I learned early that anger had a taste — metallic, bitter, the sort that sat at the back of your tongue and made you count breaths. My mother's cough kept time with everything in the house, a small, rough metronome that measured nights and money and the small mercies we could still afford. My father left for work before sunup and came home with the shape of someone who'd been asked to solve a problem without the tools to do it. We were not poor, exactly. We were the kind of family that learned to ask for less.
Miro ate cereal slow enough to make me furious on his behalf. He was nine and still believed cartoons could fix things. He believed I could fix things too, and that was the worst part. I wanted to be the person he'd never have to worry about. I wanted to stop wanting.
Kade Rinaldi liked an audience. He had the kind of face teachers forgave and a laugh that pulled other boys after it. He collected followers the way some people collected shoes. Kade's cruelty tasted rehearsed; his jokes were weapons with handles.
They waited by the lockers like they'd practiced the choreography: idle hands, loud voices, the kind of presence that bent hallways toward them. I saw them and thought about circling, about the long route past the music rooms. I almost took it. Miro wouldn't let me. He had to be at an art program and insisted I walk him. He trusted me the way kids trust a promise.
Kade noticed Miro first — the small, soft target. He stepped forward with a grin and a crumpled thing in his hand.
"Say cheese, clinic kid," he announced like it was a show. He shoved the paper into the air: a clinic receipt, folded and damp with the smell of antiseptic. The hallway noise leaned in. A teacher walked by with a clipboard and pretended none of it mattered.
"Your mum's still sick, right?" Kade said, loud enough for the locker doors to rattle. "Bet you could sell that paper for oxygen money."
Miro's fingers found my sleeve. The world drew thin. I wanted, for one stupid instant, to laugh it off, to say it didn't matter. Then Kade shoved the receipt into my face and laughed like he'd set down a verdict.
There are moments that burn slow and moments that explode. This was the slow kind. Kade's words slipped under skin and cold-burned something that had been simmering for years. He didn't just make fun of my mother; he took the one thin thing we kept private and turned it into a joke for his crew. He made our fear public.
I moved before I thought I could. It wasn't strategy. It was a muscle memory of shame. I lunged.
I had imagined a dozen perfect blows in my head before then: clean, decisive, a punch that would break a grin into something smaller and ashamed. The world, in practice, has no mercy for rehearsed fantasies. My palm slid off his chest like a wet coin. Kade's elbow answered like a hinge; his knee found my ribs. I tasted copper. I hit the floor. Tiles bit my elbows; laughter filled the ceiling.
They dragged me down the hall like luggage. Miro made a small sound halfway between a sob and a question. Teachers drifted by, their faces practiced with the soft concern of people who couldn't be bothered to get involved. Kade flicked the receipt into my hands one more time, like it had been a trophy he'd taken. "Tell your dad to bring cash," he said. "Maybe your mum will mend herself if she buys enough hope."
The hallway spun with noise; my breath came shallow and hot. I could have walked away. I could have let the bruise soak itself into patience. Instead I crawled home with the receipt folded in my fist until the paper cut my skin.
My father saw my face in the car and looked three sizes too small for whatever fix he wanted to make. He reached into his jacket like a man who knew the words money could say—silence, apology, band-aid—but also like a man who couldn't speak the truth. He didn't ask much. He handed me a few bills. "You okay?" he asked, and the question carried all the things his tired mouth wouldn't.
I nodded because it was easier to fit the shape of "okay" than the reality of the bruise. Nodding is practice; you can make it look like honesty if you rehearse.
That night my mother's cough was worse. She smiled when I came into her room the way a small person smiles when their child's hand finds theirs in the dark — with effort and a light that might be performance. Her hand shook when it reached for water. She said, "You're home," and the sentence was a small, brave thing.
I wanted to promise her that I'd make it stop. I wanted to say it out loud, to make it real with syllables. Instead I kissed her forehead and smelled antiseptic on her hair and put my face close enough to hear the small staccato of her breath. The house was full of quiet, the kind only illness teaches you.
I didn't sleep. I sat in the dark and pulled a thin book from under my mattress—something I'd bought with the change from odd jobs and pocket money, a battered manual of striking and principles. The pages smelled like glue and sweat. I opened it like a person opens a map. It did not promise miracles. It promised sequences, mechanics, a vocabulary for hands and distance. It offered arithmetic. I liked arithmetic.
There is a weird mathematics to learning. Time sums up. Minutes pile. You can measure change if you count correctly. A month is a month. Twelve months are twelve months. Twelve months of intention is a different animal.
I clenched the receipt until the paper warmed my palm. The bill numbers blurred into a list—clinic, medicine, the quiet ledger of our life. It had been used on me like an insult. I would use it as a boundary.
I thought of things to do. Not the big things—no miracles, no sudden inheritance—but the small, inevitable work: learn how to meet a fist on timing, not force; practice parries until they were second breath; make one counter so reliable it could be counted on. I could feel the shape of a plan forming like frost on a window: a method built from cold patience.
I didn't name it yet. Names come when moves have teeth and a pulse. For now I made a list in the dark and numbered it: read, save, practice, repeat. I pictured gyms I could afford, old boxing bags in basements, a middle-aged coach who'd say, "Do it again." I pictured Miro's small face when he'd stop flinching.
Before dawn I folded the receipt and tucked it in my jeans pocket. I went outside to the corner store and used the money my father had offered to buy a secondhand manual with pictures of hands and footwork. The clerk didn't ask questions. I paid in coins and walked home with the book under my jacket like contraband.
That was all I did that night: buy a book and make a promise. It was small and ugly and it had to be the thing that held me.
One year, I said to the dark. One year, and I would change the angle of my life. One year, and I would make them learn a new vocabulary for a fist.
The house in the street breathed softly. Somewhere, Kade laughed with his friends and did whatever small rituals fed a boy's feeling of power. I put the book under my pillow and let the page-edges press into my skin. I pictured the work, the drills, the long, boring repetitions that people pretend are magic. I pictured myself as a wall they would only ever hit if they wanted to break themselves.