The day after the test, Eli didn't wake up early. He didn't set his alarm. He didn't even pretend to care.
By the time the rest of the house stirred, the sun was halfway across the sky, throwing gold through the thin curtain covering his window. He lay in bed, still in yesterday's shirt, staring up at the ceiling like it held answers.
It didn't.
Nothing did.
His body was still. But his mind... it was loud — a hundred thoughts spiraling around the same dark core.
He wasn't going to school today.
He told his mom he had a headache.
She didn't ask where it hurt. Didn't come in to feel his forehead. She just snapped, "Fine. Suit yourself. You never help anyway," and walked off like he wasn't part of the household's reality. Just background noise.
Eli had learned how to be invisible.
Not in a movie kind of way, not with cloaks or powers. But in the way people can look at you and still not see you. The kind of invisibility that hurts worse than being hated — because at least hatred is attention. At least hatred sees you.
The house moved on without him.
His brothers argued over cereal downstairs. A show blasted from the living room TV. His mother shouted from the kitchen about something being burnt.
He stayed upstairs, curled sideways in bed, the notebook beside him. Blank page, open. Waiting. Watching.
But Eli couldn't write yet. Not this time.
His head hurt, but not from sickness.
It hurt from remembering.
It had been a year since his father's mother came to visit. She was older than he expected, but not kind in that fuzzy, grandmotherly way. Her face was hard, like it had forgotten how to smile decades ago. She spoke little. Observed everything. And she had this way of watching him with her sharp eyes like she knew things he didn't.
One day, when the others were out, Eli had sat across from her in the living room. She was humming something old and wordless, her eyes fixed on nothing in particular.
He didn't speak, but she did.
"You don't talk much."
He nodded.
"Your father didn't either. Always full of silence. Couldn't carry it well."
He hadn't known what to say. No one ever talked about his father. It was like mentioning a ghost — frowned upon, avoided. Sometimes he wondered if he was even real.
Then she added something that changed everything.
"He told your mother not to keep you."
Eli froze.
She didn't stop.
"Said the world was already too loud and too hard. Said it wasn't time. But she didn't listen."
He'd blinked. "He told her to get rid of me?"
She nodded. "They weren't well off. He didn't have much. He panicked. But instead of staying to fix it, he ran."
Eli remembered his throat going dry. "So… he just left?"
"He left her, not just you. But she blamed you. Because the day she chose to keep you… was the day she lost everything else."
That conversation burned into Eli's bones. And now, a year later, it came back in waves — loud, hot, bitter.
So that was the origin story no one told him.
He wasn't wanted.
He was a reminder.
A symbol of loss. Of broken plans. Of everything that fell apart.
And now, every time his mother looked at him with tired disgust… every time his brothers excluded him from their games, their jokes, their world… it made sense.
He wasn't one of them.
He wasn't meant to be.
He sat up slowly in bed, rubbing his eyes until his vision cleared. His mirror stood propped up across the room, cheap and cracked in one corner.
He walked to it.
Stared.
Same boy. Same silence in the eyes. Same shoulders slightly slumped from carrying things no one could see.
He whispered:
"You weren't supposed to be here."
It wasn't angry. It wasn't emotional.
It was just... true.
He thought about the times his mother said things like:
"You're nothing like your brothers.""You never make this house easier.""I should've listened when I was told to think twice.""You act like a stranger in your own home."
Now he understood what she really meant.
She wasn't trying to fix him.She was trying to survive his existence.
He finally walked back to his bed and pulled the notebook into his lap. For a while, he didn't write — he just touched the paper like he was afraid of bleeding onto it.
Then slowly, he began:
"I was already a problem before I could crawl."
"I was born into someone's regret."
"My silence isn't my nature. It's my defense. I learned early that speaking doesn't change how unwanted you are."
"I don't think they see a person when they look at me. Just a delay. Just a mistake in motion."
"I used to think I was just quiet. But maybe I'm the echo of a life that was never supposed to start."
He stopped, stared at the words. Then added one more line.
"I didn't ask to be here. But I'm here anyway. And that has to mean something… right?"
That night, while the house slept and the walls creaked under the weight of time, Eli stayed up with only the glow of his desk lamp and the breath in his chest.
He reread everything he wrote.
Then closed the notebook slowly.
Like a chapter.
Like a coffin.