The flies came first. They always did in the summer, buzzing against the cracked windowpanes and crawling across the chalk-white walls of the orphanage, their wings making a sound like someone whispering secrets he wasn't supposed to hear. Pereteanu sat on the bench by the door, knees drawn tight to his chest, trying not to move as sweat gathered at the base of his neck.
The heat always betrayed him. It had a particular rhythm to the way it worked — first the itch behind his ears, faint enough that he could pretend not to feel it, and then the slow loosening of everything beneath his skin, as though his bones had decided, without consulting him, that they no longer wished to hold their shape. By midafternoon on days like this one, he had learned to expect it the way other children expected rain.
It wasn't just sweat. Every part of him seemed to soften, blur, as though his body couldn't decide what it wanted to be. His arms sagged. His jawline slipped a fraction lower on one side, then the other, correcting itself only to slip again. Sometimes one eye pulled slightly beneath where it belonged, and he would catch himself reaching up to press it back into place, though it never did any good — his fingers only sank into the give of his own cheek, and the eye would drift regardless, indifferent to whatever he wanted from it.
To the other children, he looked like a half-finished drawing, something abandoned partway through. To strangers, he looked worse: a mistake that breathed.
He had tried, once, to explain it to himself in words a smaller version of him could understand — that it was like being made of wax left too near a candle, that his shape was a decision he had to keep making, over and over, all day, and some days he simply lost the argument. Nobody had ever told him that. He'd worked it out on his own, lying on his cot at night, running his fingers along a jaw that had finally, mercifully, settled into something like a proper edge, and wondering how long it would hold.
Other children had powers too, and some even flaunted them. One boy could whistle and make the curtains ripple without touching them, a small parlor trick he performed for anyone who'd watch, delighted every time as though he hadn't done it a hundred times before. Another girl had a voice that hummed like crystal, soothing visitors into leaning closer, until they found themselves crouched at her level, smiling without quite knowing why. Families liked those kinds of gifts — predictable, even charming, the sort of thing you could imagine explaining to a neighbor over tea. *She sings, and it calms the whole room down. Isn't that something.*
Those children got taken.
Not him.
"Don't stare," one of the matrons hissed one afternoon, when a visiting couple flinched at him in the corridor — a small, involuntary recoil, the woman's hand rising halfway to her mouth before she caught herself. They kept moving, their polite smiles already collapsing into the kind of pity that curdled, by the time they reached the door, into something closer to revulsion. Pereteanu watched them go and felt nothing in particular. He had stopped expecting anything else a long time before he could have told you when.
He knew the pattern by heart, the way other children knew songs. Adults came in smelling of soap and travel dust, their coats still carrying the cold of wherever they'd traveled from, and walked the length of the hall to inspect rows of children arranged like dolls on a shelf — straight-backed, hands folded, faces arranged into whatever expression the matrons had spent the morning coaching into them. And always, always, the adults left faster once their eyes landed on him. He had timed it once, counting silently in his head the way Ana would later teach him to count his own breathing: four seconds, on average, between the moment they saw him and the moment they looked away.
The matrons tried seating him in the shadows when visitors came, angling his bench toward the wall, out of the direct light from the high windows. It never mattered. Even in the corner, the heat found him. His skin shimmered faintly there too, like wax sliding from a candle no one had thought to blow out, and the shape of his face shifted with every breath he took, as though breathing itself were a kind of confession.
The other children had learned, early and without ever discussing it, to keep their distance. They played ball in the courtyard in the long stretch of afternoon before supper, shouting and laughing in the particular unguarded way of children who had not yet learned to measure their own joy, while he sat by himself under the shade of a leaning oak tree at the courtyard's edge, close enough to hear them, far enough not to be asked to join.
He had tried once. He remembered it more clearly than he remembered almost anything else from those years — the ball arcing toward him, a boy's voice calling his name with what had sounded, for one unguarded second, like genuine invitation. He'd reached for it eagerly, too eagerly, and felt his fingers give at the moment of contact, soft and clumsy, the ball slipping through them and rolling away into the dust. The others had laughed. Not cruelly — that was the detail that stayed with him longest, the unfairness of it — just the ordinary, thoughtless laugh of children watching something go wrong in a way that struck them as funny rather than sad. But it built a wall all the same, the kind that didn't need cruelty to hold, and after that he stopped trying, because trying only ever bought him one more version of the same afternoon.
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Not everyone avoided him. There was Elena.
She was small, quick in a way that made her seem always slightly ahead of wherever she actually stood, her hair kept in a messy braid that never survived a full day intact. Unlike the others, she never flinched when his face blurred at the edges or when his arm, on a bad afternoon, seemed to stretch a half-inch too long at the elbow. She would simply look at him — really look, the way people looked at things they expected to stay the same shape — and then carry on with whatever she'd been about to say, as though nothing about him required comment.
Sometimes she'd sit beside him under the oak tree in the hour before supper and talk about things she'd overheard, her voice pitched low in the particular register of a child sharing something she knew she shouldn't have heard at all — the way the matrons whispered about government officers who sometimes came asking after children with unusual abilities, officers who never announced themselves the way ordinary adoptive families did. Or she'd talk about the sea, which she had never seen and had decided, with the total conviction of someone who has never been proven wrong about anything important, that she would see one day, and that when she did it would be exactly as vast and gray-blue as she'd imagined it from a picture book with a torn cover.
He didn't always answer. Words came slower to him than they seemed to come to her, and half the time he wasn't certain what he'd say even if he tried. But she never seemed to mind the silence. She filled it herself, easily, the way some people filled a room just by being in it, and he found, without ever deciding to, that he looked forward to the hour before supper more than he looked forward to almost anything else in a day built mostly out of waiting.
When Elena was adopted, it happened quickly — the way it always seemed to happen for children who weren't him, as though the world had been holding its breath on their behalf and simply hadn't thought to do the same for his. A couple arrived one gray morning with sharp shoes that clicked against the corridor tile and softer voices than most of the visitors who came through, and within a matter of weeks, she was gone.
She had hugged him before she left — quick and fierce, her arms locking around his middle with a strength that surprised him, given how small she was. He remembered the particular pressure of it, how she hadn't seemed to notice or care that his shoulder had gone slightly soft under her grip, the way it did most afternoons by that hour.
"I'll see you again," she whispered into his ear, so quietly he almost missed it beneath the sound of the couple's shoes already turning toward the door.
He hadn't believed her. Promises didn't last here — he'd learned that lesson so early and so thoroughly that it had stopped feeling like a lesson at all and started feeling like simple weather, a fact of the climate he lived in. But he held onto the words anyway, turning them over some nights the way he turned over the ache in his jaw, not because he expected either one to change, but because some things earned the keeping regardless of whether they were true.
At night, things were different. When the air cooled — not much, just enough — his shape settled, the way a held breath settles once it's finally released. He could lie flat on his cot in the dark and, for a few hours, almost look like an ordinary boy: jaw where it belonged, arms the length arms were supposed to be, his face holding whatever expression he gave it rather than sliding toward some other one on its own.
He wished, some nights, that the dark would simply refuse to end. That the sun, for once, might forget to come back and demand its heat from him all over again. It never did, of course. But the wishing itself became a kind of ritual, a small private ceremony performed at the edge of sleep, and there was a strange comfort in it even so — the comfort of a thing you do not expect to work, done anyway, because doing it is better than doing nothing at all.
One afternoon, when the air had gone heavy enough to press against his skin like a second, damper shirt, a group of visitors passed through the hall on one of the routine inspection days the orphanage held every few weeks. He could hear their shoes clicking against the tile long before they came into view, could hear the other children straightening on their benches, rehearsing the smiles the matrons had drilled into them that morning.
He tried to sit very still. He had gotten better at it over the years — holding himself in place through sheer effort of will, the way he imagined a soldier might hold a salute — but stillness only slowed the heat, never stopped it, and by the time the visitors reached his end of the hall, he felt his shoulders slump against his will and his cheek sag, slow and inevitable, against the doorframe he'd been leaning near.
The woman in the group gasped, softly, the sound she probably imagined was too quiet for him to hear. The man beside her touched her arm, a small steering gesture, and muttered something Pereteanu didn't need to hear clearly to understand entirely: *Not that one.*
He kept his eyes on the floor, on the pattern of scuffed tile he'd long since memorized without meaning to. He didn't need to see their faces to know they were already leaving, already composing, somewhere behind their careful expressions, the version of this afternoon they'd tell their neighbors — the sweet children they'd seen, the little girl who sang, the strange one they didn't mention at all, because there was no kind way to mention him and they had already decided kindness was the story they wanted to tell.
For a moment, in the particular way that thoughts arrive uninvited and settle somewhere they aren't wanted, he wondered if maybe the heat was right about him. Maybe he was supposed to melt away — not dramatically, not all at once, but slowly, the way he did most afternoons, until there was simply less and less of him left to notice.
He didn't know, yet, that somewhere in the building behind him, a woman who had spent years learning exactly how to watch a room without seeming to was watching this one, and had been watching it, quietly and carefully, for longer than he understood.