Chapter 33. Ethan
The drive back is quiet. Berenice's old Honda smells like cigarettes and a random air freshener. Jack's in the front seat, feet on the dashboard despite his mom slapping his knee twice already. I'm in the back, bag on my lap, watching strip malls and gas stations blur past the window.
Berenice dropped me off at my aunt's two weeks ago.
Picked me up this morning without being asked, because that's what she does.
Jack just texted me, saying they were coming, and she showed up at seven, honked twice, and when I came out, she handed me a coffee and said, "You look like you haven't slept in two weeks, sweetheart. " She wasn't exactly wrong.
My aunt's house was fine. Clean, quiet, a guest room with floral sheets and a bathroom that smelled like lavender.
My aunt is a good woman who doesn't know what to do with me, so she cooks too much food and asks careful questions about "the program" and never mentions my parents.
I ate her meals, helped with the dishes, read three books, and stared at the ceiling every night thinking about Liam.
"You're quiet back there," Berenice says, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. I look at her beauty spot above her upper lip.
"He's always quiet, Mom," Jack says.
"Yes, his whole thing is being handsome and mysterious," Berenice says, and Jack groans.
"Please don't flirt with my friend."
"Watch your mouth, brat!” she exclaims, but she’s being playful. “You know I don’t date anyone younger than sixty.” She catches my eye in the mirror and winks. We all laugh. I can see clearly where Jack got his sense of humor.
Jack has his window cracked, warm air ruffling his hair. He's been talking nonstop since we left, about his sister's tattoo shop, about a dog he saw at the park, about a show he binged, about the breakfast his mom made this morning. He talks the way he breathes, constantly.
That's the difference. That's what I keep circling back to.
Jack and Liam are the same volume. Same energy, same humor, same ability to fill a room just by walking into it. People meet them and think they're the same kind of person. They're not.
Jack talks because he's happy. He talks because the world is interesting to him, and he wants to share it.
When Jack makes a joke, he means it. When Jack laughs, there's nothing underneath it except more laughter.
He's been through hell, addiction, arrest, three years locked up, and he came out the other side fundamentally intact.
His core held. He has his sister, his mom, his plan for the tattoo shop, his three years clean.
He knows who he is and where he's going.
Liam talks because if he stops, the silence will eat him alive.
He talks because humor is the wall between him and the thing that's chasing him.
When Liam makes a joke, he's bleeding underneath it half the time.
When Liam laughs, sometimes it's real and sometimes it's a sound he makes so nobody looks too closely.
He's been through hell too, but the difference is that hell followed him out.
It's still there, in the purging, in the panic, in the way he flinches before he melts into me, like his body expects pain, but bad pain, the pain he doesn’t like.
Jack is who Liam could become if he heals.
The thought arrives fully formed, and I hold it in my chest. Jack is the version of Liam where the damage got processed, where someone showed up early enough and consistently enough that the foundation held.
Berenice showed up. She moved states. She visits every chance she gets.
She handed me a coffee this morning and called me sweetheart because that's who she is, someone who shows up, even during hard times.
Nobody showed up for Liam. His mom killed herself when he was too young to even understand why she wouldn’t come home anymore.
His dad drank. His friends mocked him and got him addicted to drugs.
Every adult in his life either disappeared or destroyed him, and the fact that he can still love anyone at all, that he’s kind, considerate, sweet, that he crawled into my bed and pressed his face into my neck and said, "I think I love you," that's not normal resilience. That's a miracle.
I want to be the person who shows up for him. The way Berenice shows up for Jack. Consistently. Permanently. Not just for the crisis, but for everything.
"You okay, honey?" Berenice asks. Softer this time.
"Yeah," I say. "Just thinking."
"About that boy of yours?" She says it casually, eyes on the road, like she's asking about the weather. Jack goes very still in the front seat.
"Mom."
"What? I have eyes, Jack. I'm not an idiot, you know, I’ve been your age before. Jack told me everything about all of you."
"I didn't talk about him that much," Jack says, as if he’s apologizing to me. I chuckle.
“It’s okay, bro,” I tell him. He sighs, relieved.
“Phew, I’m glad you’re cool with it, because, truth be told, I did talk a lot about him, and you, and Miles.”
We all laugh again.
"It’s so sweet. Reminds me of your father," Berenice tells Jack.
"Please stop talking," he says, pretending he’ll vomit.
"He used to write me poems. Terrible poems. But the effort was there."
"I'm opening the door and jumping out."
I lean my head against the window and let them argue. Something in my chest loosens for the first time in two weeks. This is what a family sounds like. This is what Liam deserves. I’ll be that for him. And maybe he can be that for me too.
We pull up to the Academy gates. Berenice parks and turns to look at both of us. She reaches back and squeezes my hand.
"Take care of each other in there," she says. Not joking now. "Both of you."
"We will," Jack says.
I grab my bag. "Thank you. For everything."
"Anytime, sweetheart. And tell the boys I said hi."
I nod. I get out. Jack hugs his mom for a long time, and I wait by the gate, giving them space. When he finally pulls away, I see Berenice wipe her eyes quickly before she puts the car in drive.
We walk through the gates together. Jack is quiet now, the way he always gets when he leaves his mom. The transition back is hard. I know because I watch him do it every time, the slow reassembly of the version of himself that survives in here.
"She likes you," Jack says after a while.
"She likes everyone."
"Nah. She really likes you. She told me you're good." He pauses. "She also told me to tell you that if you hurt Liam, she'll drive back up here and deal with you herself.”
I chuckle. “I’ll try really hard to never hurt him,” I say, and I mean it. Jack puts a hand on my shoulder. He knows.
Then we're at the main building. When I get back to the Academy, I feel something I didn't expect: happy.
Which means Aspire either failed or succeeded in its mission.
Succeeded in making me not hate being here.
Failed because I should want to stay away.
But that was before Liam. Before him, I couldn't care less if I was in or out.
My life sucked either way. Now I'd commit a crime to get my ass back in here.
Our bags get searched. My ID scanned. The guard behind the glass doesn't even look up when he buzzes me through. Everything exactly as I left it. I'm probably the only one walking back in with a smile.
I have to report to Griff, as a leader. Jack follows back to the dorm. I desperately want to hurry there to see Liam.
But I know something's wrong before Griff says a word.
It's in the way he's standing behind his desk when I report in.
His green eyes find mine, and there's something in them I've learned to dread: the look that means someone fucked up badly.
I try to think of what I could have done. Then it hits me. It isn't me.
It's Liam.
"Sit down, Ethan."
I swallow hard. My fingers tighten around the strap of my bag. I sit without taking it off my back.
"What happened?"
Griff exhales through his nose, a slow, controlled release I recognize from MMA, the kind of breath you take before absorbing a hit. "Liam got into an altercation while you were on break. Someone beat the hell out of him."
The bag slides off my shoulder.
"How bad?"
"Bad. Really bad." Griff's jaw tightens. "He won't say who did it. Won't say a goddamn word, which is why he's currently sitting in the hole. I put him there to keep him safe too while we can’t remove the threat. "
My blood goes cold. I can feel the temperature drop in my veins, spreading from my chest outward until my fingertips go numb. Liam. In the hole. Beaten to shit, alone in one of those bare concrete rooms with nothing but a mattress and his own thoughts.
"How long?"
"Going on four days."
"I need to see him."
"No." Griff straightens, crosses his arms. The faded tattoos on his forearms flex. "He's in solitary. No visitors, no exceptions. He talks, he gets out. That's the deal."
I want to argue. I want to tell him that Liam won't talk because he's terrified, not because he's being difficult, that putting a kid with panic disorder and abandonment issues in an isolation cell is about as therapeutic as setting a broken bone with a hammer. But I know Griff. I know the system. I’m part of it, or at least I was.
I belted him without consent on his first day, and it kills me when I remember that, even if he enjoyed it.
I swore no one would ever hurt him again, not the system, not myself.
"I'm going to make him talk," I say.
Griff nods. "Good."
I sleep like shit. My bunk, with its slightly better mattress and the small shelf of earned items, feels grotesquely comfortable.
I lie there listening to Jack, Harry, Miles.
But not Liam. His empty bunk is three feet away, sheets still rumpled from when he last slept in them, and I feel like I'm suffocating.
Then Griff pulls Liam out. Gives him one day to decide. One day above ground to remember what sunlight feels like before they put him back in the dark.
I'm in the room when they bring him in during Quiet Time. I hear the door, and my heart does something violent, seizes, like a fist closing. And then there he is.
He's thinner. That's the first thing, and it hits me like a blow because Liam was already too thin. The bruises on his face have faded to a yellow-green that makes his blue eyes look almost supernatural, but they’re still there.
Jack yells and launches himself at Liam. Miles sits up and smiles, which from Miles is a standing ovation. Harry waves from his bunk with that smirk.
But Liam's looking at me.
I'm going to cry. I can feel it behind my eyes like pressure in a sealed room, this hot, awful thing I haven't let myself feel since the day my parents put me in here.
Maybe before. I clench my jaw. Hold it. I will not fall apart.
Not here, not in front of the others. Not when he needs me to be solid.
He comes to me after the briefest hug with Jack, and when I wrap my arms around him, I feel every rib. Feel the flinch before the melting. The sound he makes, this small, broken thing, almost takes me out at the knees. I hold tighter. Too tight, probably. I can't make myself let go.
"What the hell were you thinking?" I whisper into his hair, pressing my lips against the top of his head.
"I'm sorry," he says. Crying. Really crying, his whole body shaking against mine, and the guilt hits me like a wall. I was on break. I was gone. I left him here, and someone took him apart.
Then he tells me.
"Garrett got me alone one day," he whispers.
The world tilts.
The rage is instantaneous. Total. It floods through me, rewires my nervous system. My skin goes hot. My muscles lock. I'm shaking, goosebumps rising, my body preparing for violence with a thoroughness that scares even me.
"I'm gonna kill him."
I mean it. Standing here with Liam trembling against my chest, I mean it with every fiber. I will walk down that hall, find Garrett, and end him. I can do it. He's trash. And I know exactly where to hit, how hard, how many times.
But Liam panics. Eyes wide, breathing shredded into ragged gasps, begging me, hands fisted in my shirt, not to tell, not to say anything, because Garrett said he'd kill him and almost did.
I watch the rage drain, replaced by something worse: someone I love consumed by terror.
I pull him back in. Hold him. Pet his hair.
"It's okay, baby," I murmur. I don't care if Jack hears, or Miles, or Harry, or the entire academy. "I've got you. Daddy's here. I'm going to take care of it."
He's vibrating with fear. I hold him until the shaking slows, until his breathing syncs with mine, until his weight goes heavy and I know he's close to passing out from exhaustion.
"Don't think about this anymore, baby." I tip his chin up, gentle as I can with hands that still want to break things. "I told you I'll handle it, okay?"
He nods. His lower lip pushes out. He looks so young, so fragile, that something in my chest cracks in half.
I hold him until he falls asleep against me on his bed. Lay him down. Pull his blanket up. Sit in the half-dark of Quiet Time with my hands clasped between my knees and my jaw set.
He's going to hate me for this.