The wind at this height feels different, cleaner, like it had never been forced to choke down the Botox and quiet desperation drifting up from the plebs below.
Phei Maxton stood dead on the edge of the school rooftop, six stories up, staring down at the manicured hellscape that had been his cage for seventeen straight years.
From this high, it almost looked edible: lawns so perfect they were basically nepo-baby porn, Mediterranean McMansions flexing their stucco abs, that private golf course rolling out like God's own putting-green thirst trapps, the community center spark like it personally blew the budget committee.
Paradise.
That's what the peasant outside the gates called it while they doom-scrolled the drone footage and cried.
For him it was just Hell's glow-up. The Next Level After Hell!
He closed his eyes and let the trauma montage autoplay one last time, not because he was into nostalga kink, but because his brain was a petty bitch that refused to let a single receipt expire.
It wasn't always like this, some Disney-channel ghost in his head tried to whisper.
Cute lie. It had always been this rancid. From the day his parents got turned into speed-bump confetti when he was seven, sudden, messy, done, and he got overnighted to Aunt Melissa and Harold Maxton like some limited-edition orphan with killer cheekbones.
The Maxtons. One off the Founding-family royalty of The Paradise. Money so old it had cobwebs, money so new it still had the plastic on. The kind of wealth that didn't open doors; it built the cathedral, then charged admission to breathe.
He was supposed to be grateful. Melissa (he'd stopped calling her "aunt" the day he realized gratitude was just humiliation in Sunday best) still delivered the sermon like it was branded on her soul: "You should be grateful we took you in. Grateful you have a roof over your head. Grateful you get to attend Ashford Elite Academy with our children."
Our children. Never nephew. Never family. Just charity case with a side of contempt.
Three female cousins and one boy who'd sell Phei's kidneys for better ring light and call it a favor.
Victoria, nineteen, Ivy League venom in human form, home on breaks just to remind him air was a limited resource. The twins, Danton and Delilah, eighteen, senior-year gods sculpted by whatever surgeon Daddy kept on retainer, both treating him like gum on their red bottoms.
And Sienna. Sweet Seventeen. Same grade. Same age. Different species. The kind of lethal pretty that made you want to sin just to get excommunicated closer to her.
Five Maxton children in total, if you counted him. But nobody did. Not even him.
The house, sorry, the compound 'cause calling it a house or mansion was an insult, had twelve bedrooms. Twelve.
Yet somehow Phei's was the shoebox next to the laundry room that still smelled like fabric softener and quietly dying dreams. Used to be staff quarters, back when they paid humans for that.
Then they decided a freshly orphaned seven-year-old could moonlight as housekeeping and call it character building.
His room. The punchline.
Danton used it like a post-rager biohazard site. Smashed controllers from rage quits. Empty White Claws. Crumpled Takis bags licked clean. Dirty boxer briefs.
And the crown jewel—and this was Phei's personal favorite—used condoms knotted and flicked across the carpet like victory confetti after Danton raw-dogged whatever influencer fell for the trust-fund smirk that week.
"Yo, Phei-Phei!" Danton would sing-song down the marble hallway, voice dripping fake affection and real venom. "Clean this shit up, yeah? Can't have Mom seeing this."
And Phei cleaned it.
Because what choice did a charity case ever have?
Because in that house, compliance wasn't a choice. It was survival.
The worst nights were the ones when Danton brought a girl back to Phei's room. He never knocked; doors were for people who didn't own the house.
He'd just shoulder the thing open, some half-drunk girl already laughing at a joke Phei never got to hear, her arm looped around Danton's waist like she'd been born there.
"Out," Danton would say, flicking his thumb toward the hallway the way you shoo a cat off a couch. Didn't matter if Phei was halfway through homework or already in bed. Out.
So Phei left. He'd sit on the carpet outside his own door for a while, knees pulled to his chest, listening to the muffled music and the laughter that always sounded sharper when it was aimed at him.
When it got too loud, he'd drift downstairs to the second library nobody used, curl into one of the big leather chairs, and wait. Sometimes until three, four in the morning, until heels clicked across the marble and a car door slammed.
Only then could he creep back in, spraying everything down with cheap air freshener that smelled like artificial pine and somebody else's sex, and trying to sleep on sheets that still felt warm.
Some nights Danton didn't even bring a girl. He just wanted the bed.
Or wanted Phei to knowing he could take it whenever he felt like it. He'd stretch out across the mattress with his laptop balanced on his chest, volume cranked high enough that the fake moans of porn leaked through Phei's headphones anyway.
Phei kept his eyes on the algebra problems in front of him and pretended the numbers still made sense.
Once, just once, Phei asked him to leave. The words came out small and cracked, like a kid asking for the last slice of pizza he already knew wasn't his.
Danton paused the video, looked over with that lazy, sleepy smile that always meant trouble, and said, "What, you never seen tits before? Educational viewing, little bro."
One day the girl riding him laughed so hard she had to grab the headboard to stay on. Phei still hears that laugh sometimes when the house is too quiet.
Right now Phei is standing on the ledge outside his bedroom window, six stories above the concrete courtyard nobody ever uses. The wind tugs at his shirt like it's trying to help him decide.
School was supposed to be different. Ashford Elite Academy, all ivy and iron gates and the kind of money that smell like new leather and old power.
When they made him start here at thirteen, Phei actually thought the nightmare might pause here. New place, new rules. Maybe he could be somebody who mattered.
Eight days. That's how long it took.
The uniform they gave him had been Danton's first, cuffs already thin, blazer smelling faintly of someone else's cologne. He brought lunch in a paper bag while everyone else orders fifty-dollar poke bowls. His phone still had a home button.
Kids that age can smells weakness the way dogs smell fear.
They never used his name.
"Maxton!" they'd shout across the quad, and Phei would turn every time, heart stupidly leaping, until he saw they were waving at Danton or Delilah or Victoria. He was just the extra one. The scholarship kid. The spare.
Brett and his friends turned it into sport.
A shoulder check in the hallway, a spilled latte down Phei's shirt, homework that vanished and reappeared with Brett's name on it. One days Phei finally dragged himself to a teacher, Mr. Harrison didn't even look up from his computer long enough to pretend interest.
"Brett's father paid for the new science wing," he said, like that was the whole conversation.
The girls were worse, quieter about it. Sierra cornered him in the library one afternoon, two friends blocking the aisle, phones already out.
"You're writing these essays for us," she told him, sweetest as poison. "Or everyone hears you followed me into the bathroom and wouldn't leave." He wrote them. Five essays, all-nighter, wrists cramping. They told the story anyway.
The whole community lived behind walls and gates and private security that answered to the homeowners, not the city. Phei was inside the fortress but he'd never belonged there.
He tried, God he tried. Learned how Melissa wanted her coffee, how Harold liked his shirts folded, how to move through the house without making noise. Thought if he was useful enough and invisible maybe they'd let him stay. Maybe they'd even want him.
Last week Sienna took the laptop he'd bought with money he earned washing dishes at four in the morning, money he hid in a sock under his mattress, and brought it back with the screen cracked into a spiderweb.
"Oops," she said, eye still on her phone.
Harold glanced over top of his newspaper. "Things break, Phei. You'll manage."
Three days ago Victoria came home from whatever expensive college she pretended to attend and decided the towels were folded wrong. She stood in the doorway sipping wine from a glass bigger than Phei's head while he unfolded and refolded every towel in the house.
Four hours on his knees.
She kept angling her phone so her friends could watch. "He's literally trembling," she narrates, delighted. "So pathetic."
He wasn't trembling from rage.
He was counting. Counting the little blue pills in Melissa's rarely-opened medicine cabinet. Counting how many it would take to make the counting of his life time stop.