At dinner, Felix’s mother offers him the ceramic bowl with the green beans, rests her gaze on his face, waiting, as if she has asked him a question, though she hasn’t. A clean, golden line of rage angles down through his guts. He glares at her until she looks away, puts the bowl down, a fucking coward. 

“School called,” she says, patting a stray hair back into her tight bun, her voice lambent, and he can tell she has mapped the conversation like the decision trees that hang on the dining room wall before a trial.  

He watches her tiny mouse features, such delicate bones and thin, trembling skin. It’s not even fun when she’s like this. Doesn’t she know there is no great schism at the core of him? The world is simple. He is simple. “So?” 

She folds her cutlery across her plate, half her rare steak uneaten. “They don’t want you back.” 

He grinds the knife against the meat, watches blood seep from the fine-grained flesh and vein across his plate.  

His mother pushes back her chair. “I’ll make some calls tomorrow. We’ll find you something better.” 

But this is already the best private school around. So good he will be allowed to leave quietly, even though he was caught red-handed—witnessed, then accosted at the exit. In the principal’s office, he had worn his open, sorry face, said it was just a prank, he didn’t mean anything by it, he had learned his lesson.  

Before that he stands in the dim, empty classroom over his teacher’s mug and waits for the shouts in the hallway to clear. Kids are always shouting and going on about nothing. A body thuds against the door. Some Chad. A slap of hands appears in the square window. An adult voice takes charge; the din quiets, vanishes. He slips the thin envelope from his back pocket, tips the white powder into the milky tea. It clumps then sinks into the liquid. He smiles, realizing it doesn’t even matter if she drinks it. The possibility, for now, is enough. 

Before that his teacher hands back his essay with “correlation is not causation” scrawled in the margin. But who could say what causes anything? Isn’t the whole world a domino line of correlations waiting for a first push? He goes to his teacher’s desk where she sits at her laptop, a ray of sun slashing gold across the blue veins of her throat. 

“Hey Felix, what’s up?”  

“What do you mean here?” He points to her green scrawl. 

“Just because two things happen—“ 

“I know the definition, but why is this an example?” 

“Just because the girl wants—” 

But he can’t hear the answer because Carla with the V cut sweater is staring at him and whispering something to her blond neighbour, who looks up, catches his eye and giggles, pale hand covering her mouth. 

Before that he is alone in his bedroom; it is dark, save for the computer screen shining with the blue light of a chat with Carla. He’s eating Doritos for dinner because his mother is working late again. 

Before that he is 8, a birthday boy in a Burger King crown watching the knife slice clean through the cake. 

It’s easy to get the six-year-old neighbor girl out back to the dumpster where it smells like old fries. They squat over greasy concrete, and she whispers, “Show me.” She means the puppy he told her about, but instead he grins and slides the cake knife from his jacket. But she’s faster than you’d think and before he knows it she’s gone. In the parking lot, his mother presses his head to her hip, says to the little girl’s parents, her voice shaking, “He hasn’t been the same.” Tucked in the warmth of his mother’s body, he watches the little girl’s pigtails bob gently, like lures, in the backseat of her family’s car. 

Before that he stands at the edge of his father’s open grave, his small hand clutched between his mother’s bony fingers, and watches as the dark coffin lowers into the earth. She emits small, high sounds, squeezes his hand too tight, and although he loved his father, he does not cry. Not then, not ever. The day is blue, the sun bright, and inside him nothing cracks open. 

Before that, he is on a soft square blanket, whole and watched. His mother tickles his cheek with her long, dark hair, and he grabs for it, again and again, and as he laughs, she laughs, for he is a wonder, and a golden line of sun traces a widening trail from his pale cheek to the great expanse outside, and everything is possible.