CHAPTER TWO
The time was 6:57 PM.
I know because I checked my phone twice, which is two more times than I usually bother. There's something about sitting on a park bench in the dark with bandages on your face that makes you oddly aware of time. Not in a philosophical way. Just in the way of — *hm. It's late. My mother is going to have thoughts about this.*
The sun had finished setting a while ago, leaving behind that specific shade of deep blue that isn't quite night yet but has clearly stopped pretending otherwise. The park was mostly empty at this hour — a jogger in the distance, a couple on a bench far enough away to be irrelevant, the distant sound of a dog that had opinions about something. The cool evening air brushed against my face with the gentle consideration of someone who didn't know or care that my face was currently hosting a small collection of bandages.
Nose. Jaw. Right cheek.
Underneath my shirt, wrapped firmly around my ribs, more of the same.
One would think that sitting on a park bench, battered, alone, watching the last light leave the sky after a Monday that had expressed itself almost entirely through physical violence, would be a miserable experience.
It wasn't, particularly.
That probably says something about me. I've stopped trying to figure out what.
______
The pharmacy was the reason I was out this late.
Nakamura's — three blocks from school, a ten minute walk in normal conditions, approximately twenty-five in my current configuration. I'd been going there long enough that Mr. Nakamura, who ran the place with his wife and had the permanent expression of a man who had seen everything and was mildly disappointed by most of it, no longer asked me what happened.
He just looked up when I walked in, took in the current damage report with the practiced eye of someone who had been assessing it for the better part of two years, and went to get the supplies.
His wife was less diplomatic.
"Fredrick." She said my full name the way only my mother and people who were genuinely exasperated with me did. "This is the fourth time this month."
"Third," I corrected, settling onto the stool by the counter. "The second time was a door."
"You walked into a door."
"Aggressively. It was a mutual incident."
She gave me the look. Mrs. Nakamura had a specific look she reserved exclusively for me — a combination of professional concern, maternal irritation and the particular weariness of someone who had delivered the same speech many times and knew it hadn't worked yet but was constitutionally incapable of not delivering it again.
"You need to be more careful," she said, cleaning the cut on my cheek with the gentle efficiency of someone who had done this enough times to be fast without being careless. "You're seventeen, not a boxer."
"Boxers choose to do this," I pointed out. "I'm more of a canvas. Passive medium."
"This isn't funny."
"It's a little funny."
It wasn't, really. But the alternative to finding it funny was something I didn't particularly want to sit with on a Monday evening, so.
She finished patching me up — nose, jaw, cheek, the ribs wrapped with the practiced tension of someone who had wrapped my ribs before, which she had — and then held my face in both her hands for a moment the way my grandmother used to, looking at me with an expression I had learned not to examine too carefully because it made something in my chest do a thing I didn't have the bandwidth for right now.
"You're a good boy, Fredrick," she said quietly. "You deserve better than this."
I smiled, which hurt my jaw.
"Mrs. Nakamura," I said, "if you tell me I have a bright future ahead of me I will never come back."
She released my face. Made a sound that was almost a laugh. Went to go ring up the supplies.
Special treatment, as I mentioned. She only charged me for the materials.
_______
So that was why I was late. And the park was why I hadn't gone home yet.
I wasn't avoiding home. My parents were — my parents. They were fine. More than fine. They were, by any reasonable metric, excellent parents who loved me in the specific and slightly suffocating way of people who have something to be afraid of and are choosing every single day not to show it.
Which was exactly why I needed ten minutes on a park bench first.
I leaned back. Looked up at the sky, which had finished its transition to proper dark now, a few stars beginning to establish themselves in the gaps between clouds.
My ribs ached in a dull and constant way that I had, over time, become almost companionable with. My jaw throbbed. The back of my head, where it had met the locker, contributed its own low frequency complaint to the general chorus.
*Marcus got more creative today,* I noted to no one. *That's almost impressive.*
It wasn't, really. Marcus Reeves was not a creative person. He was a large, simple, effective one, which in the context of making Fredrick Wilbert's life difficult amounted to roughly the same thing.
I'd known Marcus since the beginning of sophomore year — which meant I'd been navigating his particular brand of enthusiasm for approximately a year and a half. Long enough to have developed a fairly complete psychological profile of the man.
Marcus needed someone to be less than him. That was the operating requirement. Not because he was stupid — though the braincell joke landed every time for a reason — but because his entire sense of self was constructed on a comparison, and I was the comparison he'd chosen. The ghost boy. The printer paper. The thing at the bottom of the food chain that made everything above it feel higher by contrast.
I didn't take it personally, exactly.
It was just irritating.
*And occasionally painful,* my ribs added helpfully.
*Yes,* I conceded internally. *Thank you. I'm aware.*
______
I thought about Madison Goldfarb for a moment, which I hadn't intended to do.
Specifically I thought about her expression. The one she'd had for half a second before rounding the corner. The one I'd filed away under *probably nothing* and intended to leave there.
It was still there. That was the problem with filing things — they didn't actually go anywhere, they just sat in the back waiting for a quiet moment to re-present themselves, and apparently a park bench at 7 PM on a Monday was quiet enough.
I couldn't name it still. The expression.
It wasn't guilt — I'd seen guilt before and it looked different, more active, more self-focused. It wasn't pity either. Madison Goldfarb's pity looked like boredom performed at half-speed and I was familiar with both.
This was something else. Something with more weight to it.
I turned it over a few more times, got no further with it, and put it back.
*Probably nothing,* I reconfirmed.
The couple on the bench across the park laughed at something. One of them leaned into the other. The jogger came back around on a second lap, footsteps steady and unhurried.
The world, as previously established, entirely unbothered.
I checked my phone.
7:09 PM.
*Right,* I thought. *Home.*
_______
I heard it before I opened the front door.
Not arguing — my parents didn't argue, or if they did they did it in the specific adult way of very controlled voices and long silences that I had learned from an early age to read as worse than shouting. No, what I heard was quieter than that.
My mother's voice. Low and tight. The particular quality she got when she was holding something in.
My father's response, quieter still.
Then silence.
I stood on the front step for three seconds longer than necessary, key in the door. Then I turned it, pushed it open, and called out —
"I'm home. Before you say anything — I look worse than I feel. And before you say anything about *that* — I feel fine. And before you say anything about *that* — Mrs. Nakamura already gave me the speech, we don't need to do it twice."
A pause from the kitchen.
Then my dad appeared in the doorway, dish towel over his shoulder, looking at my face with the carefully managed expression of a man who had a great deal to say and was choosing, deliberately, not to say it.
He was quiet for a moment.
Then he said — "How was school?"
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
"Instructive," I said.
Something moved in his expression. Not quite a smile. Not quite not one either.
"Dinner's almost ready," he said, and went back to the kitchen.
_________
My mother was less restrained.
Not emotionally — emotionally she was, if anything, more controlled than my father. The restraint was physical. The moment I sat down at the kitchen table she was next to me, one hand on my chin tilting my face into the light, examining the damage with an expression that she had constructed very carefully to look like ordinary maternal concern and nothing more complicated than that.
I let her.
It was the least I could do.
"Nose isn't broken," I offered. "Mrs. Nakamura confirmed."
"Mrs. Nakamura," my mother said, with the specific tone she used for that name, "is a pharmacist, not a doctor."
"She's also been looking at my face after these incidents for almost two years now so I'd argue she has significant relevant experience."
My mother's hand stilled on my jaw.
Just for a second. Just long enough for something to pass through her eyes that she didn't want me to see and which I saw anyway.
Then she let go, straightened up, and went back to the stove.
"Eat something," she said. "You're too thin."
"I've always been this thin."
"I know," she said, which wasn't actually an answer to what I'd said.
We ate dinner. My dad made a joke about his colleagues at work that was genuinely terrible and which I laughed at anyway because it was the kind of bad that comes from effort and I could respect effort. My mother refilled my glass without asking. The kitchen was warm and smelled like whatever she'd made — something with rice, something with tomatoes, something that required the specific calibration of someone who knew exactly what I liked without ever having discussed it.
It was an ordinary dinner.
We were very good at ordinary dinners, the three of us. We had, over time, perfected the art of it.
Nobody mentioned the bandages again.
Nobody mentioned anything else either.
We never did.
___________
My room was at the end of the upstairs hallway — small, managed, the specific organized chaos of someone who knows where everything is and wouldn't be able to explain the system to anyone else. Desk under the window. Bookshelf that had overflowed onto the floor in three separate places. A mirror on the back of the door that I had at various points considered removing and had always decided against for reasons I couldn't articulate.
I stood in front of it now.
White hair, sticking up at several creative angles that the evening had inflicted on it. Amber eyes, which were honestly the only feature I'd ever considered above average and which I suspected would look distinctly out of place on a face this pale regardless. Bandage on the nose. Bruise developing on the jaw in an interesting shade that was going to be deeply purple by morning.
*Interestingly average,* I'd told myself earlier.
I revised that.
*Interestingly patchy,* was probably more accurate today.
I sat down at my desk. Opened my bag. Retrieved the homework that had somehow survived the locker incident in one piece, which was more than could be said for its owner.
Outside my window the street was quiet. The neighbor's cat was doing its nightly patrol of the front fence with the serious dedication of someone who took their territorial responsibilities very seriously. A car passed. Somewhere down the block someone had their TV on too loud, the faint ghost of a laugh track drifting through the glass.
I looked at the homework.
The homework looked back.
I thought, for a moment, about tomorrow. Then about the day after. Then — as I sometimes did, quietly, in the small hours when the armor was down and there was no one to perform for — about the general shape of things. The way they were arranged. The way they would keep being arranged for —
I stopped.
Looked back at the homework.
*Math,* I told myself. *Do the math.*
I did the math.
__________
It was nearly eleven when I finally put the pen down. The house had gone quiet around me — my parents' light off, the street outside still, the neighbor's cat presumably having resolved the territorial situation to its satisfaction.
I leaned back in my chair. Looked up at the ceiling.
Three cracks in the plaster, which I had at various points named and was not going to admit to naming. A water stain in the corner that had been there since before I was born. The particular silence of a house that has settled into itself for the night.
My jaw hurt less than it had. My ribs were down from a shout to a murmur. My head had, somewhere around nine-thirty, decided to stop contributing to the conversation entirely.
All things considered — as Mondays went — I'd had worse.
Not many. But some.
I turned off the desk lamp. Lay back on the bed still mostly dressed because the ribs had strong feelings about the mechanics of changing clothes at this hour. Stared at the ceiling in the dark.
Tomorrow was Tuesday. Tuesday had no particular reason to be better than Monday and several structural reasons to be the same. Marcus would be there. The hallway would be there. The fluorescent lights and the linoleum and the careful architecture of Hallow Creek High's social ecosystem would all be exactly where I'd left them.
And Madison Goldfarb would have her expression back on.
The one that was bored and certain and completely impenetrable.
The other one — the half-second one, the real one — would be filed away somewhere underneath it, where she kept the things she didn't perform for audiences.
I closed my eyes.
*Probably nothing,* I thought for the third time.
The ceiling didn't argue.
I went to sleep.
_____________
Chapter Two — End