It was January when an apartment on fifth avenue in Downtown cemented itself in the public consciousness as an event for the history books, terrorizing the people of the city. It was a tragedy, with thirty lives lost. Most died from smoke inhalation than the actual explosion, but did that difference really matter? It was one of the worst things to happen, especially to this part of the city, in a long time. People forgot what it was like to feel true fear. To feel their safety crumble, as if something like that was always going to happen, or could happen. It was a statement that nowhere and no one was safe from loss.

I barely remembered what followed the explosion. I was blinking in and out of consciousness in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. I remembered the paramedics, leaning over me, checking my pulse. Their cold gloves sent shivers up my arm. Their masks and the blinking lights overhead made it look like I was getting abducted by aliens. When they touched me, I thought that they were trying to probe me. Even if they looked like people, I could not be certain.

The most surprising thing was that I could not feel any bit of the pain. Maybe it was the shock, or the coma, or even maybe the painkillers they juiced me with. I could not remember the pain. The physical pain, at least.

The hospital room I woke up in was white. Not an eggshell white, where it might feel like some thought was put into the design. It was bone white. It was hard and blunt. It did not try to hide what it was. It was a place for the sick, or the hurt, to go to get better. It reflected the white teeth of the doctor’s smile, like shining a flashlight onto a bed of snow.

The bed they let me take was hard, uncomfortable.

He told me, with that painfully fake smile, “looks like a doozy kid. You might be here for a while.” I looked at him, bandages covering my chest like a mummy. That seemed enough for him. That little moment of nothingness. He quickly stood up, brushing off his coat, and coughed into his fist. He flipped through his clipboard. He looked uncomfortable too. It was like he finally read my notes. I could tell that he wanted to backtrack a little.

“Well, hopefully not too long,” he said.

I was not in much of a talking mood. They kept the hospital room just a little too cold. I shivered in place. The doctor coughed into his hand again.

“Well, let’s see here. A little bit of stitching. A slight concussion, but nothing too distressing. Looks like the worst of it must have been absorbed by the surrounding infrastructure. I don’t know how else to say this, but kid, you’re a miracle.”

I did not feel like a miracle. I felt like a kid whose life was ruined.

The next few weeks flew by in a blur. Reporters were barred, for the most part, from the hospital. The administration wanted to keep their patients out of the eyes of the public. I was grateful for that.

I did not get too many visitors. A few kids from my class visited about a month in. Mr. Chelsea, one of my teachers, visited with a group of other students from my Social Studies class. For all the badgering and awkwardness, It was nice.

Mr. Chelsea told me a story about his brother, who was a firefighter. I was not paying attention, but I did remember the gist of it. He told me about it when the rest of the students went to the cafeteria for lunch. He stayed back just to talk with me one-on-one. He was one of my favorite teachers, always looking out for his students.

His brother was always a little unruly, a little wild. He was a problem child who thought of himself a little too much, and that was always a problem for their parents. When he was in high school, he did not have many friends, stuck mostly to himself, or to some outcasts. So, as a way to make friends, he would try to get in with a rougher crowd. He started doing more and more dangerous stuff just to make the people around him, who really cared, pay attention. Eventually, he even started to play with dangerous stuff…the kind of stuff we’ve had assemblies about. Somehow, for some stupid reason, matches entered the picture, or was it a lighter?

Mr. Chelsea described what it was like to watch your house burn down. Like before, I was not really paying attention to what he was saying. I was too focused on watching him tell it. His eyes were firm, unflinching, but not hard. They were not stoic, or stone-like. They looked soft, like they knew a secret that I could never understand. They were the same kind of eyes that I saw once before. He forgave his brother.

All of his stuff, his teddy bear that he had since he was a baby, his racecar bed, his model planes that his brother helped him hang from the ceiling of his room. Everything was lost. His mom’s scrapbook with photos of them as kids, his dad’s favorite book. Nothing was safe from the fire.

He told me the story with a tiny smile poking through. I asked him why he did not hate his brother for it. He said he did, for a while. Turns out, his brother felt even worse than he did. Who would have guessed that? He is still trying to make up for it, even today.

Mr. Chelsea told me that his brother was the one who called to let him know I was okay and in the hospital. He said he pulled me out of the fire with the rest of the firefighters and once I was back at the hospital he helped to notify my school, since he knew that Mr. Chelsea also worked there. After learning I was in his class, he told him about what happened, personally. He is a real hero, Mr. Chelsea said.

As he is telling me all this, I wondered how Mr. Chelsea’s brother could recover from something like that. How could he ever move on from something that horrific? Something that he, himself, caused? And I wondered, why tell me all this? What was the point? Did he want me to feel grateful for his brother? Did he feel some sort of twisted pride hearing his brother called a hero? Grateful that a stupid teenager one day decided to to play with fire, transforming him into the hero that would one day save me? I could not stomach the thought, it seemed too cruel, even for me.

Stolen story; please report.

He told me something that really stuck, though.

“He was always a hero,” I whispered to myself, long after Mr. Chelsea and the rest of class left to go home, to their own families. The moment came back to me as I laid in bed, waiting for the nurses to return and replace my bandages.

“He was always a hero. It was always inside of him. The capacity to do good is inside us all Monty, just like how we all have the power to make bad mistakes. Like a block of marble with the statue of David hidden away, It’s up to us to chip away at the outside stuff, to reveal what was inside all along.

“Things are gonna be tough for you Monty. Just know that it isn’t the end of the world for you. Things will get better.”

Did Mr. Chelsea feel responsible for what happened with his brother? I wish I had asked him. I wondered if I felt responsible. A little part of me did, at least I thought. Was that not strange? Why did I feel like that?

Still, it was a weird thing to say to a kid in a hospital. Maybe he did understand. I was too exhausted to try and put myself in his shoes. The pain was still there. I could hardly think of anything else. The distractions did not do much to help, but they were something to keep my mind off of things.

It was not until I met my case worker that I really felt like things would be okay for me; if there even was a chance for me to get better. Her name was Casey. She came in one day carrying a basket of sweets and toys wrapped in this big mess of ribbons and bows that was gaudy to the point of being a little cringey. Before I could pretend to be thankful, she peaked her head around the basket, which happened to be large enough to encompass her, and introduced herself.

“I heard you were a fighter kid. You look like one,” she said after setting down the basket on my bed.

“What gave you that impression?”

“You got the look of one. I don’t really know how to explain it, but I see kids everyday who look like the world is out to get them, kids who’ve given up on things.”

I shrugged.

“I haven’t been told that before,” I said.

“Folks are probably scared to say the wrong thing to ya,” she said, sitting down at the edge of my bed. She wore a blazer and khakis, and she looked almost like a school teacher.

I thought back to the doctor, and how he treated me after learning what happened.

“So, what does a kid do around here to stay sane? Wallow in bed?”

She looked around the room at the white walls and humming tv.

“Can’t really do much else. They won’t let me leave yet,” I said.

She spoke with one of the nurses and after waiting fifteen minutes for a response were led to the outside courtyard. It wrapped around the hospital. The trail was quiet. We only saw maybe three other people, other kids walking around with adults. Might have been their parents. I was probably the only one with a babysitter.

I was happy to get out of bed. The sun was framed right above my hospital wing, shining out across the bushes and the low-lying trees of the courtyard. We passed a hedge surgically trimmed to not look too formidable, like a big block of green soap. We passed a bed of flowers and when Casey knelt down to pick one, she got yelled at by a passing nurse. I tried not to laugh too hard. It was the first time I smiled in a few weeks.

We talked about my plans for after my discharge; what I would do once the hospital kicked me out. Casey mentioned an orphanage, but the idea of being surrounded by other miserable kids did not appeal to me in the slightest. I tried not to say it like that, but I think Casey got the idea. She said that her agency looked into my closest relatives and found a cousin of mine who could take me in. He was my mom’s sister’s kid, living in an apartment in Easton. I was not too enthused with leaving the inner city, but it was better than the alternative.

She asked if I knew him well but I told her honestly that my aunt was never really close to my mom. They had a bit of a falling out and stopped coming to holiday parties because of it. I only had vague memories of David from when I was really little. He was a tall dude, and like me had black hair that went to his shoulders. I remembered my dad saying that I looked like him. It was surprising, since people often said I looked more like my dad than my mom. It was a weird quirk of our family.

I missed my parents.

Casey noticed me get quiet. She reached down and hugged me. My arms stayed at my side, but I let her stay like that a little longer.

“Things are gonna work out Monty.”

I really hoped so.

The ride outside the city island took all afternoon. We crossed a bridge from Downtown Agartha into Easton, riding out across the bay, miles above the water. The traffic is always bad on the island, and I have never heard Easton to be better. We waited almost an hour just for the cars to even get across the bridge, let alone driving through the city. But once we did, we toured the south side, skipping across lanes to reach Octoberfaire, a bayside neighborhood overlooking the ocean, just south of Agartha Island, just before South Easton.

The glow of the street lamps passed by in sprints, eager to paint the car’s interior with flashes of orange light. I looked out at the town and tried to imagine myself living here. I could see my mom and I out on the pier getting ice creams. My dad was walking along the beachfront with me, looking out into the bay. I thought that I could not call this place home without them.

I wondered if David would even want me. Did he accept custody of me just because he felt pity for a kid with no parents? Did he feel obligated because we were family? The questions rolled around in my brain the whole ride over. Casey had not been too helpful. She just reassured me that he wanted to help me every time I tried to prod her more about it.

What would living with him be like? What kind of person was he?

“He seemed pretty chill over the phone,” Casey said, watching the road. “Let's meet him first... Who knows? Maybe the two of you will hit it off.”

It was evening when Casey pulled in front of David’s apartment, an old shoe factory turned into a fairly nice brownstone complex. She walked me up to his apartment. While we explored the place, she whistled, impressed with the renovations.

We came up to his apartment and knocked on the door twice. When we went to knock a third time, the door swung open.

David stood in the door frame. He looked at us with wide eyes. He was a deer in the headlights.

“Nice to see you again, Monty. It’s been a while,” he said. He waved the two of us into the apartment.

Mr. Chelsea’s words came to mind. Things will get better.