The F-Class Student Is Earth's Hidden Weapon

Chapter Two: What the Watch Means

Noah

That same evening, after everything with the scores and Serena, our apartment smells like other people's dinners.

The vents run through the whole building, so on a good night I get somebody's fried plantains from two floors down, and on a bad night I get whatever Mr. Alvarez down the hall is boiling that makes my eyes water. Tonight it's garlic and something sweet. My stomach growls before I even get my shoes off.

"Long day?" Mom asks, without looking up from the stove.

"Normal day."

She knows that's a lie. Mom always knows. She's still in her work polo from the hospital cafeteria, hair pulled back tight, the kind of tired sitting in her shoulders that a good night's sleep can't fix because she never gets one. She works the dinner shift feeding sick people who don't want to eat, then a four a.m. cleaning shift at the office building downtown before most people even wake up. I used to ask her why she doesn't just pick one job. She used to say two half-jobs beat one job that doesn't pay the light bill. She stopped explaining it a while ago. I stopped asking.

I sit at our little table, the one with the wobbly leg we've propped up with a folded napkin for three years now, and I tell her about the exam. Not all of it. Just the score, and then the part where they hauled me into a room like a suspect.

Her spoon stops stirring.

"They accused you of cheating."

"Basically."

I watch her face do the thing it does when she's deciding how angry to let herself get in front of me. She sets the spoon down. Wipes her hands on the dish towel slow, like she's buying herself a second to choose her words.

"Listen to me." She sits across from me, and her hands, calloused from years of hot pans and industrial cleaners, close around mine. "We don't bow. We bend, and we get back up. You hear me? Every single time. That's the whole trick, baby. Bending doesn't mean breaking."

I've heard pieces of that before, fragments over the years. This is the first time she's said it whole and complete, like it's something she's been saving.

"Okay," I say, because it's easier than telling her how tired I am of bending.

She squeezes my hands once and goes back to the stove. Dinner is rice and beans again, and she splits the last of the chicken onto my plate and says she's not that hungry tonight, which is a lie I let her tell because calling her on it would only make us both feel worse.

After dinner I do homework at the table while she showers, and around nine she leaves for her cleaning shift, kissing the top of my head on her way out like I'm still seven years old. I don't mind. Some things you don't want to grow out of.

I'm winding the watch when Yusuf finds me the next morning outside school, sweeping cigarette butts off the front steps before the first bell. Yusuf's the custodian, an older guy with silver in his beard and forearms like he used to do something a lot more physical than push a broom for a living. Most kids don't notice him. I do, mostly because he's the only adult in this building who's never once looked at me like I don't belong here.

"You're up early," he says.

"Couldn't sleep."

He nods at my wrist, at the watch, stopped where it's always stopped. "Your father used to check the time on that thing every five minutes. Drove your mother crazy."

I go still. Yusuf never talks about my dad. Nobody does, not really, not since the accident, not since I was nine and the world rearranged itself around a hole where he used to be.

"You knew him?"

Something shifts in Yusuf's face, quick, like a door almost opening and then thinking better of it. "Knew of him," he says, too fast, and goes back to sweeping like the conversation never happened. "Get to class, Vale. Bell's about to ring."

I want to push. I want to ask how a school custodian knew anything about my father, a man who worked in a research lab across town, in a life that ended before Yusuf could've possibly crossed paths with him. But the first bell rings, sharp and final, and Yusuf's already three steps away with his broom, humming something under his breath like the last thirty seconds didn't happen.

I stand there a second longer, tapping two fingers against my thumb, turning the sentence over like a rock I can't see the bottom of.

Your father used to check the time on that thing every five minutes.

That's not a stranger's sentence. That's not something you say about someone you only knew of.

I file it away with everything else about my dad that doesn't add up. The accident report Mom still keeps folded in a drawer, the one I've snuck out and reread a handful of times over the years without ever fully understanding it, official enough looking and somehow never actually explaining anything. The lab that stopped returning my mother's calls within a year. The fact that nobody at Halcyon Kinetics, the research company he worked for, ever sent so much as a card. One more piece in a pile of pieces that don't fit together yet.

The second bell rings. I go to class. But all through first period, while the teacher drones about the periodic table, I keep thinking about the way Yusuf's face changed, and I keep winding a watch that never moves, like maybe this time will be different.

It isn't.