Jeff and his family had just moved into a new neighborhood when it started.
It seemed like any other suburb. Quiet streets. A cul-de-sac. Parents waving from driveways. Jeff's younger brother Liu was excited. Jeff was fourteen, trying to appear as though he didn't care about anything, the way fourteen-year-olds do.
On the first day of school, three older boys on skateboards stopped them on the street. Randy, Troy, and Keith — the kind of boys who've been failing long enough to look permanent. They took Liu's money. Jeff tried to stop them, and in the scuffle that followed, Randy pulled a gun. Jeff fought back anyway. It's the kind of thing that seems brave until you understand what it costs.
At the hearing, Liu took the blame. Said he started it. Jeff watched his brother get taken away in a police car and felt something split in him that didn't come back together.
The birthday party was a week later. Randy and his friends showed up. Jeff fought them again. It was ugly and serious and beyond what a fourteen-year-old should be capable of. But Jeff was capable. He knocked Randy's arm out of socket. He broke a nose. He took a flare to the face while he was down and couldn't move.
At the hospital, he woke up swathed in bandages. The doctors told his mother that his face would be permanently scarred. That his skin had changed.
When the bandages came off, Jeff looked in the mirror for a long time.
Then he smiled. Not a normal smile. A smile that stretched too far, as though his face had been rearranged to accommodate it. He told his mother he liked it. She did not believe him. She watched his eyes.
She should have done something then.
Three nights later, Jeff's mother woke to movement in the house. She found Jeff standing in the doorway of Liu's room with scissors in his hand, watching his brother sleep. When she reached for the phone, Jeff told her he was going to help Liu sleep forever, so Liu would never have to wake up and be afraid again.
She screamed.
She was the first.
Afterward, Jeff walked out into the blue-grey neighborhood in the earliest part of the morning, face bleached pale, mouth carved into that wrong smile, eyes that no longer closed. He moved between houses without hurrying. He moved the way someone moves when they've decided something.
Parents in the area locked their doors after that. Checked their children's windows. But Jeff had grown very patient. And he had time.
He was very good at waiting.
Go to sleep.