The hotel staff were polite but perfunctory. A smile at the door, a swipe of the card at the desk, a bellhop who didn't bother to hide his curiosity at the sight of a child clutching an oversized audition pass. It all blurred together into another anonymous room with cream-colored walls, blackout curtains, and a faint smell of industrial detergent baked into the sheets.
We didn't stay long. Within a day, the show handlers explained that the process wasn't immediate. The judges gave their yeses and nos, but the producers had the real authority. Cuts were made in offices, not on stage. Some contestants vanished from the edit before the public ever saw them.
So we were told to wait. A call would come in a few weeks. Until then, there was nothing to do but go home.
I didn't protest. New York was as good a cage as any.
---
Life slipped back into routine—or what passed for routine in my mother's household. She hovered, as she always did. At first, she relived the audition endlessly, replaying it in her head, recounting it to anyone who would listen. The cashier at the grocery store, the cab driver, the neighbor three doors down—each was forced to hear how her son was "the chosen one." It was contradictory, since she hated it when other people gave me attention or came close to me.
I ignored it.
My focus shifted inward, toward a different kind of stage.
The wish energy I had collected was still there, dense and heavy like compressed light. I resisted the temptation to spend it recklessly. I could, with one invocation, turn a street corner into a cathedral or make the Hudson run backward. But that would be stupid. Power without foundation was waste.
Instead, I remembered an old idea.
An apex human. Socially speaking. A cultivated self. Genius of mind. Genius of art. Genius of presence. Something close to the idealized image I once carried of myself in my first life before I fell into existential despair. It wasn't power for power's sake, but refinement for its own. I had already decided that science and art would be my lifelong pursuits through immortality, so I could start from there. I could no longer be considered human—it was an old aspiration of mine anyway. And there is no difference really between human and non-human; we are all nothing but specks of matter and energy drifting in an indifferent universe.
The thought lingered, and one morning I decided to act.
"Mother," I said over breakfast. She was slicing strawberries for me with exaggerated care, as though a dull knife might leap from her hand and cut me by accident. "I need to go to the library."
She blinked, then frowned. "The library? Sweetheart, you don't need to waste time there. You're already gifted. What could a library give you that I can't?"
I wiped my mouth slowly. "Books."
Her lips twitched, but she couldn't deny the logic. A few hours later we were at the New York Public Library, her hand clamped around mine like she thought someone might try to steal me.
The rows of shelves were old friends I hadn't seen in a long time. I wandered past them with deliberate calm, running my fingers along the spines. Mathematics. Physics. Literature. Philosophy. Entire worlds waiting to be reordered in my head.
My mother tried to keep up, but her heels clicked too loudly, her breathing too quick. She wasn't comfortable here.
"What are you even looking for?" she asked when I began stacking textbooks into her arms. Algebra, biology, chemistry, history. High school material, nothing extraordinary.
"Interesting stuff," I said.
Her brow furrowed. "You already sing better than anyone your age. Why bother yourself with… this?" She gestured at the weight of knowledge in her hands as though it were trash.
"Because I want to," I said simply.
It wasn't enough to be powerful. That much I already had. But refinement required layers, roots, structure. I would finish the school curriculum first. I would consume it, digest it, and move forward until nothing in human learning felt foreign to me. Only then would my image begin to resemble the one I carried in my head.
---
The books became my new companions. I devoured them quickly, one after the other, filling pages of notes. Equations, timelines, anatomical diagrams—it was child's play, but necessary play.
And I didn't stop there.
One evening, after marking a chapter in a biology text, I turned to her and said, "Buy me a violin."
She blinked, caught off guard. "A violin?"
"Yes."
Her expression softened almost instantly, like I had just proposed marriage. "If that's what you want, of course. Anything for you."
Within days, a black case appeared in our apartment, polished and waiting. She hovered as I opened it, her face glowing with something that looked like pride but wasn't. It was closer to hunger.
I plucked the strings experimentally, the sound raw and uneven. No matter. I would master it. Along with painting, along with whatever else struck my fancy. Art was another language, another way to twist hearts.
"Do you like it?" she asked, her eyes too wide, too eager.
"Yes."
Her shoulders dropped in relief, as though my approval validated her entire existence. She sat beside me while I experimented with the bow, correcting nothing, understanding nothing, but never leaving the room.
That was the beginning of her new habit.
If I read, she sat across from me, pretending to knit or scroll her phone, her eyes flicking up every few seconds. If I painted, she stood behind me, her breath warm against my neck, murmuring about how talented I was. If I practiced scales on the violin, she applauded even the sour notes, clapping like I had just performed at Carnegie Hall.
At first, I ignored it. Her obsession was a hum, background noise. But repetition magnifies, and soon the hum became static.
She wasn't letting me live. She was trying to consume me.
---
Still, I allowed it.
I noted the way her voice grew sharp whenever I mentioned anyone else—an old teacher, a friend from the building, even the neighbor's dog. She wanted exclusivity, her name stamped on every corner of my attention.
I noted the way she looked at the violin, at the books. As if they were rivals, intruders in her private kingdom.
And I noted the way she touched me—constantly, compulsively. A hand brushing my hair, a kiss pressed to my temple, fingers curling around my wrist when there was no need. She wasn't afraid I would run away. She was afraid I wouldn't need her.
I let her cling. Let her watch. Let her drown herself in her illusions.
---
Days blurred into weeks. I moved from algebra to calculus, from scales to simple melodies, from still-life sketches to color studies. Progress was quick; mastery would take time, but time was something I had in abundance.
Every so often, I felt the wish energy trickle inside me again, faint echoes from strangers who had been in the audience that night. They still thought of me, still wished for me. Their energy drifted like pollen on the wind, small but persistent.
But the real flood hadn't arrived yet. That would come when the episode aired. Millions of eyes, millions of hearts.
Until then, I cultivated myself.
---
One evening, while I traced a diagram of the circulatory system into my notes, my mother perched on the couch beside me. She didn't even pretend to be busy this time. She just watched, chin resting on her hand.
"You're too serious," she murmured. "Most boys your age would be playing outside."
"I'm not most boys."
Her lips curved into something like a smile. "No. You're mine."
The way she said it was telling. It wasn't pride. It was possession.
I let the words slide past me, as always. She thought she had me wrapped in her arms, tied with ribbons. She didn't realize that the strings had already shifted.
In time.
For now, I turned the page, drew another diagram, and imagined the bow of the violin in my hand, the brush against canvas, the applause of an audience not yet gathered.
The image grew clearer in my mind.
And when the world saw me again—on their televisions, in their living rooms—they would unknowingly pour their wishes into that image, helping me carve it into reality.
I smiled faintly at the thought.
My mother noticed, of course. She always did.
"Why are you smiling?" she asked.
"Nothing," I said.
And she accepted it, though her grip on my arm tightened for just a second longer than necessary.
---
The waiting continued.
But waiting was not wasted.
Every note, every equation, every brushstroke was a brick in the foundation of the self I was building.
And my mother—whether she knew it or not—was already a part of the design.