On the rare occasions when my mother does spare me a glance, she looks at me like I’m nothing at all, like I don’t exist unless I’m an inconvenience. Our interactions, or lack thereof, were always far from motherly. They were cruel and filled with disappointment. Like she’s internally cursing whatever twist of fate made me hers.
Sometimes, I wonder if I was ever even a daughter to her. Am I really just an obligation? A mistake she learned to tolerate?
Across the table, Kai sits as he always does—posture perfect, yet robotic in a way no one but me ever seems to notice. He’s too good to be true, but at the same time, there’s something weirdly eerie about his stillness, like he isn’t entirely here. He’s always been slightly distant, but after being sent away, something about him changed.
He’s colder now. Hollowed out. It’s strange how someone so physically present can feel so absent.
He sits between Will and Christian, a trio I have always found quite bizarre. They never made sense to me, not togetherat least, and yet they made it work. Now, I only ever see them together.
Kai and Will had formed an unlikely friendship a few years back, one that seemed almost inevitable.
Simply because Will needed Kai, and Kai needed Will. Their friendship, if one could even call it that, wasn’t surprising.
It was almost like they had passed the stage of friendship. They had skipped that stage and landed directly in a place of understanding. They got each other in the way that people who are equally broken understand each other. They don’t even need to talk about it. They just knew. I’ve always envied that about them. The way they can be silent together and still be seen.
Across from me, Christian listens attentively to whatever my father is rambling on about. Unlike most, Christian has the gift of genuine listening. He observes, absorbs, and retains information. A strategist.
A poet with a brilliant literary mind—one I can’t even begin to understand.
But despite Christian being Kai’s cousin, and living with him, they weren’t always close; something shifted between them over the years. Time, I suppose. Or necessity.
And then, of course, there was that other boy. The small one who hadn’t quite grown into his size, yet had the kind of confidence most people could only dream of. The one that had been so badly tormented at school at one point. Bullied in every sense of the word.
Liam. From the Grey family.
He was little, but tough, and had the kind of resilience that most people overlooked. He was brave, I’ll give him that.
At first, Kai had only watched. He never stepped in, never said a word. And then one day, Liam fought back.
I remember it like it was yesterday, because it was so sudden, so unexpected. One moment, he was getting shoved against alocker, and the next, he was throwing a punch, catching one of them—one of Kai’s so-called “friends”—clean across the jaw.
Hilarious if you ask me. I didn’t know much about his other friends, because as far as I know they were never really his friends, just puppets. They’ve always been expendable to him; in fact, I gather most people would fall into that same category when it comes to Kai.
And sometimes, I think, all of them do.
The kid he’d hit had stumbled back, dazed, more out of shock than pain, and Liam just stood there, fists clenched, breathing hard, his eyes burning. The others had waited for Kai to react. These were his people, his circle, and Liam had just made an enemy of them.
But Kai hadn’t been mad.
He hadn’t reprimanded him or stepped in to put him back in his place. Instead, he had watched, something almost amused flickering in his expression, and then, of all things, he had smiled.
He was impressed, I realized. As if something in Liam’s defiance had pleased him.
That was the moment everything changed, and Kai took him under his wing after that. He made sure no one touched him again, and no one ever did.
There isn’t a single soul in that school that would go against Kai’s wishes. It would be suicide, socially speaking. It’s a kind of superpower, I guess. To have everyone bend backwards at your will.
Even then, I think we all understood he wasn’t quite like the rest of us. He had that particular sort of mind—strange, beautiful, and slightly out of reach.
He has always been, to put it plainly, something otherworldly.
And yet, it didn’t matter how often I’d watch him, I could never understand him in the slightest. And the moment you think you do, he’ll prove you wrong.
Like the time a few months back when he shocked the whole world and buzzed all his hair off.
I still don’t know why he did it. He didn’t even warn anyone or explain why. Kai hadn’t even flinched when Berlin had walked in on him that day and screamed the rooftops off.
One morning his hair was light brown and falling into his eyes the way it usually did. And the next day, it was gone.
