The ceiling was leaking again.
Mildred watched the water trail down the wall in a slow, crooked line, following the same path it had for the past three months. The landlord said he would fix it, and that was before winter. Now it was almost summer, and the stain had grown from a small circle into something that looked like the map of a country that didn't exist.
He lay on his back on the thin mattress, arms folded behind his head, tracking the water's progress. It was hypnotic, in a way he couldn't define it. The only thing in this room that moved with purpose.
The rest of the room was still. A single chair with a broken leg propped against the wall. A cardboard box that held everything he owned – his three shirts, two pairs ofbpants, a cracked phone, and a textbook he had stolen from the school library because he couldn't afford to buy it.
No posters on the walls, no decorations. Nothing that said anyone lived here except the smell of stale cigarettes and the faint, sour undertow of sweat.
The door at the bottom of the stairs opened.
Mildred's body reacted before his mind did. His shoulders tensed, his breathing became shallow. He had learned that reflex from a young age, the way a dog learns to flinch at the sight of raised hands. The difference was that he had stopped yelping years ago.
Heavy footsteps followed, two sets. One he recognized, his aunt's uneven gait, the left foot dragging slightly from the time she had fallen down these same stairs drunk and refused to go to the hospital because hospitals asked way too many questions.
The other footsteps were heavier than hers, male perhaps. It felt confident in a way that said he had been here before.
"Cosy place you've got," the man said. His voice was rough, the kind of voice that came from cheap whiskey and a cheap lifestyle.
"It's home." His aunt laughed. Mildred knew it intimately it was the laugh she used when she was working. High and bright, nothing like the voice she used when it was just the two of them.
"Can I get you something to drink? I've got—"
"Maybe later."
The floorboards in the hallway creaked, and his aunt's bedroom door swung open. Mildred stared at the ceiling and counted the moments.
'One…two….three….'
The door closed, and the lock clicked shut.
He let out a breath he hadn't realized he had been holding in and continued watching the ceiling leak on.
****
He was eight when his mother died.
That was how he always thought of it. Not "passed away" or "lost her" or any of the softer phrases people used to sand down the edges of grief.
She died.
One day, she was there, and the next, she wasn't, and the world kept spinning like it didn't notice the difference.
The funeral was small, only about three people cared to attend. His mother's sister, his aunt Margaret, had shown up in a red dress and sunglasses and cried loud enough that the priest kept glancing at her.
Mildred had stood by the grave in a borrowed coat that smelled like mothballs and tried to understand where his mother had gone. He remembered thinking that if he stared hard enough at the hole in the ground, he would see her climbing out, brushing the dirt off her shoulders, and laughing at the joke of it all.
But she never did.
Margaret took him in afterwards. Not out of love, which he clearly understood even at the age of eight, but because the alternative was letting the state take him in, Margaret had always cared what people thought.
"I'm not letting my sister's boy end up in foster care while I'm alive," she told the social worker, her voice dripping with righteous indignation. "What kind of person would I be?"
What kind of person, indeed.
The first six months, she tried, did her best. He had to give her that much. She made him breakfast sometimes. Bought him a jacket that fit once, even kept the apartment clean enough that he could pretend it was all normal.
Well, all until the money from his mother's life insurance ran out.
Mildred didn't know the exact details because he was still young but he understood, even then, that Margaret had been counting on that money to solve her problems, and when it didn't, something in her cracked or maybe it just revealed what had been there all along.
The drinking started. First, just at night, then earlier, then all the time. Then men started coming around.
At first, she tried to hide it, waiting until he was asleep before she let them in, keeping them in her room, and telling him to stay upstairs. But after a while, she stopped caring.
He was twelve the first time one of them found his room.
He had been pretending to sleep, the way he always did when she had company, pulling the thin blanket up to his chin and willing himself invisible. But the man was drunk and the bathroom was at the end of the hall and he had opened the wrong door by chance.
The way he looked at Mildred, the way he smiled.
Mildred had scrambled backwards, hitting the wall, and the man had just stood there in the doorway, blocking the only exit, and said, "What do we have here?"
He told Margaret the next morning. His voice had been steady when he was saying it. He practised it in his head a dozen times before he finally said it, making sure the words came out right, making sure he didn't sound like he was accusing her of anything.
She listened without looking at him. Her eyes were on the TV, some daytime show about people suing each other over small things. When he finished, she picked up her cigarette from the ashtray, took a long drag, and said,
"You need to learn to keep your door locked."
"My door doesn't lock."
She looked at him then, with a flat expression. "Then stop leaving your room when I have company."
He hadn't mentioned it again.
The men kept coming, and some of them ignored him. Some of them looked. One of them, the one who came back three times before Margaret got tired of him, touched his hair once and said, "Pretty thing you've got," before Mildred shoved his hand away and locked himself in the bathroom until morning
He learned to sleep with one eye open. Learned to read the sounds in the house, the weight of footsteps, the tone of voices, and the rhythm of breathing. Learned that the safest place was always the corner of his room, back to the wall, where nothing could approach without him seeing it first.
He learned that his aunt would never protect him. That whatever softness she once had had curdled into something hard and selfish. She saw him not as her sister's son but as a mouth to feed, a room she couldn't rent, a reminder of the money she had already spent.
"You're lucky I took you in," she'd always tell him, usually after she had been drinking. "You know that, right? Nobody else wanted you, absolutely nobody."
He knew, he had always known, it wasn't new information.