The thought arrived before the bell.
Yaz was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling he could not see in the gray half-light, when it came to him. Not like other thoughts, which floated up from somewhere and drifted past like clouds. This one landed. Heavy. Solid. The kind of thought that sits on your chest and will not move until you look at it.
Not all days are the same.
He had known this, in a way. The way you know the sky is blue or porridge is gray or the fence is cold. A fact you carry without examining. But now, lying in the dormitory with nineteen other children breathing their small breaths around him, the thought became something else. Something with edges.
He tried to remember yesterday. May 10th. What had happened? Breakfast. Lessons. Outdoor hour. The fence. The old man. The bell. Dinner. Sleep. A day like a thousand other days, shaped exactly the same, fitting into the same mold.
But his birthday. March 15th. That day he remembered. The way the light had looked on the ceiling. The way TomΓ's had said "So?" and meant it. The way his chest had felt when he whispered "Happy birthday" to himself in the dark.
That day had weight. That day had color. That day was still here, inside him, as real as his hands, as real as the forty-seven tiles waiting above his head.
Fifty-seven days ago. But it felt like yesterday. It felt like now.
Some days stay, he thought. Some days go.
The bell rang. CLANG CLANG CLANG.
He did not move immediately. He let the thought sit there, on his chest, while the other children stirred and groaned and threw back their scratchy blankets. He let it press down. He wanted to understand it before it floated away like all the other thoughts he had lost.
Some days are heavier than others.
Some moments are sharp.
He sat up. The mattress crinkled beneath him. The day was beginning, the same as every day, and yet the thought stayed with him. A new weight. A new knowing.
Breakfast was porridge.
Yaz ate it without tasting. His spoon moved from bowl to mouth, bowl to mouth, the same rhythm as always. But his mind was somewhere else. It was sorting through days the way you might sort through papers, looking for the ones that mattered.
The day at the fence when the boy in the blue jacket had looked at him and looked away. That one stayed.
The day he overheard "found, not surrendered" through the crack in the door. That one stayed.
The day he met Suki's eyes for the first time. The day the old man looked back at him. The day Ms. Reyes wrote names on the board and asked why we remember some people and forget others.
Those days stayed. They had weight. They pressed against the inside of his skull like stones arranged in a pattern.
But the days in between? The ordinary days? The days that were just breakfast and lessons and outdoor hour and dinner and sleep?
Gone. All of them. Blurred into a gray mass that had no edges, no features, no shape at all.
He looked around the cafeteria. Eighty-something children eating the same porridge at the same tables under the same fluorescent lights. Bzzz. Bzzz. The sound of electricity pretending to be silent. How many of these children were living heavy days right now? How many were living days that would disappear the moment they ended?
TomΓ's sat three tables away, eating alone, his face the same stone-carved emptiness it always was. Was this a heavy day for him? Or just another one to forget?
There was no way to know. That was the strange thing. You could not tell from the outside which days were which. Heavy days looked like ordinary days. Sharp moments looked like blunt ones. The difference was inside, invisible, known only to the person living them.
Yaz finished his porridge. The skin had formed over the last few bites, and he ate it anyway. The texture was wrong, too thick, like something that had died and not finished dying. But his body needed fuel. His body was always needing things that his mind did not want to give.
The storage room waited.
He went there after lunch, slipping away during the gap between eating and lessons when the caretakers were distracted and the hallways were almost empty. Down the stairs. Crk. Crk. Through the dim corridor. Plink. The dripping pipe in the ceiling that never stopped, that marked time in drops the way Yaz marked it in breaths.
The door was where he had left it. The room was how he had left it. Boxes. Broken chairs. The smell of dust and machine oil and old paper.
The broken radio sat in the corner. He looked at it without moving toward it. It looked back. A dead thing waiting to become something else. Like him.
He sat against the mattresses. The fabric was rough through his shirt, pressing small points of texture into his back. He pulled his papers from where he had hidden them, behind the largest box, the one no one ever moved.
The words were still there.
ALONE. SEVEN. FENCE. FORGOTTEN. BIRTHDAY.
WAITING. WINDOW. COLD. PORRIDGE. GRAY.
COUNTING. MRS. OKONKWO. SUKI. THE OLD MAN. NO ONE.
FOUND NOT SURRENDERED.
He spread them on the floor. The papers were wrinkled now, creased from being folded and hidden and carried. The pencil marks were smudged at the edges. But the words were still readable. Still true.
He looked at them for a long time.
They are pieces of the heavy days, he thought. The sharp moments. I wrote them down so they would not disappear like the ordinary days disappear.
But writing them down was not enough. He could feel that now. The words were just words. They sat on the paper like stones arranged in no particular order. You could look at them and know they meant something, but you could not feel what they meant. Not really.
Something was missing. Something he did not have a name for.
He put the papers away. Climbed the stairs. Went to lessons.
The thought stayed with him all afternoon.
That night, the Maestro spoke.
Yaz was lying in bed, the darkness heavy around him, the night light glowing its steady orange near the door. He was thinking about the days. About which ones stayed and which ones went. About the strange shape of time, which was not a line like the teachers said, not a river flowing from past to future, but something else. Something with hills and valleys. Something with weight.
You are beginning to understand.
The voice came from the deep place. Warm. Patient. Like sunlight through glass, like the smell of something clean.
Yaz did not startle anymore. He had grown used to the voice. Or not used to it, exactly. He had accepted that it was there, the way you accept the forty-seven tiles or the eighty-three steps or the coldness of the fence in winter. A fact of his life that did not require explanation.
Time has a shape, the voice said. Not the shape they teach you. Not a straight line. Not even a circle.
Yaz thought about circles. The loop of the words he had written. ALONE pointing to FENCE pointing to FORGOTTEN pointing to SEVEN pointing to BIRTHDAY pointing back to ALONE. That was a circle. But time was not like that either.
Time is made of moments, the Maestro continued. Some moments are brief. They last a second, and then they are gone, and you never think of them again. These moments are like dust. They fill the air. They are everywhere. But they mean nothing.
Yaz thought of all the seconds he had lived. All the breaths. All the blinks. Millions of them. Billions, maybe. Too many to count, even for him.
And some moments are different. They are heavy. They take up more space than they should. A second can feel like an hour. An hour can feel like a lifetime. These moments stay with you. They become part of who you are.
The birthday. The fence. The door. The old man's eyes meeting his and then looking away.
Some years will feel like days, the Maestro said. Some moments will last forever.
Yaz turned the words over in his mind. They felt true. They felt like something he had known without knowing, had carried without holding. The shape of time was not straight or circular. It was lumpy. Uneven. Made of moments that mattered and moments that did not, all mixed together, impossible to predict until you had lived them.
That is why the question matters, the voice said. What will they remember about you? Not the dust. Not the billions of moments that mean nothing. The heavy ones. The sharp ones. The ones that stay.
What will you give them to remember?
The darkness pressed around him. The radiator clicked. Tink. Tink. Tink. Nineteen other children slept their nineteen other sleeps, living their own heavy moments and light ones, their own sharp and blunt, their own shapes of time.
Yaz closed his eyes.
The question sat on his chest like a stone.
May 12th brought rain.
It fell soft and steady against the windows, turning the world outside into a blur of gray and gray and more gray. The yard was empty during outdoor hour. The children stayed inside, crowded into the common room, the television playing something bright and meaningless.
Yaz sat in his corner and thought about numbers.
He had counted many things. Tiles. Steps. Days. Meals. Words spoken to him. Children in the orphanage. Cracks in the ceiling.
But he had never counted years.
He was seven. That was a number. Seven years since he had begun, since someone had found him somewhere and brought him here, since his life had started.
If he lived to be seventy, like the old people in the educational videos, that would be... he calculated. Seventy years. And he had used seven of them.
Seven out of seventy.
Ten percent.
The number landed in his stomach like something cold. Ten percent. He had already spent ten percent of his entire life. A tenth of everything he would ever have. Gone. Used up. Behind him now, unreachable.
And what did he have to show for it?
He thought about the days. The twenty-five hundred and fifty-seven days he had counted in Chapter 4. All of them lived. All of them past. Most of them forgotten, turned to dust, meaning nothing to anyone, including him.
Ten percent.
It sounded small. Ten percent was almost nothing. Nine-tenths still remaining. Plenty of time. Plenty of days. Plenty of chances.
But the ten percent that was gone? That was gone forever. He would never get it back. He would never relive his birthday, never stand at the fence for the first time, never hear "found, not surrendered" for the first time. Those moments had happened, and now they were his only in memory. Which was a different kind of having. A lesser kind.
The rain kept falling. Ptt. Ptt. Ptt. Against the glass. Against the roof. Against all the surfaces of the world that stood between Yaz and the sky.
Some years will feel like days.
The Maestro's words from last night. He understood them differently now. Some years felt like days because they contained no heavy moments. Because they were all dust, all light, all forgettable. You could live an entire year and look back and see nothing, feel nothing, remember nothing.
That was what had happened to most of his seven years. They had felt like days. Like one long, gray, uninterrupted day that stretched from infancy to now. The heavy moments were few. The sharp ones were fewer.
Some moments will last forever.
But the moments that lasted? Those were the ones that mattered. Those were the ones that made you someone instead of no one. Those were the ones that people remembered, that stayed in the world after you left it.
How many of those had he made?
He counted. His birthday. The fence. The day he heard about his origin. Meeting Suki. The old man. The question. The words.
Seven? Eight? A handful. A small collection of sharp moments in a vast sea of dust.
Not enough.
Not nearly enough.
The storage room again.
May 13th. The rain had stopped. The sun was out, turning the wet pavement into a mirror that hurt to look at. Yaz went down the stairs, through the corridor, into the room that smelled like dust and possibility.
He sat with his papers. The words stared at him. He stared back.
You need to make something, he thought. Something heavy. Something sharp. Something that stays.
But what?
The words on the paper were true. He knew that. They were pieces of his heavy moments, extracted and placed outside himself. But they were just pieces. Fragments. They did not add up to anything whole.
He thought about the people on Ms. Reyes's board. The ones whose names the world remembered. They had made things. Discoveries, movements, art. Things that existed outside of them, things that other people could see and feel and carry forward.
What could a seven-year-old in an orphanage make?
Not a discovery. He did not know anything the world did not already know.
Not a movement. He had no power, no followers, no voice anyone would listen to.
Art?
He looked at his failed drawings. The faces that looked like nothing. The shapes that refused to hold their shape.
Not that kind of art.
The words?
Maybe. Maybe the words could become something. They already felt different from the drawings. Heavier. More true. When he read them, he felt something in his chest, a tightness, a recognition. Like looking in a mirror and seeing your own face looking back.
But how did words become something more than words?
He did not know. He had no model. He had never read a book about someone making words into things. He only knew that feelings could become words, and words could become marks on paper, and marks on paper could exist outside of him.
What comes next?
He stared at the papers for a long time. The light shifted through the single dirty window near the ceiling. The bulb flickered. Pff. Pff. The boiler hummed through the wall.
Nothing came.
He put the papers away and went back upstairs.
May 14th.
The dormitory. Morning. The gray light filtering through the east-facing window, catching the dust that floated always in the air, turning it into gold for a few brief minutes before the sun moved higher and the magic faded.
Yaz sat on his bed and watched the dust.
It was beautiful. He had noticed this before, many times, but he noticed it again now. The way the particles drifted and swirled, each one following its own invisible path, each one lit from within by the light that passed through it. They were nothing. Dust. The dead skin of children, the fragments of cloth, the tiny pieces of everything that fell apart slowly over time.
But in the light, they were gold.
Beauty in neglected spaces.
He did not know where the phrase came from. His own mind, probably. Or the Maestro, whispering without sound. It did not matter. The phrase was true. There was beauty here, in this place where no one looked for beauty. In the dust. In the light. In the forty-seven tiles and the scratchy blankets and the way the radiator clicked its useless song.
Beauty was not the same as happiness. He understood that now. You could find beauty in sad things. You could see gold in dust. You could stand at a fence and watch families and feel your heart break and still notice that the chain-link made diamond shapes against the sky.
The bell rang. CLANG.
He went to breakfast. He ate his porridge. He attended lessons. He stood at the fence during outdoor hour and watched the old man feed his pigeons. The bench. The bread crumbs. The birds descending like small gray angels.
Suki was not there again. Four days now. The family was very serious. Something was happening to her, something that was pulling her away from this place, toward another life she could not see clearly yet. Yaz felt her absence like a missing tooth. A gap where something should be.
She might leave before I figure it out.
The thought was cold. Practical. The kind of thought that came from the part of him that had learned to expect loss.
She might leave, and I will still be here, still watching, still waiting, still trying to make something from nothing.
The old man scattered crumbs. The pigeons pecked. The sun was warm on Yaz's back.
He thought about the ten percent. About the shape of time. About the heavy moments and the light ones, the sharp and the blunt, the ones that stayed and the ones that vanished like dust when the light moved on.
I need to make something, he thought. Soon. Before more of the ten percent becomes twenty percent becomes thirty percent becomes gone.
I need to make something that stays.
The bell rang. CLANG.
He went inside.
That night, he took out the yellow paper.
He had been saving it. The special one. The A5 sheet the color of butter, the color of afternoon light, the color of things that were meant to be touched and held. He had known, from the moment he found it in Mrs. Okonkwo's wastebasket, that it was for something important.
Now he felt the importance pressing against him. Heavy. Urgent. The time was now. The moment was sharp.
He sat in his bed with the paper on his knee and the yellow pencil in his hand. The dormitory was dark. The night light glowed orange. The other children breathed their sleeping breaths. No one watched. No one cared. He was alone with the paper and the pencil and the thing he was trying to make.
The words he had written before sat in his memory. ALONE. SEVEN. FENCE. FORGOTTEN. BIRTHDAY. They were true. But they were pieces, not a whole. He needed to find the thread that connected them. The thing they all pointed toward.
What do they have in common?
He thought about it. The words circled in his mind like pigeons around bread, descending and rising, never quite landing.
ALONE. He was alone.
SEVEN. He was seven years old.
FENCE. He watched through the fence.
FORGOTTEN. He was afraid of being forgotten.
BIRTHDAY. His birthday had come and gone and no one had noticed.
What do they all share?
The answer was obvious. They shared him. They were all about him. His loneliness. His age. His place. His fear. His day.
But that was not enough. That was just observation, just fact. Facts did not make heavy moments. Facts did not create the kind of thing that stayed.
He closed his eyes. The darkness was complete. He could feel the pencil in his hand, the paper on his knee, the weight of the blanket on his legs. The radiator clicked. Tink. Just once. Like a heartbeat.
What is the one thing that connects all of it?
And then, from the deep place, from the place where the Maestro lived, something rose.
Time.
Yaz opened his eyes.
Time connects all of it.
SEVEN was a number of years.
BIRTHDAY was a marker of years.
ALONE was what he had been for all his years.
FENCE was what he had watched through for all his years.
FORGOTTEN was what would happen when all his years were done.
It was all about time. About the years passing. About being seven now and being something else later and being nothing eventually and wondering, in between, what any of it meant.
He looked at the yellow paper. The pencil trembled in his hand.
Once, he thought. Everything starts with once.
Once upon a time. That was how stories began. Once there was a boy. Once there was a fence. Once there was a day no one remembered.
Once.
I.
Was.
Seven.
Years.
Old.
The words arranged themselves. Not in his head. On the paper. His hand moved without permission, the pencil pressing into the surface, leaving marks that were words that were him.
Once I was seven years old.
He stared at what he had written.
The letters leaned wrong. His handwriting was still bad. The yellow of the paper showed through where the pencil had not pressed hard enough.
But the words were there. Outside of him. On the paper.
Once I was seven years old.
Six words. A complete sentence. The simplest kind of truth.
He said them aloud. Whispered, barely a breath, but aloud.
"Once I was seven years old."
The sound sat in the dark. It did not echo. It did not fade. It just sat there, taking up space, becoming part of the room.
His chest did something strange. Not tight, exactly. The opposite of tight. Open. Like a door swinging wide. Like a window letting in light.
He had written something true. Something that mattered. Something that was about time and about himself and about the shape of a life that started here, in this moment, at seven, and would go... somewhere. He did not know where.
The first line.
The Maestro's voice. Warm. Proud. Almost smiling, if voices could smile.
That is the first line. The beginning. The seed.
Yaz looked at the words again. Once I was seven years old. They stared back at him. Simple and heavy. Small and vast.
Now, the voice said, and there was something new in it now, something like challenge, something like invitation. Where does it go?
Yaz did not answer. He did not know the answer. He only knew that the question was right, that it was the only question that mattered now, that everything he had been feeling and fearing and hoping had led to this moment, this paper, this line, and what came after.
He folded the yellow paper carefully. Once, twice. He put it under his pillow, where he could feel it pressing against his head. Where he would know it was there even in sleep.
The words would wait for him. They were patient. They had been waiting his whole life for him to find them.
And now they were found. Now they existed. Now they were the beginning of something he could not yet see but could feel, the way you feel warmth before you find the fire.
"Once I was seven years old." It was not a complete thought. But it was the beginning of one. And beginnings, Yaz was learning, were the hardest part.