“Don’t worry,” she says. “We’ll send something up.”
“Look at it this way,” adds Kenzo, one hand on the door. “Maybe you’ll finally get some work done.”
He’s about to close the door when Jaxon says, “Wait.”
Kenzo hesitates.
“The Galactic Trials,” says Jaxon. “You read it, didn’t you?”
The corner of Kenzo’s mouth twitches up in an unmistakable smile.
Jaxon’s heart quickens. “What did you think?”
“I think you’re a great writer.” He nods toward the typewriter. “So write.”
With that, the door swings shut.
Jaxon feels a moment of happiness, relief.
But as the silence settles, his heart, like his head, begins to turn on him.
He rattles the handle, but there’s no point.
It’s already locked.
Chapter Two
Twenty-Five Years Earlier
“LET ME OUT!” HE PLEADS, RATTLING THEhandle, even though he heard the bolt slide home.
Oswald Jackson Jr.—a name he hates not just because it regularly gets the shit kicked out of him on the playground, but because a name is supposed to be yours, it’s supposed to mean something, and this one makes him feel like a crappy photocopy of Oswald Jackson Sr., aka the world’s biggest asshole and the one who just locked him in this shitty excuse for a bedroom—slaps his palm against the doorframe. He knows better than to kick the door itself because if he so much as scratches the paint on the shitty wood, his dad will come back and tan him instead.
He’s not even sure what set his old man off this time.
One minute, Oswald was sitting on the ratty sofa, feet up on the table, reading a comic book Mom got him at a trunk sale, and the next, Dad was yelling at him to get up, and he must have taken too long, or looked at him the wrong way, because the next thing he knew, one of his dad’s meaty hands was ripping the comic book out of his grip, and the other was around the scruff of his neck, and he was being hauled down the short hall and shoved into his room.
His room is barely big enough for a bed, but he swears, as soon as the door’s locked, it starts getting smaller, like two giant hands are pressing on it from the outside, pushing the walls together, and at the same time those hands are pressing on his chest, squeezing the air right out of him.
Panic.
That’s what the school counselor called it, after Dale Parker shut him in a locker, and even though the principal got the locker open ten minutes later, a horrible thing had happened in the darkened cabinet: Oswald’s lungs had forgotten how to work. He’d sobbed, convinced he was going to die, and when they called his parents, Dad was the one who answered, and when Oswald got home, he said he didn’t raise a pussy, and next time he better fight back, and it’ll be a few years and a ten-inch growth spurt before Oswald learns how to throw a punch, but he’ll never get over the fear of small spaces.
Oswald backs away from the door, into the center of the room, trying to convince himself that he has space, that he’s not stuck.
That afternoon, when he sat shaking in the school counselor’s office, she told him to try and take slow breaths, to count five green things, and four yellow ones, and three red, but all the colors in his bedroom look faded to the point they’re just different shades of gray, and the panic’s getting worse, so Oswald tries something else.
He climbs beneath his bed.
It shouldn’t help, swapping a small space for a smaller one, but it does. Maybe it’s because he’schoosingthis one, or because, when he was little, it was like a second, secret room, one where no one else could fit. It’s tighter now, and he has to lie on his back, but once he’s under, his chest finally begins to loosen.
There, a foot over his head, is a small galaxy of plastic stick-on stars.
His mom found them in the dollar bin, a sheet of thirty for a buck, and they’re supposed to go on the ceiling, so they can soak up sunlight and then glow in the dark, but Dad wouldn’t let him put them there, said it would fuck up the paint.
That’s okay. Oswald likes them better here.
They may not glow the way they’re supposed to, but they still emit a faint hum of fluorescent green, and as his eyes slide in and out of focus, he lets his mind drift, far beyond the double-wide, until he’s somewhere else, someone else, rocketing through space, the captain of some grand galactic vessel, battling alien monsters in the dark.
