The first pencil came from the recycling bin outside the classroom.
Yaz found it on a Tuesday morning, half-buried under crumpled worksheets and broken crayons. Yellow paint, chipped. Eraser worn down to a pink nub. Eight centimeters long, maybe eight and a half. He measured it against his finger to be sure. Longer than his index finger. Shorter than his middle and index together.
He looked around. The hallway was empty. The recycling bin sat where it always sat, against the wall near the supply closet, overflowing with the discarded evidence of other children's education. No one watched. No one cared. Pencils were nothing. Pencils were everywhere and nowhere at once, belonging to everyone and no one.
He took it.
His hand moved before he could think about moving it. Fingers closing around the wood, pulling it free from the pile, tucking it into his sleeve in one smooth motion. The wood was cold. Slightly damp from something spilled in the bin. But solid. Real.
He walked to the cafeteria with his heart beating too fast. The pencil pressed against the inside of his wrist, hidden, a secret shaped like possibility.
The second pencil was shorter.
Five centimeters. Blue paint instead of yellow. No eraser at all, just a metal ring with teeth marks where someone had chewed it. Yaz found it under a table in the common room three days later. It had rolled into the crack between floor and wall, the crack where dust gathered in gray drifts that no one cleaned because no one looked there.
He looked there. He always looked in the places no one else looked.
The pencil was nearly useless. So short it would be hard to hold. So chewed it felt wrong in his hand, wet with the memory of someone else's mouth. But he took it anyway. Added it to the yellow one in his locker. Two pencils now. Two small chances.
The third came from the yard. Snapped in half, lying in the mud near the dead tree, so short it was barely a stub. Three centimeters at most. Yaz cleaned the mud off with his sleeve and put it with the others.
Three pencils.
He did not know what he would do with them. He only knew that having them felt different from not having them. Like the difference between standing at the fence and turning away from the fence. One was passive. The other was something else.
Paper was harder.
The orphanage did not waste paper. What paper existed was counted, distributed, collected, recycled. Worksheets came and went. Drawings were made and taken and filed or thrown away. Nothing stayed. Nothing accumulated. The system was designed that way. Efficient. Lean. Leaving no room for hoarding, for saving, for children who might want to keep things that were technically not theirs.
Yaz learned to watch the bins.
Not the recycling bins. Those were too public, too obvious, too likely to draw attention. The trash bins. The ones in the corners of rooms, the ones beside caretakers' desks, the ones that held the things adults threw away without thinking because adults did not think about what children might want.
He found his first scrap on April 30th.
It was small. The size of his palm, roughly torn, one edge straight and three edges ragged. The back was blank. The front held part of a memo, words he could not fully read because the tear had cut through them. "...regarding the new..." and "...effective immediately..." and a signature that was just a scribble.
He took it.
Over the next three days, he found more. A corner torn from a notebook. A receipt for something called "cleaning supplies, bulk." A yellow sticky note that had lost its stick. A page from a magazine, glossy on one side, blank and white on the other.
Eleven scraps by May 2nd. He counted them carefully, laying them out on his bed during quiet hour when the dormitory was empty. Eleven pieces of paper, each one different, each one rescued from the trash, each one now his.
He stacked them in his locker. Under his spare uniform. Behind his toothbrush and the small smooth stone he had found in the yard years ago. His collection. His treasury.
Three pencils. Eleven scraps of paper.
It was not much. It was almost nothing.
But it was more than he had ever had before.
The yellow paper came on May 3rd.
It was different from the others. Warmer. Softer. The color of butter, of afternoon light, of things that were meant to be touched and held. A5 size, larger than any of his other scraps. Slightly crumpled at one corner but otherwise perfect.
He found it in the wastebasket near Mrs. Okonkwo's station. She had thrown it away along with some notes and a empty tea sachet. Just paper. Just trash. But the color caught his eye, and he knelt as if tying his shoe, and his hand moved, and then the paper was in his sleeve, pressed against his skin, warm already.
That night, lying in bed, he held it up to the dim light from the window. The orange glow of streetlamps turned the yellow into something else. Gold, almost. Precious.
This one, he decided. This one was special. This one was for something important.
He did not know what yet.
But he would.
Drawing did not work.
Yaz discovered this on the evening of May 3rd, sitting in the storage room with his back against the stacked mattresses and his shortest pencil in his hand. The room smelled like dust and machine oil from the boiler next door. The single bulb above him flickered. Pff. Pff. A quiet static, almost like breathing.
He had a piece of paper. Not the yellow one. One of the others, the corner torn from a notebook. He pressed the pencil point to the surface.
A face. He would draw a face. A person. Someone.
The pencil moved.
What appeared was not a face. It was... he did not know what it was. Shapes that refused to become shapes. A circle that was not round. Eyes that were too big. A mouth that was a slash. Hair that looked like scribbles, which it was, which was all he knew how to make.
He tried again. Different paper. Different angle.
Worse. The nose was on the wrong side. Or the ears were. Or everything was.
Again.
The paper tore. His pencil pressed too hard. A hole appeared where the face should be. A hole surrounded by bad lines and worse ideas.
He crumpled the paper. Threw it against the wall. It bounced and rolled and stopped near a box of old cleaning supplies.
The frustration burned in his chest. Hot. Tight. The feeling of wanting something you could not have, of reaching for something your hands could not grasp.
He was seven years old. Seven-year-olds drew. They drew all the time. Pictures of houses and trees and families. Pictures of suns with faces and clouds with legs and dogs that looked like dogs, at least a little.
But Yaz's pictures looked like nothing. Like the inside of his head when he tried to remember his parents. Blur and absence. Shapes that refused to hold their shape.
He gathered the crumpled papers. Put them in his pocket to throw away later, somewhere no one would connect them to him.
Drawing did not work.
Writing did not work either.
He tried on May 4th, in the same storage room, with a different pencil and a different piece of paper. The glossy magazine page. He would write on the back, the white side, the side that was blank and waiting.
A story. He would write a story. That was what people did. They wrote stories about things that happened, and other people read them, and then the writer was remembered. He had learned this in lessons. Books. Authors. The ones whose names went on covers.
He pressed the pencil down.
Once upon a time...
The words came out shaky. His handwriting was bad. He knew this. The orphanage taught handwriting in third year, which he was in now, but teaching and learning were different things. His letters leaned the wrong way. His O's were not round.
Once upon a time there was a boy.
He stopped. What happened next? In stories, things happened. Events. Problems. Solutions. The boy met someone or found something or went somewhere. The story moved.
But Yaz did not know how to make stories move. He only knew how to watch them, to receive them from books and screens and lessons. The mechanics of creation were hidden. No one had taught him how.
The boy was...
What? What was the boy? Sad? Happy? Looking for something?
The boy was at a fence.
He stared at the words. They looked wrong. Not wrong like his drawings, which looked like nothing. Wrong in a different way. Flat. Dead. Words that were just words, not a story, not anything that mattered.
He wrote another sentence.
He stood at the fence and looked through it.
And another.
There were people on the other side.
He read what he had written. His stomach felt strange. The sentences sat on the paper like insects that had died and dried out. Husks of something. Not the thing itself.
He put the pencil down.
Stories required something he did not have. A knowledge. A skill. A way of making words become more than words, of making sentences become more than sentences.
He did not have it.
The radio was in the corner.
Yaz noticed it on the evening of May 4th, after his failed story, after he had crumpled the glossy paper and shoved it in his pocket with the other failures. He was looking for somewhere to sit, somewhere the flickering bulb did not reach, and his eyes moved across the boxes and broken chairs and then stopped.
It was small. Fifteen centimeters long, maybe ten wide. Black plastic casing, cracked down one side. An antenna bent at an angle that suggested it had been stepped on. A dial on the front, numbers faded to ghosts.
A radio.
He had seen radios before. In the common room, sometimes, when the older children were allowed to choose programs. In pictures. In the educational videos about "how technology works." But he had never touched one.
He picked it up.
It was lighter than he expected. Something rattled inside when he moved it. The battery compartment on the back was missing its cover, exposing an empty cavity where batteries should go.
He turned the dial. Kkk. Kkkk. Static? No. The sound was mechanical, not electrical. The dial was broken too.
The radio was dead. Or at least dormant. Waiting for batteries that no one would give it, for repairs that no one would make. It had been thrown in this storage room the way everything else had been thrown here. Forgotten. Abandoned.
Like me.
The thought arrived without permission. He pushed it away.
But his hands did not put the radio down. They held it. Felt its weight, its shape, the cracks in its casing. His thumb traced the dial, the faded numbers, the place where music might once have emerged.
Radios play music.
He knew this. Music was... he did not know what music was. Not really. The orphanage had sounds. The television made noise. But music was different. Music was what the families through the fence sometimes played from their phones, tinny and distant. Music was what Mrs. Okonkwo hummed sometimes when she thought no one was listening. Music was...
He did not know.
He put the radio on the floor, behind a box where no one would find it. Not because he wanted it. Not because he knew what to do with it. But because throwing it away felt wrong. Because dead things deserved to stay where they were, undisturbed, until they were ready to be something else.
He left the storage room.
But he thought about the radio for a long time after.
May 5th was for humming.
Yaz tried in the bathroom, early morning, when the stalls were empty and the only sound was the drip of a faucet that had never been fixed. Plink. Plink. Plink. Water on porcelain. A rhythm.
He opened his mouth.
What came out was... sound. Not music. Sound. A low note that was not really a note, more of a breath with tone attached. It wavered. Wobbled. Died.
He tried again.
Higher this time. A sound that was supposed to go up but went sideways instead, cracking in the middle like his voice was made of something fragile.
Again.
Longer. Steadier. But still not music. Still just... noise. Noises that came from his throat without meaning anything, without going anywhere, without becoming the thing he had heard families play through their phones or Mrs. Okonkwo hum when she thought no one was listening.
He stood in front of the spotted mirror. His reflection looked back at him. A boy with messy black hair and eyes that were too old and a mouth that was open, producing sounds that meant nothing.
He hummed at his reflection.
Hmmmmm.
The reflection hummed back. Silent. Mocking.
Hmm hmm hmmmmm.
Nothing. Just a boy making noises at himself in a bathroom that smelled like disinfectant and old pipes.
He closed his mouth.
That night, in the dark, he almost gave up.
Almost.
The dormitory breathed around him. Nineteen other children in their nineteen other dreams. The radiator clicked. Tink. Tink. The night light glowed its steady orange. Everything was the same as every other night, and Yaz lay on his back and felt the weight of his failures pressing down on him like blankets he had not asked for.
Drawing did not work. He could not make shapes that looked like anything.
Writing did not work. He could not make stories that moved.
Humming did not work. He could not make sounds that meant anything.
I have nothing to say.
The thought was cold. Certain. A door closing.
He stared at the ceiling he could not see. Forty-seven tiles somewhere above him, invisible now, but there. The only fixed thing in a world that kept shifting.
I decided to make something. I decided. And I can't. I don't know how. I have three pencils and eleven pieces of paper and a broken radio and none of it matters because I don't have anything inside me worth putting outside me.
I have nothing to say.
The silence stretched. Long. Empty. The particular silence of giving up, of surrender, of accepting that some walls could not be climbed and some fences could not be crossed.
And then, from the deep place, from the warm place where the voice lived, something stirred.
You have everything to say.
Yaz's breath caught.
You have seven years of loneliness. Seven birthdays no one remembered. Two thousand five hundred fifty-seven days of watching through fences and pressing your forehead to cold glass and counting tiles because counting was the only power you had.
You have a name that was assigned, not given. Parents who are questions, not answers. An origin that is absence, not story.
You have the old man on the bench. The families you watched. The lie Mrs. Okonkwo told you when you asked where you came from.
You have everything to say, Yassine.
You just don't have the words yet.
The warmth spread through his chest. Slow. Gentle. The way morning light spread across the dormitory floor when the clouds allowed it.
Don't try to make something beautiful. Don't try to make a story or a picture or a song.
Try to make something true.
Start there. Start with what is true. The words will come.
He lay in the dark for a long time after the voice faded. His heart was beating in a different rhythm now. Not the fast panicked rhythm of failure. Something slower. Steadier.
What is true?
He did not answer the question. Not yet. But he held it. Turned it over. Felt its weight.
Tomorrow, he decided. Tomorrow he would try again.
May 7th.
The storage room again. The flickering bulb. The smell of dust and time.
Yaz sat with his back against the mattresses, a piece of paper on his knee, the yellow pencil in his hand. Not the special yellow paper. One of the others. A receipt for cleaning supplies. Blank on the back.
He did not try to draw.
He did not try to write a story.
He pressed the pencil to the paper and asked himself a question.
What is true?
The answer came from somewhere below thought.
ALONE
The word appeared. Five letters. Simple. Ugly. His handwriting was still bad, the letters still leaning wrong.
But the word was true.
He stared at it. It sat on the paper like a small animal, waiting to see if he would hurt it or feed it or let it go.
He had never written that word before. Not like this. Not as a statement, not as an admission, not as a fact placed outside himself where he could look at it.
ALONE
Yes. That was true. That was what he was, what he had been, what he might always be. Alone in a building full of people. Alone at a fence. Alone in his bed at night, whispering happy birthday to himself because no one else would.
He wrote another word.
SEVEN
His age. The number that meant everything and nothing. The number of years he had been here, been alive, been waiting for something that never came.
The pencil moved again.
FENCE
The barrier. The dividing line. The thing that separated him from everything he could not have.
FORGOTTEN
The fear. The future he saw when he looked at the old man on the bench. The question that kept asking itself: What will they remember about you?
BIRTHDAY
The day no one remembered. The day that started everything, that made him realize he was invisible, that planted the seed of everything that came after.
He stopped.
Five words. Five truths. They sat on the paper in a column, ugly and small, written in bad handwriting with a pencil he had stolen from a recycling bin.
ALONESEVENFENCEFORGOTTENBIRTHDAY
He read them again. And again.
They were not a story. They were not a drawing. They were not music.
They were just words.
But they felt different from the story he had tried to write. Different from the drawings he had tried to make. Different from the humming that went nowhere.
They felt... true.
Not beautiful. Not clever. Not the kind of thing anyone would remember.
But true.
May 8th.
More words.
He sat in the same spot. The same smell. The same flickering bulb. A different piece of paper.
WAITING
WINDOW
COLD
PORRIDGE
GRAY
COUNTING
The words accumulated. Each one a small truth, a small piece of something he had been carrying without knowing it. He wrote them one at a time, slowly, letting each one settle before moving to the next.
MRS. OKONKWO
He hesitated on that one. A name. Was a name a word? Was writing someone's name the same as writing about them?
He decided it was different. Mrs. Okonkwo was not just a name. She was a truth. The way she looked at him. The way she lied gently when he asked about his parents. The way her bracelet clicked. Clk clk clk.
SUKI
Another name. Another truth. The girl who counted things too. The girl who was maybe leaving. The girl who understood.
THE OLD MAN
Not a name but a description. A warning. A future he refused.
NO ONE
What the old man was called. What Yaz was afraid of becoming. Two words that meant more than two words should mean.
The paper filled. He turned it over. Kept writing.
FOUND
SURRENDERED
NOT
He arranged them differently this time.
FOUND NOT SURRENDERED
The phrase that had started everything. The words he had overheard through the door. The truth about his origin, which was not a story, not an explanation, just an absence shaped like words.
He stared at the paper.
Something was happening. Something he did not have a name for.
The words were not random anymore. They were not just a list of truths. They were beginning to... connect. To suggest things. To point toward each other like arrows on a map.
ALONE pointed to FENCE.
FENCE pointed to FORGOTTEN.
FORGOTTEN pointed to SEVEN.
SEVEN pointed to BIRTHDAY.
And BIRTHDAY pointed back to ALONE.
A circle. A loop. A shape made of words.
He did not know what the shape meant. Did not know if it was anything at all. But he could feel it there, beneath the words, the way you could feel warmth in a room before you found the source.
May 9th.
He did not write.
He sat in the storage room with all his papers spread in front of him, the failed drawings and the failed story and the pages full of words, and he looked.
ALONE. SEVEN. FENCE. FORGOTTEN. BIRTHDAY. WAITING. WINDOW. COLD. PORRIDGE. GRAY. COUNTING. MRS. OKONKWO. SUKI. THE OLD MAN. NO ONE. FOUND NOT SURRENDERED.
The words stared back at him. Ugly. Small. Written in handwriting that leaned the wrong way.
But they stared back.
That was the strange thing. They had presence. They had weight. They were not just marks on paper. They were pieces of him, extracted and placed outside, visible now in a way they had not been visible when they were only inside.
This is what it feels like, he thought. Making something.
Not the feeling of succeeding. He had not succeeded. The words were not beautiful or clever or memorable. No one would ever read them. No one would ever know they existed.
But they existed.
They existed because he had made them exist. Because he had taken something that was only inside him and put it outside him. Because he had turned feelings into words and words into marks on paper and marks on paper into... something.
Something that had not been there before.
Feelings can become words.
The realization was quiet. Not a thunderclap. Not an explosion. Just a small understanding, settling into place like water finding its level.
Feelings can become words.
Words can become marks on paper.
Marks on paper can become something that exists outside of me.
Something that other people could see, if other people ever looked.
He gathered the papers. Carefully. Slowly. He stacked them in order: the failures first, then the words, then the special yellow paper that was still blank, still waiting.
He put them all in his locker. Behind his spare uniform. Beside the stone he had found in the yard years ago.
His collection. His treasury.
Three pencils. Many pieces of paper. Some of them filled now with words that were true.
May 10th was ordinary.
Breakfast was porridge. He ate it. Lessons were lessons. He attended. Outdoor hour came and he stood at the fence and watched the street and the bench where the old man sat feeding pigeons and the sky that was the particular blue of late spring.
Suki was not there. She had been called to the office again. Third time this week. The family was serious. Something was happening, something beyond the fence of the orphanage itself, something Yaz could not see but could feel.
He watched the old man scatter crumbs. Watched the pigeons descend. Watched the world continue as it always continued, indifferent to the small boy at the chain-link who had discovered something in a storage room.
Feelings can become words.
Words can become something that exists outside of me.
He did not know what to do with this knowledge. Did not know where it led. The words he had written were not a story, not a song, not anything he could show anyone. They were just... beginnings. Fragments. Pieces of a puzzle he did not yet know the shape of.
But they were his.
That was the thing. They were his.
He had found them, but not the way he had been found. He had made them, chosen them, written them with a pencil he had taken from a recycling bin onto paper he had rescued from trash cans. Every word was a decision. Every truth was a choice.
Found, not surrendered.
That was what his file said. A passive thing. Something that happened to him, not something he did.
But the words on the paper were different. They were not passive. They were active. They were him, reaching out, making marks, creating something from nothing.
The bell rang. CLANG.
He pulled his fingers from the fence. Walked back toward the building. Eighty-three steps, but he was not counting them today. He was thinking about the storage room and the broken radio and the papers in his locker and the words that were waiting for him to find more of them.
Feelings can become words.
Words might become something else.
He did not know what the something else would be. Did not know if it would ever be anything at all. He was seven years old. He had no training, no guidance, no model to follow. He only had three pencils and eleven pieces of paper and a collection of words that were true but not beautiful, not clever, not the kind of thing anyone would remember.
But they were his.
For the first time in seven years, Yassine Kwon had made something.
The words on the paper were ugly and small. But they were his. For the first time in seven years, Yassine Kwon had made something that hadn't existed before.