The line would not leave him alone.
Yaz woke on Friday with the words already circling, the way water circles a drain before it goes down. Round and round. Once I was seven years old. The ceiling above him was invisible in the pre-dawn gray, but he knew the tiles were there. Forty-seven. He did not need to count them anymore. Some numbers became facts. Some facts became permanent.
Once I was seven years old.
The yellow paper was still under his pillow. He could feel its edge against his scalp, a small rectangular pressure that had been there all night. Proof that he had not dreamed it. Proof that the words existed outside of him now, in pencil on paper, real enough to touch.
But the words were incomplete. He had known this when he wrote them. He knew it now, lying in the dark, waiting for the bell that would tell him his body belonged to the orphanage again. Once I was seven years old was a door, not a room. A beginning, not a middle or an end.
Where does it go?
The Maestro's question from last night. It had followed him into sleep, woven through dreams he could not quite remember. Dreams of fences and old men and numbers that stretched so far they disappeared into fog.
Where does it go?
He did not know. That was the problem. He had written the first line of something, and now the something was waiting for more, and he did not have more. He had six words. Six words that were true. But truth was not the same as complete. Truth was just the beginning.
The bell came. CLANG CLANG CLANG.
He got up. He dressed. He walked to breakfast. He ate porridge that had already skinned over, breaking the gray film with his spoon, watching it reform, breaking it again. The cafeteria was loud around him. Voices and clattering and the particular hum of a building full of children who had nowhere else to be. But Yaz was not there. Not really. His body sat at the table. His hands moved the spoon. His mouth chewed and swallowed.
But his mind was somewhere else. Circling. Circling.
Once I was seven years old.
What comes next?
The storage room was cold.
May had turned warm outside, the kind of warm that made the dead tree in the yard look less dead, that brought green to the grass near the fence, that made children want to stay outdoors longer than the bell allowed. But the basement had its own weather. It stayed cool even when the world above baked. It stayed damp even when the world above dried.
Yaz sat against the stacked mattresses, the rough fabric pressing small points into his back. The single bulb above him flickered its tired flicker. Pff. Pff. The boiler hummed through the wall. The broken radio sat in the corner, still dead, still waiting.
He had the yellow paper on his knee. The pencil in his hand. The words staring up at him.
Once I was seven years old.
He had been staring at them for twenty minutes. Maybe longer. Time moved strangely down here. There was no sun to track, no bell to mark the hours, just the flicker and the hum and the particular silence of a room that no one visited.
What comes next?
He thought about the question. Really thought about it. Not the way you think about answers on a test, searching for the correct response. The way you think about a door, wondering what is on the other side.
Once I was seven years old.
Once. That word meant past. It meant looking back. It meant the person speaking was not seven anymore. They were older. They were remembering.
So the next line is about being older?
The thought was new. He turned it over. Examined it.
If the song was about time, about the shape of time, about how some moments stayed and some moments went, then maybe the song should move through time. Maybe it should start at seven and go... somewhere else. Somewhere older. Somewhere further down the road that was a life.
What happens at eleven?
The question arrived without warning. From the deep place, from the warm place, from wherever the Maestro lived when he was not speaking.
Yaz blinked. Eleven. That was four years from now. Four years of porridge and lessons and outdoor hour and the fence and the ceiling tiles and the bell that told him when to move and when to stop moving. Four years of waking before dawn and lying awake after dark and counting things that no one else counted.
What would he be at eleven?
He closed his eyes. Tried to imagine it.
The dormitory. The same? No, probably different. The older children slept in Dormitory B. He would be there by eleven. Different bed. Different ceiling. Different number of tiles to count.
Still no family. That seemed certain. The families that came to look at children wanted babies. Toddlers. Small ones who could still be shaped, who did not have years of orphanage habits pressed into their bones. An eleven-year-old was already formed. Already hardened. Already what he was going to be.
He tried to see himself at eleven. Taller, probably. His body would grow even if nothing else did. Thinner, maybe, the way Tomαs was thin, the way the older boys all seemed to have their bones showing through their skin like structures under cloth.
Still alone?
The question hurt. He pushed it away. But it came back, the way questions always came back when they mattered.
Still alone. Probably. Suki might be gone by then. The family was serious. She would leave, and he would stay, and the gap between them would grow wider every day until it was too wide to see across.
Still watching through the fence. Still pressing his forehead to cold glass. Still whispering things to himself that no one else would ever hear.
Eleven, he thought. Eleven is just seven with more time on top of it. The same boy, only longer.
He opened his eyes. Looked at the paper.
Once I was seven years old.
What if there was another line? What if it said something about eleven?
He did not write anything. The thought was not ready yet. It was still forming, still soft, like clay that had not been shaped.
But he held it. He carried it with him when he climbed the stairs and went to lessons and stood at the fence during outdoor hour, watching the old man scatter crumbs for his pigeons.
Eleven. Twenty. Sixty.
The numbers circled in his head like the pigeons circled around the bread.
Saturday was for imagining.
Yaz sat in the common room, in his corner near the window, and let his mind wander. The television played something bright and empty. Other children moved through the room, playing games, arguing over toys, doing all the things children did when they had nothing better to do. He ignored them. They ignored him. This was how it worked.
He thought about twenty.
Twenty was harder than eleven. Eleven he could almost see. Twenty was fog. Twenty was a number so far away it might as well be a different planet.
At twenty, he would not be here. The orphanage only kept children until eighteen. At eighteen, they released you. Gave you papers, a small amount of money, and a door to walk through. What happened after the door was your problem.
What happens after the door?
He tried to imagine it. A street. A city. The same city, maybe, or a different one. Buildings and people and all the machinery of a world that had continued without him for twenty years.
Would he have a job? Would he have a place to live? Would he have... friends? The word felt strange in his mouth, even though he was not speaking out loud. Friends. People who chose to be near you. People who remembered your birthday.
He thought about Suki. She might remember his birthday, if she was still around, if the family did not take her, if some miracle kept them connected through the years that stretched ahead like an empty road.
But miracles did not happen to children like him. He knew that. Miracles happened to other people, in other stories, in the books the teachers sometimes read aloud and the movies the television sometimes played. Miracles were for protagonists. He was not a protagonist. He was just a boy in a gray shirt, sitting in a corner, watching his life happen to him instead of the other way around.
At twenty, he thought, I will be alone.
The thought was not sad, exactly. It was just true. The way the forty-seven tiles were true. The way the eighty-three steps were true. Some facts did not need to hurt you. They just were.
But maybe at twenty, I will have made something.
The thought surprised him. It came from somewhere else. From the part of him that had written Once I was seven years old on yellow paper. From the part that believed, against all evidence, that his existence could matter.
Maybe at twenty, someone will know my name.
He looked out the window. The sky was blue and far away. The fence was gray and close. Beyond the fence, people walked past, living their lives, going places, being someone's something.
Once I was twenty years old.
The line appeared in his head. Just like that. Arriving the way the first line had arrived, complete and sudden, like a bird landing on a branch you did not know was there.
Once I was twenty years old.
He did not have paper. Did not have a pencil. But he held the line anyway. Carried it in his mouth like a seed he was afraid to swallow or spit out.
Sunday came with clouds.
The gray was back. Not the hard gray of winter, but the soft gray of spring trying to make up its mind. The yard was empty during outdoor hour. The rain was not falling yet, but it was thinking about it. You could smell it in the air. That particular wet-metal smell that meant the sky was full of water it had not decided to release.
Yaz stood at the fence anyway.
His fingers threaded through the chain-link. The metal was cool, not cold. His palms pressed against the diamonds, leaving marks he could feel but not see.
The old man was there. On his bench. Feeding his pigeons.
Sixty.
The number had been following Yaz all day. Through breakfast, through the quiet hours, through the common room and the hallways and now here, at the fence, watching a man who was probably sixty or close to it.
What happens at sixty?
He looked at the old man. Really looked, the way he had looked in Chapter 5 when he first noticed him, when he first understood what the man represented.
The coat. The shaking hands. The eyes that looked at nothing because there was nothing left to look at.
That's sixty, Yaz thought. If you do it wrong.
But what if you did it right? What if you got to sixty and you were not sitting on a bench, feeding pigeons, waiting for nothing? What if you got to sixty and you had... what?
Children.
The word arrived from somewhere. From the families he had watched through the fence. From Mrs. Okonkwo and her bracelet that clicked when she moved, her bracelet that was a gift from a mother she had loved.
Children were what people had when they were not alone. Children were what made you matter after you were gone. Children visited you. Children remembered you. Children said your name when you were too old to say it yourself.
Soon I'll be sixty years old.
Another line. Appearing like the others, complete and sudden, like something that had been waiting to be found.
Soon I'll be sixty years old.
Will I think the world is cold?
Or will I have a lot of children who can warm me?
Yaz's breath caught.
The lines were coming faster now. Stacking on top of each other like the words he had written in Chapter 7. ALONE. SEVEN. FENCE. FORGOTTEN. But these were not just words. They were sentences. They had rhythm. They had shape.
Soon I'll be sixty years old.
He gripped the fence tighter. The diamonds bit into his palms.
That's what comes next, he realized. The song goes forward. Seven to eleven to twenty to sixty. A life, compressed into lines. Time, given shape.
The old man scattered crumbs. The pigeons descended. The rain started to fall, soft and slow, wetting Yaz's hair, running down his face like tears that were not tears.
He stood at the fence until the bell rang.
He had the shape now. He knew what the song was about. It was about time. About growing. About the moments that stayed and the moments that went and the fear that you would end up on a bench somewhere, feeding birds, waiting for nothing.
But there was a problem.
The problem had been there since the beginning. He had pushed it away, ignored it, hoped it would solve itself. But it was still there, sitting in the middle of his song like a rock in a river.
My mama told me.
That was the line. The line that came after Once I was seven years old, the line that connected the beginning to everything that followed. He had heard it in the original song, the one Mrs. Okonkwo sometimes hummed when she thought no one was listening. He knew how it was supposed to go.
Once I was seven years old, my mama told me.
But he did not have a mama.
He had no one to tell him anything. No mother to give advice. No parent to shape his path. He was found, not surrendered. He was assigned, not named. He was nothing and no one and from nowhere.
How could he write about a mama he did not have?
The problem followed him to bed.
Sunday night. The dormitory dark around him. Nineteen other children breathing their small breaths. The night light glowing orange. The radiator clicking. Everything the same as every other night.
But Yaz was not sleeping. He was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling he could not see, and the problem was pressing down on him like a weight he could not shift.
My mama told me.
He could not write that. It would be a lie. And the song was supposed to be true. The whole point of the song was truth. The words he had written were true. ALONE. SEVEN. FENCE. FORGOTTEN. Once I was seven years old. All of it true. All of it him.
But my mama told me was not him. His mama had never told him anything. His mama was a blank space, an absence, a question that would never be answered.
How could truth include something that had never happened?
You are stuck.
The Maestro. Warm and patient in the deep place.
You are stuck because you think truth means autobiography. You think the song has to be about what happened. But that is not what truth means.
Yaz frowned in the darkness. He did not understand.
Truth is what is real. Real feelings. Real fears. Real hopes. You do not have a mother. That is a fact. But you wish you had one. That is also a fact. The wish is real, even if the mother is not.
The wish was real.
Yaz thought about that. The wish. The longing. The thing he felt every time he watched a mother wipe ice cream from a child's face, every time he saw a father lift a daughter onto his shoulders, every time he pressed his forehead to cold glass and imagined what it would be like to have someone who was his.
The wish was real. It was one of the truest things he knew.
If you had a mother, the Maestro continued, what would you want her to tell you?
The question landed in his chest. Heavy. Sharp. The kind of question that made you afraid to answer because the answer would hurt.
What would he want her to tell him?
He closed his eyes. Let the question sink into the deep place. Let it sit there, in the dark, where the truest things lived.
An answer rose.
She would tell me not to be lonely.
That was it. That was the advice he had never received, the words no one had ever spoken to him, the guidance he had spent seven years waiting for.
Go make yourself some friends, or you'll be lonely.
The line appeared complete. Like the others. Like a gift.
He did not have a mother. But he had the advice a mother would have given. He had the words he wished someone had said. And those words were true, even if the mother was not.
Write the mama you needed, the Maestro said. Write the advice you never got. That is not lying. That is art.
Art is not autobiography. Art is truth told through invention.
Yaz lay in the darkness for a long time after the voice faded. The words circled in his head. Not just circled. Arranged themselves. Found their places.
Once I was seven years old, my mama told me.
Go make yourself some friends or you'll be lonely.
Once I was seven years old.
The beginning was complete. He could feel it, solid and whole, like a stone that had finally found its shape.
And the rest was coming. He could feel that too. The eleven and the twenty and the sixty. The fear of the cold world. The hope of children who would warm him. The whole arc of a life, compressed into lines, given form through words he was inventing because no one had ever given them to him.
He fell asleep with the song half-formed in his head, growing in the dark like something planted.
Monday was for writing.
Yaz went to the storage room during the gap between lunch and lessons. The gap was short, fifteen minutes maybe, but he had learned how to move quickly when he needed to. Down the stairs, through the corridor, into the room that smelled like dust and possibility.
He had the yellow paper. He had his pencil. He had the lines.
He sat against the mattresses and wrote.
Not slowly, the way he had written the first line. Quickly. Urgently. The words wanted out. They had been waiting, and now they were ready, and he could not stop them even if he wanted to.
Once I was seven years old, my mama told me
Go make yourself some friends or you'll be lonely
Once I was seven years old
The beginning. Complete. He looked at it. The letters were still crooked. His handwriting was still bad. But the words were there. Outside of him. Real.
He kept writing.
Soon I'll be sixty years old, will I think the world is cold
Or will I have a lot of children who can warm me
Soon I'll be sixty years old
The ending. Or part of it. The fear and the hope, side by side, the way they had always lived side by side inside him.
He looked at what he had written. The beginning and the ending. The start and the finish. But there was something missing in the middle. A bridge. A path. The journey from seven to sixty.
What happens between?
The question was smaller now. Less frightening. He had solved the mama problem. He could solve this too.
Eleven, he thought. Twenty.
But he did not have lines for those ages. Not yet. The words had not come the way the others had come. He could feel them waiting, somewhere below the surface, but he could not reach them. Not yet.
He folded the paper. Put it in his pocket. Climbed the stairs. Went to lessons.
The middle would come. He was certain of it now. The song was building itself, piece by piece, line by line. He just had to wait. He just had to listen. He just had to let the words find him the way they had been finding him all along.
Tuesday brought the middle.
He was standing at the fence during outdoor hour, watching the street, watching the old man, watching the world continue without him, when the lines arrived.
I only see my goals, I don't believe in failure.
'Cause I know the smallest voices, they can make it major.
The words landed in his head like birds on a branch. Complete. Perfect. As if they had been there all along, waiting for him to notice.
The smallest voices.
That was him. He was the smallest voice. A child in an orphanage, writing words on yellow paper, hoping someone somewhere would hear.
They can make it major.
Major. Important. Remembered. Not no one. Not forgotten. Not sitting on a bench feeding pigeons to birds that would not remember him when he was gone.
He gripped the fence tighter. The diamonds pressed into his palms.
That's the chorus, he realized. That's the part that holds everything together. The belief. The hope. The refusal to accept that small means nothing.
He went to the storage room that night, after lights out, when the dormitory was sleeping and no one would notice him gone. He crept down the stairs in the darkness, feeling his way, counting the steps without meaning to. The storage room was pitch black. He did not turn on the light. He did not need to. The words were in his head. He just needed to put them on paper.
He wrote by feel. The pencil moving across the yellow surface, leaving marks he could not see.
I only see my goals, I don't believe in failure
'Cause I know the smallest voices, they can make it major
When he was done, he folded the paper and put it back in his pocket. He climbed the stairs. He returned to his bed. He lay in the darkness and felt the song inside him, almost complete, almost whole, waiting for the last pieces to fall into place.
One more push, he thought. One more push, and it will exist.
Wednesday came soft and golden.
The sun was out. The yard was warm. The fence was almost pleasant under his fingers, the metal heated by light instead of frozen by shadow.
Suki appeared beside him.
He had not seen her in days. The family visits had consumed her. She was being measured, he realized. Weighed. Considered. The family was deciding if she was worth keeping.
She did not look different. Same short black hair. Same watching eyes. Same small body in the same gray clothes. But something had shifted. Something he could not name.
"I might be leaving," she said.
The words were flat. Matter-of-fact. The way you say the sky is gray or the porridge has skinned over.
Yaz did not know what to say. His chest did something complicated. Not quite pain. Not quite anything else. The feeling of a door opening onto a room he did not want to enter.
"When?"
"I don't know. Soon, maybe. They're talking about paperwork."
Paperwork. The word seemed too small for what it meant. A few pieces of paper, some signatures, some stamps, and Suki would become someone else. Someone with a family. Someone with a home. Someone whose name would be spoken by people who loved her.
"Are you scared?"
The question came out before he could stop it. Too honest. Too direct. The kind of question that made people uncomfortable.
But Suki did not look uncomfortable. She looked at him with her dark, steady eyes, and she thought about it, and then she said:
"Yes."
Just that. Just the truth.
"But I want it anyway," she added. "I want to be... theirs. Even if I don't know how."
Yaz nodded. He understood. Wanting something you did not know how to have. Reaching for a door you were afraid to open. That was the whole shape of being a child in a place like this.
"I'm making something," he said.
He had not meant to tell her. The song was secret. The song was his. But the words came out anyway, the way important words sometimes did.
"Making what?"
"I don't know yet. Words. Lines. Something that sounds like... me."
Suki looked at him for a long moment. Her eyes moved across his face, reading something he could not see.
"Good," she said finally. "You should make something. Something they can remember."
Then she walked away. Toward the building. Toward the life that was pulling her in a direction he could not follow.
Yaz stood at the fence alone.
Something they can remember.
Yes. That was it. That was the whole point. The song was not just for him. The song was for them. For everyone who would hear it. For Suki, wherever she ended up. For Mrs. Okonkwo, humming songs whose origins she had forgotten. For the children who would come to this orphanage after he was gone, who would sleep in his bed and count his ceiling tiles and wonder if anyone had ever been where they were.
The smallest voices can make it major.
He pulled his fingers from the fence. Walked back toward the building. Climbed the stairs to the storage room.
He had work to do.
The song came together on Wednesday night.
Not all at once. Piece by piece, like a puzzle, like a map, like the words he had written on separate scraps of paper finally finding their places.
He sat in the darkness of the storage room, the single bulb off, the only light a thin sliver from the crack under the door. The yellow paper was in his lap. The pencil was in his hand. And the words were pouring out of him, one after another, filling the space that had been empty for so long.
Once I was seven years old, my mama told me
Go make yourself some friends or you'll be lonely
Once I was seven years old
I only see my goals, I don't believe in failure
'Cause I know the smallest voices, they can make it major
Soon I'll be sixty years old, will I think the world is cold
Or will I have a lot of children who can warm me
Soon I'll be sixty years old
He read the words. All of them. From beginning to end. His voice was barely a whisper, but the words filled the room anyway, pressing against the walls, taking up space, becoming real.
The song was not finished. He could feel that. There were gaps. Places where more words belonged. The eleven and the twenty that he had imagined but not written. The father he did not have, the way he had the mama he did not have.
But the shape was there. The architecture. The skeleton on which everything else would hang.
He read it again. And again. Each time, the words became more solid. More true.
You have made something.
The Maestro. Warm and proud and quiet.
Not finished yet. Not complete. But something. A shape. A structure. A place for all your pain to live outside of you.
Yaz folded the paper. Pressed it against his chest. The yellow was invisible in the darkness, but he could feel it there. Warm. Real. His.
He climbed the stairs. Returned to bed. Lay in the darkness with the paper under his pillow, the way he had done since the first line, since the beginning, since the moment he understood that words could become things that existed outside of himself.
The song was waiting. Almost done. Almost there.
One more push, the Maestro whispered. And it will exist.
Yaz closed his eyes.
He could feel it, complete, waiting, just beyond his reach. One more push, and it would exist.