The boy sat on the cracked stone steps at the edge of the courtyard, his knees drawn up tight against his chest, elbows balanced on the sharp ridges of bone. He watched the others—his cohort, his pack—scatter from the recreation room doors like startled sparrows. The warmth of noon pressed flat against the concrete, the relentless Southern Anchor sun already dissolving the chalk lines from yesterday's hopscotch tournament. Half a dozen boys tumbled toward the scuffed kickball, arguing over the rules in a Babel of dialects, their calls bouncing off the high, windowless walls of the Benevolent Shelter of Last Resort.
He watched, but he wasn't watching them. Not really. Not the way a child is supposed to—sizing up the chances of winning, or scanning for the moment an adult's back is turned so they could escalate the game from "fun" to "potential medical emergency." His attention, whenever it lapsed from strict discipline, drifted always to Johan Liebert.
Johan stood with his back to the morning-glazed brick, just beneath the barred window that looked in on the Director's Office. The window was made for ventilation, not surveillance, but the threat of adult presence was enough to keep the bolder kids away from that quadrant of the yard. Johan, of course, was unbothered by the proximity. He stood perfectly still. His white-blonde hair—so pale it seemed colorless—remained perfectly parted, the single rebel lock at his brow held in check by a hidden matrix of gel or perhaps sheer will.
Johan did not join the games. He did not move or sway or make the little unconscious gestures that indicated humanity in the flesh. He simply observed. Hands folded behind his back, chin tipped forward in a thoughtful half-bow. If he had blinked, the boy never saw it. If his lungs moved, they did so with perfect stealth, so the fabric of his crisp blue shirt never rippled at all.
The boy adjusted his own posture, suddenly aware of how slouched and sprawling his body had become. He straightened, pushed his shoulders back, and tried to replicate Johan's composure. His knees wouldn't quite lock; the left kept wanting to tilt inward, as if magnetized by self-betrayal. He folded his hands, first in his lap, then behind his back, settling for the position that looked least like a parody of obedience.
The kickball match was descending into chaos—someone had declared "double points" and a second ball was in play, which quickly devolved into open warfare. Above the commotion, he heard the metallic whine of the courtyard gate as the Maintenance Man emerged from the tool shed. The boy flinched, bracing for the voice that would surely single out his name, some new blame pinned to his scrawny, pigeon-chested self. Instead, the Man with the Keys stalked toward the playground perimeter, broom in hand, to shoo away a pair of younger girls who'd found a cache of cigarette butts in the gravel.
The boy let out a thin, breathy laugh at the girls' ingenuity—then instantly regretted it. He glanced at Johan to see if the sound had registered. Johan's gaze did not waver, but the boy had the uncanny sense of being observed in turn, as if through a two-way mirror. He imagined the world from Johan's vantage: the chaos of the other children forming predictable, repeating fractals; the adults' movements telegraphed in advance by the tenor of their footsteps; the emotional currents of the orphanage visible as a thin, colored mist.
But even in imagination, he could not get behind those eyes.
He tried anyway. It was a private game, a way of making sense of the boy who scared the everliving shit out of him, even while the staff referred to him as "the model student." He watched for the subtle cues. Johan's left thumb, bent slightly at the first joint, caressed the knuckles of his right hand in a motion that looped every seven seconds, on the dot. Each time the echoing laughter of the other children peaked, Johan's gaze would lift fractionally, as if measuring the wave and its decay. When the Director's shadow glided past the office window, Johan's head did not move, but the boy saw the almost imperceptible dilation of his pupils.
He imagined Johan's mind as an infinite ledger, each entry a notation of every spoken word, every misstep, every decision made by anyone in the building since time began. The boy wondered what notes had been taken about him.
He wanted, desperately, to know what page he occupied in Johan's mental catalog.
The game escalated. Someone tripped, sprawling face-first into the gravel, scraping a forearm raw and bloody. The boy watched the injured child stagger to his feet, looked for the microsecond flicker of pain, the reflexive glance toward the staff, then the quick scan of the bystanders for sympathy or witnesses. Johan did not so much as flinch.
The boy's heart hammered in his chest. He could not say why; this was an ordinary afternoon, the same as every other since the director had switched them to the summer schedule and the days became endless white-hot corridors of boredom. Nothing had happened, but he felt as if something had. Something enormous and inevitable, vibrating beneath the surface of the day like the hum of distant machinery. It was all he could do not to look over his shoulder.
He tried to force his thoughts to something else—to the memory of breakfast (the hardboiled egg, the half-stale toast, the minute satisfaction of getting the first pour of syrup from the communal pitcher) or to the trivia he'd been teaching himself about city transit lines (did you know that in some countries, trains could fold space, like a piece of paper, bringing two points together with almost no travel at all?). But each time his mind wandered, it was pulled back to Johan—Johan's statue-like posture, the clockwork blinking, the slow cadence of his breathing.
He checked the windows of the administration building. No one was watching. The adults' world was sealed off, the glass double-thick and frosted. He could have gotten up, could have run, could have joined the scrum of children and allowed himself to be tackled, bruised, reabsorbed into the stream of normalcy. But he could not move. He could not look away.
He remembered the first time he had seen Johan. It was the day after the fire drill, the day the old dormitory matron lost her nerve and quit, the day the boy himself was supposed to have been adopted. The prospective parents—who had spoken with the brittle cheer of people convinced they were "saving" something—never returned.
The boy had seen a lot of new faces in the orphanage. Some arrived shattered, snotty and raw from separation. Others arrived blank, numb, already trained in the economy of hope. He remembered when Johan arrived, born in the orphanage and already a fully formed rumor, or the shadow of a secret someone had decided to share.
There was a story—one of the girls in the older cohort claimed she'd seen the file: Johan had never cried as a baby, never screamed, not even when the nurses at the hospital administered vaccinations or when the first family that tried to foster him "changed their minds." He simply accepted what was. The boy doubted this; everyone cried, everyone screamed, unless they'd already been replaced by something else.
Another whistle from the playground supervisor. The children formed two ragged lines, the rules for the next game being shouted at them with the conviction of military law. The boy noted who listened, who argued, who cheated by creeping up past the starting line. He realized he was performing his own version of the ledger, his own attempt at mastery through observation. But every time he tried to add a note about Johan, the line was blank.
Johan was not inscrutable; he was worse. He was legible, but only in a language the boy had never been taught.
Johan's gaze shifted, meeting his own. It was not the shy, sidelong glance of a child unsure if he was allowed to make eye contact. It was direct, piercing, as if measuring the boy's face for minute changes in emotional topography. The boy flinched—an involuntary, visible startle—and then tried to cover the movement by rubbing at an imaginary itch on his shin.
Johan tilted his head just so, a gesture not of confusion, but of clinical interest. The boy felt the flush of shame, the sense of having revealed something about himself without knowing what or why. He wanted to stand, to say something clever or biting, to reassert the invisible hierarchy that kept his own nerves from eating him alive. Instead he sat, rooted to the steps, waiting for the next move.
A memory flashed—some child-psychology manual he'd glimpsed in the office, the page about "contagion of affect." Emotions spread, like viruses, through mimicry and mirroring. Smile at a baby, the book said, and the baby will smile back. Frown, and you will get a frown. The boy wondered, if you stared into Johan's eyes long enough, what emotion you would catch.
The answer, he realized, was none at all.
Johan began to walk, each step a precisely metered interval. He crossed the width of the courtyard, never once glancing at the mayhem around him. He passed within six feet of the boy, paused, turned, and fixed him with that unsettling blue stare. He waited, as if expecting a question.
The boy opened his mouth, but no words arrived. Johan watched the effort, clocked the hesitation, then nodded—once, politely, the way the Director nodded when dismissing a topic that bored her.
"Do you ever get tired of watching?" Johan asked.
The voice was calm, unmodulated, but not cold. The question hung in the air, as if suspended on an invisible string.
"I'm not watching," the boy lied. He tried to look at the dirt, but his eyes flicked back to Johan's too quickly.
Johan smiled, not unkindly. "You're very good at it," he said.
The boy didn't know whether to feel complimented or mocked. He tried to laugh, but it came out as a hiccup.
"I'm waiting for them to call us back in," he improvised.
Johan's gaze flickered, as if calculating the probability of this statement being true. "The bell won't ring for another sixteen minutes," he said. "Would you like to wait with me?"
The boy hesitated. He glanced at the other children, at the staff member half-hidden behind a newspaper, at the patch of sky visible above the enclosing walls. There was nowhere else to go. He stood, dusted off his shorts, and joined Johan beneath the barred window.
They stood together in silence. Not companionable, not hostile—just a silence that expanded to fill the available space. The boy became acutely aware of his own breathing, of the sound his tongue made as it probed the inside of a loose tooth, of the tiny flecks of paint flaking from the window frame above them.
Johan resumed his watchfulness, but now his head inclined slightly toward the boy, as if sharing a secret vantage. The boy tried not to think about how strange this was, how unnatural the moment, but the thought would not leave.
"You don't have to be afraid of me," Johan said, after a long while.
The boy started, caught off guard by the suddenness of the pronouncement. "I'm not," he said, but the tremor in his voice said otherwise.
Johan's eyes narrowed, not in suspicion, but in a kind of amusement. "You're afraid of a lot of things," he said. "I used to be, too."
The boy wanted to ask what Johan was afraid of. He wanted to know whether it was the same things he feared—the certainty of being left behind, the unpredictability of adults, the sick feeling when you realized your life was a series of tests you were failing.
Instead, he said, "I'm not scared. I just like to know what's going to happen."
Johan nodded. "Most people do," he said. "But they don't admit it."
The boy felt something uncoil in his stomach, a strange relief. He could almost believe, for a moment, that Johan was like him. Almost.
A shout interrupted their conversation—a kid from the kickball game, lying on the ground, clutching his ankle and howling. Johan didn't so much as flinch.
"They always get back up," Johan said, quietly. "They always pretend it doesn't hurt."
The boy looked at the scene, then at Johan, and realized: he was being studied, dissected, analyzed, even as he tried to do the same to Johan. He blinked, slow and deliberate. Swallowed. He was surprised to find that his own breathing had synchronized with Johan's.
Sixteen minutes later, as promised, the bell rang, and the children lined up at the entrance. The staff called their names in alphabetical order, moving them back inside for lunch and the forced monotony of the afternoon. Johan lingered at the end of the line, and the boy found himself standing beside him without quite knowing how.
In the echoing corridor, with the sound of footsteps and whispered insults bouncing off the walls, the boy stole a glance at Johan's face.
For the first time, he saw the hint of something in those pale eyes—not empathy, not cruelty, but an infinite patience. Like a doctor waiting for the patient to admit what was wrong.
The boy blinked again, matching Johan's rhythm. He didn't know whether he was learning or being taught.
He only knew that the rhythm was inside him now, and it would never leave.