"You little shit," he says quietly, and the softness of his voice is more terrifying than any shout. "You dare put your hands on me?"
And then he's coming at me.
The first punch catches me in the stomach and all the air rushes out of my lungs in a single explosive breath. I double over, gasping, trying to breathe and failing. Before I can straighten up, before I can even begin to recover, his fist connects with the side of my head and the world goes bright and tilted, spinning sickeningly. My ear is ringing, a high-pitched whine that drowns out everything else.
I swing at him blindly, purely on instinct, feel my knuckles connect with something solid—his jaw, his shoulder, his chest, I don't know and don't care. And then his hands are on me, grabbing my shirt with both fists, and he's throwing me against the wall with enough force to crack plaster.
My head hits first and for a second everything goes black. When my vision clears, swimming back into focus, Henderson is standing over me where I've crumpled to the floor, and his face is twisted with a fury I've never seen before, not in all the months I've lived here.
I've crossed a line. I've done the one thing you're never supposed to do in this house. I fought back. I put my hands on him.
"You want to be a man?" he snarls, reaching down and grabbing my left arm. "You want to fight me like a man? Fine. Let's see how much of a man you are."
He yanks me up and pain shoots through my shoulder as my weight pulls against the joint. I try to pull away, try to break his grip, but he's too strong, too heavy, too angry. He twists my arm behind my back, forcing it up between my shoulder blades, and pain shoots through my shoulder socket, white-hot and terrible.
"Stop, please stop, leave him alone!" I hear Ivan screaming somewhere behind us, his voice raw and desperate, but it sounds far away, like it's coming from underwater or from another room entirely.
Henderson twists harder and I feel something in my arm shift wrong, a terrible grinding sensation that makes my stomach turn. The pain is blinding, all-consuming, and I'm struggling now, really struggling, trying to get free, trying to twist away, but his grip is iron.
And then he slams me forward into the edge of the counter.
I hear it before I feel it—a crack, a snap, the sound of something breaking that shouldn't break, the sound of bone giving way under pressure. It's sickeningly loud, impossibly loud, echoing in my ears.
Then the pain hits.
The pain is white-hot, like nothing I've ever experienced. It wipes out everything else—thought, sound, vision. For a moment the whole world is nothing but that pain, radiating from my arm in waves that consume everything I can't see, can't think, can't breathe.
There is only pain.
I must scream. I don't remember screaming but I must, because when the world comes back into focus—slowly, gradually, like surfacing from deep water—Ivan is sobbing and Henderson is standing a few feet away, breathing hard, looking at me with something that might be satisfaction or might be fear. Even he knows he went too far this time. Even he knows you can't explain this away with lies about a boy falling down stairs.
My arm is hanging wrong. I can see it even through the haze of pain that's making everything blur and swim. The angle isn't right, the shape isn't right. There's a bump in my forearm that shouldn't be there, a protrusion under the skin. It's broken. It's definitely, obviously broken.
"You did that to yourself," Henderson says. "You came at me. You attacked me. I was defending myself. That's what happened. You understand me, boy?"
I can't answer. I'm sliding down the cabinets to the floor, my back against the wood, cradling my arm against my chest with my other hand, trying not to move it, trying not to jar it because every tiny movement sends fresh waves of agony through my entire body. The pain comes in waves, each one worse than the last, cresting and breaking and cresting again.
"You tell anyone different, it'll be worse for both of you," Henderson says. He looks at Ivan, who is frozen by the counter, tears streaming down his face, his back still bleeding. "Get him to your room. Keep him quiet. And don't even think about leaving this house tonight. You leave, you run, and I'll call the cops and tell them you attacked me. They'll put you in juvie so fast your head will spin. Both of you."
He turns and walks out of the kitchen, and a moment later I hear the truck start up and pull away down the driveway, gravel crunching under the tires. Going to a bar, probably. Going to drink until he convinces himself that what he did was justified, that it was self-defense, that I'm the one who caused this.
"Jay." Ivan is kneeling beside me, his hands hovering over my arm like he wants to touch me but is afraid to make it worse. "Jay, oh God, Jay, your arm—it's—I can see—"
"It's okay. It's okay. It's fine. Help me up."
"We need to call someone," Ivan says desperately, his words tumbling over each other. "We need to get you to a hospital right now, we need to—"
"No. No hospital. Not tonight. If we call anyone, Henderson will say I attacked him. They'll believe him. Adults always believe other adults. They'll think I'm violent, that I'm the problem. They'll put me somewhere worse."
Ivan is crying so hard now that his whole body is shaking with it, sobs tearing out of him, and I realize with a distant kind of wonder that this is the first time I've seen him really cry since he got here. All those months, all those beatings, all those nights in the barn—he held it together, keptit inside, stayed strong. But watching me get hurt is what breaks him. Seeing me in pain is worse for him than experiencing his own pain.
"Hey," I say, reaching out with my good arm, my right arm, and touching his face gently, wiping at his tears even though more keep coming, streaming down his cheeks. "Hey. I need you to help me get to our room. Can you do that for me?"
He nods, still crying, and he helps me stand. Every movement sends fresh waves of agony through my arm, and I have to stop twice to breathe through it, to keep from passing out, to keep the darkness at the edges of my vision from closing in completely. The walk down the hallway takes forever. Each step is an eternity of pain. By the time we get to our room and Ivan closes the door behind us, clicking the lock, I'm drenched in sweat and shaking almost as badly as he is.
I sit on my bed, cradling my broken arm against my chest, trying to find a position that doesn't hurt and failing. Ivan sits next to me, close enough that our shoulders touch. He's still crying, these quiet sobs that shake his whole body, and I lean into him because I don't have the strength to hold myself up anymore, because the pain is making me weak and dizzy.
"I'm sorry," he keeps saying, over and over. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, this is my fault, you shouldn't have—you shouldn't have done that, you shouldn't have—"
