, and then I heard the man yell, "Ken!" one more time, and much angrier. Then silence.

I turned back to the kid in the front yard. He was still playing with his dinosaurs. The older man returned to me at the front door and said, "I'm sorry. My wife and I try to keep Ken off the dating sites, but he… this is the third time this has happened. I'm really sorry."

As you've likely guessed by now, the teenager was, in fact, Ken. I started apologizing to the man, who apologized right back to me. He said over and over, "I don't know what we're going to do."

I said, "Maybe take away his computer power cord so that he can't go online. Especially if I'm not the first person he's done this to."

"We tried that. He always finds another one," the man said.

I said, "Grounding him, maybe?"

The man sighed. "Me and my wife… we don't really have the heart to do that. We'll figure it out. Thank you."

I left. I can only imagine that with parents like that, Ken's probably had over half the women on the Internet come over to his house. Whether or not he tricked any of them long enough for a date to actually occur, that's anyone's guess, and not one that I like to think about.