Chapter 6. Ethan
The buzzer hits at six. I’ve been awake since five-forty-seven. By the time the lights come on, I’m already dressed and making the bed.
I sit up. Swing my legs over the edge of the bed. Feet flat on the cold floor, the chill traveling through my soles and up my shins like a small, daily punishment. I change in silence and make the bed with hospital corners.
Jack is the first noise. Always is. His bunk creaks as he rolls, and then his face appears over the edge, hair standing in six different directions, brown eyes barely open, already talking.
"Is it illegal to sleep past six? Like, constitutionally? Because I feel like there's something in the Geneva Convention about this."
Nobody answers. This doesn't stop him.
"I had a dream about pancakes," he continues, dropping to the floor with a thud. "Big ones. Stack of five. Syrup, actual maple syrup, not that brown water they pretend is syrup here. And butter. Real butter. The kind that comes in a stick."
"Shut up, Perry," Harry mutters from his top bunk, voice thick with sleep and irritation. He's still horizontal, one arm dangling off the bunk, his glasses folded on his chest like he fell asleep mid-thought.
Miles is already dressed. I didn't see him get up. I never do. He exists like a shadow, his dark hair falling across his forehead. He sits on the edge of his bunk, lacing his sneakers. He catches my eye and nods. Once. The entire conversation.
And then there's Liam.
He wakes up like a cat. First the stretch, arms reaching above his head, back arching, his shirt riding up past his navel and exposing the ridge of his hip bone, the pale stretch of his stomach.
My jaw tightens. My cock too. I look at the wall.
Look back. He yawns, wide and unselfconscious, and rubs his face with both hands, his black hair a wreck, his blue eyes still glazed with sleep.
The tattoos on his neck shift as he turns his head, and he looks like something out of a painting.
He catches me watching. One corner of his mouth lifts.
I smile back and wink at him. He looks embarrassed but can't help smiling. My little puppy. I check my watch. 6:07. Right on schedule.
"Move it," I say to the room. The leader voice. "Roll call in eight minutes."
Jack salutes with the wrong hand. Harry groans elaborately.
Miles is already standing by the door. Liam swings his legs over his bunk and lands with a quiet thud.
Happy, our basil plant, named by Jack, sits in its small clay pot, leaves a little thin from the winter light but stubbornly alive. Like us.
The common area is already filling when we arrive. Bodies in gray and black shuffling.
Griff is there. Of course he is. Standing at the front with his clipboard pressed against his thigh, his posture so perfect it makes my own spine straighten by reflex. His green eyes sweep the room.
"Sound off," he says. And like a small miracle, everybody shuts up. I wish I could do that.
Names are called. Names are answered. Some morning announcements, and the moment of silence so we can pray and think grateful thoughts. We're dismissed to use the bathroom and finish getting ready before breakfast.
I help Liam shave. I love doing that. Neither of us ever goes more than a day without shaving, and I love how he stays completely still, face full of shaving cream, while I use the razor, his neck stretched as he looks up, his Adam's apple bobbing.
He looks so vulnerable like that and completely mine.
Breakfast. I take my tray. Sit where I always sit, the table near the south wall with a sightline to both exits.
Jack drops beside me, already eating, talking through a mouthful of toast about the dream pancakes again.
Harry doesn't sit with us, he has other friends or clients to charm.
Miles is at the end, reading something he's got balanced on his knee under the table.
And Liam sits next to me, our bodies touching. Even when we're quiet, I love feeling the warmth of him along my right side.
He eats.
I try not to stare. I fail, but quietly.
My eyes track the fork, the food, the motions.
Eggs. Toast. A spoonful of oatmeal. Another.
He eats with a lot of focus, like he's decided to do this rather than fallen into it.
There are mornings when the food moves around the plate but never reaches his mouth.
Mornings where he takes one bite and his face goes tight, and his hand drops to his lap and I feel something helpless and furious twist behind my ribs.
But he's been doing much better since the start of treatment, and that makes me so proud.
Today is not one of those mornings. Today, he finishes the eggs. Takes a second piece of toast. Opens the canned fruit and eats three peach slices, then a fourth. I can breathe easily.
He's eating. He's here. The morning is ordinary and great.
Then, everything goes bad.
The phone room is the saddest place in Aspire Academy, and I don't say that lightly for a facility that includes solitary confinement.
Six payphones bolted to a cinder block wall, each mounted at a height that assumes the caller is average, which means the shorter kids stretch and the taller ones hunch, and nobody is ever comfortable.
The receivers are that heavy institutional plastic, the color of old teeth, connected by coiled metal cords that have been yanked and twisted and slammed down too many times.
The room smells like disinfectant layered over the particular scent of anxious boys, sweat and cheap deodorant.
The awful space between wanting to call home and dreading what home will say.
I sit at the desk by the door. Clipboard on the surface, pen in hand, watch on my left wrist. The system is simple: each resident gets ten minutes, once a week, one call per session, names checked off in order.
If you're bad, you get this privilege revoked.
I time them. I don't listen. I hear everything, but I don't listen.
Every argument, every silence, every cracked voice asking a parent who stopped caring to please, please, just this once.
It breaks my heart. Worst admin task they assign to me.
A kid with a shaved head, Jorge, dials a number and hangs up before it rings. Dials again. Hangs up again. The third time, he lets it ring, and when no one answers, he places the receiver gently back in its cradle and walks out without looking at me. I check his name off the list. Next.
Another boy, Ashton, talks to someone who is either his mother or his girlfriend, and the conversation goes from "I miss you" to "That's bullshit" in under ninety seconds. He slams the phone hard enough that the kid at the next station flinches. I give him a look. He leaves.
Then it's Jack.
He bounds up like he always does, energy barely contained.
His brown eyes are bright. He's been waiting for this all week, his sister's number is practically one of his tattoos, and he dials it without looking, the Batman tattoo on his neck shifting as he tilts his head to cradle the receiver against his shoulder.
"Yo, sis!" he says, and the grin is so wide it's really wholesome. "What's up? How's the shop? How's the little monster?"
I look down at my clipboard. Write down the time. Start the timer. Ten minutes.
The cadence of Jack's voice changes, drops half an octave, loses the bouncing rhythm. "Wait, what? What do you mean?" A pause. "He's... since when?"
I glance up.
His smile is gone. Not fading, gone. His free hand, which was resting on the wall beside the phone, has moved to his neck, fingers pressing into the skin around his tattoo. He's gripping himself.
"But the shop... he can't just... that's your business. That's both of yours, it's…" His voice cracks. He presses his forehead against the wall. "How much does he want? ... No, like, what's the actual number? What are we talking about?"
I stop writing. The pen goes still in my hand.
"What about the equipment? The lease? You can't just… yeah, I know, I know, but…" He swallows. "What about your kid? What about the... no. No, don't sell it. Don't sell the shop. Please. Just... can you hold on? Can you wait until I'm out?"
His knuckles are white around the receiver. The coiled cord trembles. I watch the boy who laughs at everything break down.
"Yeah," he says. Quiet now. The volume of someone who's stopped fighting. "Yeah, okay. I love you too. Tell the little dude I said hi. I'll... yeah. I'll figure something out."
He hangs up. But he doesn't let go. His hand stays wrapped around the receiver, fingers locked.
I stand and go to him. The other five kids at the phones look away. I reach past Jack and gently pry the receiver from his grip, finger by finger, the way you'd remove something sharp from a child's hand. The plastic is warm and damp from his palm. I place it in the cradle.
He stares at the phone.
"She's gonna lose the shop," he whispers. His face is blank. His brown eyes are fixed on a point in the middle distance.
"My whole future," he says. Not to me. To the wall, the phone, the air. "That was... I had a plan. I had a whole…"
He doesn't finish.
My hand goes to his shoulder, pressing enough that he can feel the weight of it.
He doesn't shrug me off. Doesn't lean in either. Just stands there, breathing.
"Take a minute," I tell him. "Take as long as you need."
The next resident is waiting by the door. I hold up a hand without looking. Not yet.
Jack stands in the phone room for four more minutes. I know because I watch the clock. Then he finally moves, mechanically.
He walks out. I check his name on the clipboard.
I call the next name. The system continues. It always does. That's the thing about institutions: they process grief on a schedule, allot it ten minutes, and move on. The phone room doesn't care that Jack's future just crumbled into the receiver of a payphone the color of old teeth.
But I do. And I don't know what to do about it yet, which is the worst feeling I know.
?
Lunch is loud as usual, but not at our table.
Liam starts with the jokes. He's telling the story about the fish, miming Lu's knife technique, exaggerated and wrong on purpose. It's the kind of story that would normally have Jack wheezing, throwing his head back, feeding the punchline back with something even funnier.
Jack picks up a piece of bread. Sets it down. Picks it up again. Nods at something Liam says. His eyes are aimed at the table, at the food, at nothing.
Liam switches tactics. The comedy routine fades into something quieter, he moves closer, drops his voice, leans in the way he does when he's being genuinely earnest instead of performatively loud. His hand lands on Jack's arm, a brief squeeze. Jack doesn't pull away, but he doesn't respond either.
"Hey, plenty of other shops," Harry says from across the table. He's there to be with Jack, which is his fucked up version of supporting a friend. "Other fish in the sea, right? Get it?"
My eyes find his. The look I give him is cold and serious. His mouth closes. He looks at his tray. Wisely.
Then Miles does the most impressive thing: he gets up and touches Jack's shoulder.
Jack looks up at him, a little confused.
Miles nods for Jack to get up, and he does, reluctantly.
Then Miles actually hugs Jack. It's stiff and awkward, but most of all it's shocking.
Something none of us has ever seen him do.
Now Jack is sobbing into his shoulder, and Miles just keeps hugging him while Liam, Harry, and I exchange looks in awe.
They hug for a little while until Jack stops crying. Then they both sit. We look at them as if they’d each had grown another head.
But Miles just says, "Sometimes we need to be sad."
That's it, he doesn't say anything more. Jack looks marginally better. That's all I can ask for.
After lunch, Griff catches me in the hallway with a look that means follow me, so I do.
His office smells like coffee and the particular staleness of a room that's been heated all winter. He doesn't make me sit before he starts talking, which means it's not a punishment. Punishments always start with him telling me to sit.
"You've been doing well in your coursework," he says. "The nursing program specifically. Ms. Okafor's been sending me updates."
"Yes, sir." I keep my voice flat. I don't know where this is going. Ms. Okafor is my nursing counselor.
"There's a hospital an hour from here. St. Agnes.
They have a partnership with a couple of facilities like ours.
Take on a small number of residents for supervised clinical hours.
Real hospital, real patients, under a nurse's direct supervision the whole time.
It's competitive. Most kids who apply don't get in.
" He closes the folder on his desk, looks at me over it.
"Ms. Okafor put your name forward. I signed off on it. "
For a second I don't say anything. I'm waiting for the catch. There's always a catch here.
"You'd go two days a week, a full day each time," Griff continues.
"Transport supervised. You'd be doing real clinical work, not just observing.
It looks good on paper when the time comes for review boards.
You need clinical hours for your degree.
Looks even better if you're serious about doing this for real once you're out. "
"Once I'm out," I repeat, like the words are in a language I don't quite speak.
"That's the idea." He smiles. "Don't get ahead of yourself. You screw around out there, you embarrass this program, you're back here scrubbing toilets for the rest of the year. Understood?"
"Understood, sir." I stand up straighter without meaning to. "Thank you."
"Thank Ms. Okafor. She's the one who thinks you're worth the paperwork." He waves a hand toward the door, already reaching for the next folder on his desk. "You start after everything is arranged. Details will come through her."
I walk out and the hallway looks the same as it always does, gray and cold and lined with the same doors, but something in my chest has shifted half an inch to the left.
Jack's future crumbled this morning. Mine just quietly cracked open.
I don't know what to do with either of those things yet, so I just walk, and let the feeling settle somewhere.
I walk faster. My chest is doing something I don't have a word for. I need to sit down. I need to run. I need to tell someone, except I can't tell anyone yet, especially not Liam, as I don’t want him to freak out, even though I know he’d support me, so I just keep walking, faster, until I'm almost at a run down a hallway where running is not allowed, and I don't even care.