#stebboro

Santoro had always taken notice of who came and went in the clinic. He didn’t like new things, and he liked new people even less, so when his father, ever gracious, ever soft-hearted, took in a new patient, Santoro made a quiet habit of observing from the corners. It meant fewer surprises.

There was one patient that always drew his eye: a lanky woman with jittering joints and faded, washed-out blue eyes that never seemed to land in the right place. Amelia Stebbins. She shuffled in every few weeks for sleeping pills she couldn’t afford.Though it wasn’t like his father asked. The way he smiled while handing her the bottle made Santoro uneasy, like his father was willing pieces of himself away for free.

Sometimes Amelia brought her son. A pale boy with a thready kind of movement, a sort of wobbly disposition like that of a newborn deer. His eyes were worse than his mother’s: huge, glassy, fixed a hundred feet past whatever stood in front of him. He was quiet, too. Quiet in a way that felt deliberate. Santoro didn’t know much about kids his age but he knew enough to mark the kid as strange and move on.

Today was an exception from her usual pickup. Santoro was doing his homework on the exam table, legs dangling off the side, a sight his father insisted was “charming” for a third grader. Dr. Santoro was used to his son’s oddities. Santoro kept his head down and wrote, but it was hard not to hear the tight, shaking edge in Amelia’s voice.

She was whispering with him, voice wobbling like a clothespin line in a storm. She kept wringing her hands, twitching, nearly vibrating out of her skin. It only stopped when his father placed a hand on her shoulder and murmured something low and steady. Then he looked over at his son and jerked his chin toward the hall.

“This is a conversation for adults," he said.

Santoro opened his mouth to argue that he was mature and that was when his father snapped for the first time in Santoro’s life. A sharp bark, one word, then a hand closing around the collar of his shirt and steering him out. Not rough, not really, but shocking. Enough to make Santoro’s stomach twist unpleasantly.

“Go act your age for once," his father said, low but firm. “Sit with the Stebbins boy. His chest hurts and he’s missing his mother.”

Which Santoro translated perfectly well into: Get your ass out there.

He didn’t argue again.

The waiting room was chilly, metallic. Stebbins sat there with his too-long limbs and too-wide eyes, staring at the ceiling like he was reading the water stains. Santoro slumped onto the cold metal chair next to him, homework tucked under his arm and his expression dejected enough to linger.

Stebbins didn’t look at him. Didn’t acknowledge him at all until Santoro muttered something offhand and unfortunately cold, meant to sound smart and older and above all of this.

Stebbins blinked once. “It’s fine,” he said, flat as gravel. “You can just do your homework.”

So the room filled with the scratching of fine graphite.

“Hey,” he rasped after a few minutes, “what happens if you take too many cough drops?”

Santoro straightened up, eager to reclaim some dignity. “Your throat gets numb,” he said confidently. “You choke, your airways freeze up, maybe you pass out.”

It was mostly invented, cobbled together from the vaguest scraps of science he’d absorbed.

Stebbins looked impressed anyway.

After that they sat in a chilly silence until Amelia reappeared with a prescription and a grateful, exhausted thank-you to Dr. Santoro. She told her son it was time to go. Stebbins stood, stretching like something that had been folded too long.

The next time they came in for a checkup, Stebbins carried a book, The Velveteen Rabbit, dog-eared and worn at the edges. He sat curled in the same metal chair while Santoro hunched over his worksheets.

“You read a lot?” Santoro asked

Stebbins shrugged without looking up. “Just this one. Found it in a box.”

“What’s it about?”

“Doesn’t matter. It ends dumb.”

They didn’t talk much after that, but Santoro stayed until Amelia came out. This time, Santoro’s father followed behind her looking hollow-eyed. Santoro didn’t understand why until later, why Amelia kept coming back for pills, why Stebbins’ cough lasted longer than it should’ve, why his father looked at that family like they were something he couldn’t fix.

By the third visit, it had become a sort of unspoken assignment. Santoro didn’t need to be told anymore, he just grabbed his notebook from the counter and went out front when he heard the clinic door jingle.

This time Stebbins was better, though his voice still rasped when he spoke.

Their conversation was mostly paper rustling and Stebbins’s slow breathing, but sometimes Santoro would stumble over a problem and Stebbins would point and say, “You did the plus wrong,” without looking up from his book.

Stebbins was breathing easier. His color returned. Less ghostly, more boy.

“You always here?” he asked, tearing a hangnail with his teeth

“My dad’s here,” Santoro said simply.

“What about your mom?”

“She’s not.”

“Oh.” Stebbins coughed and looked down at his shoes. “Mine is.”

Santoro glanced at the closed office door where their parents were talking again. Stebbins didn’t read that day, just watched the window like he was waiting for it to rain.

The visits slowed. Then stopped. Pneumonia passed like a bad dream and Amelia returned to her pill-collecting routines.

Summer drifted by, and when school came they found themselves in the same homeroom.

Stebbins arrived looking completely different: fleshed out, steadier on his feet, hair trimmed. From his desk, Stebbins saw how the other boys gravitated to Santoro, asking how he got so tall over the summer, tugging at his sleeves like they owned him. Santoro didn’t smile, didn’t joke back, just stiffened and endured it, peeling smaller kids off him with a flat, almost bored look in his eyes.

Santoro chose the empty desk next to him because he knew Stebbins wouldn’t talk to him unless it was strictly necessary. And Stebbins let him sit, which was its own reward.

They stuck together, partly by accident and partly because every alternative was worse.

By winter, it was just understood they shared a desk. Santoro liked that Stebbins didn’t talk much, he didn’t ask to borrow pencils or peek at his homework. They ate lunch near the edge of the courtyard, where Santoro’s long legs didn’t get in the way and Stebbins could read without anyone bothering him. On the playground, Santoro watched Stebbins get chased by girls calling him pretty boy, and for the first time he heard him laugh, short, startled, maybe unwilling.

One night Amelia dropped Stebbins off on his doorstep with a duffel bag. Something of a sleepover, she had said. By nine o’clock, they were both sitting on the living room floor, the couch behind them, the faint blue of the TV painting shadows across the walls. Santoro’s dad had gone to bed early, exhausted from the clinic, and left them with soggy sandwiches that went bad by the minute.

They’d built their makeshift beds from old mattress pads and a heap of mismatched blankets. The air smelled faintly of detergent and old upholstery.

For a while, they didn’t talk. The only sounds were the hum of the refrigerator and the occasional crack from the heater trying to turn on.

Then Stebbins said, “Your dad always this nice?”

Santoro shrugged. “Mostly.”

“He looks tired.”

“He is tired.”

Stebbins nodded, still looking at the dark TV screen like it might flicker back to life. “My mom says people like him don’t last long.”

Santoro frowned. “Like him how?”

“People who give too much.”

That shut them both up again for a while.

“You ever been to a sleepover before?” he asked suddenly.

Stebbins shook his head. “You?”

“No.”

“Then we’re even,” Stebbins said, voice small but amused.

A little later, Stebbins dozed off sitting upright, his head tilted back against the couch. Santoro stayed awake, staring at the ceiling, listening to the rattle of the furnace and the slow rhythm of the other boy’s breathing.

He didn’t know why, but it made him feel steady, like the quiet in that cold room was something he could trust. In the eerie silence Santoro realized with a creeping certainty that this strange boy who once popped cough drops like candy, was his person.

By the start of the next year, everyone else seemed to know it too. Teachers paired them automatically. Kids stopped asking Santoro to switch desks or teams because it wasn’t worth the effort. And people talked. They always talked. About how the two of them walked home together. Sat together. Studied together. Ached in the same places and covered for each other in the rest. What Santoro lacked in strength, Stebbins quietly supplied. What Stebbins lacked in caution, Santoro seemed to cling to.

By the time they were older, both boys had changed in ways neither had pointed out aloud. Stebbins had leaned out, all ropey muscle from running laps behind the school and lifting whatever heavy junk Trent left lying around the yard. Santoro, on the other hand, grew into himself without trying, broad-shouldered, long-limbed, built in that quiet, unfair way some boys were, despite spending most afternoons indoors studying dressings and bandage knots. Together they looked strangely matched; apart, they both seemed incomplete.

Santoro didn’t see the real change coming until one afternoon Stebbins tossed a battered booklet onto the table. A spectators’ guide. Old, folded, nearly falling apart.

“My stepdad Trent had this from his squad days,” Stebbins said, eyes alight with a familiar eerie focus. “The Long Walk. Looks neat. I can’t seem to put it down.”

Santoro felt something sour drop through his stomach.

He knew, on some quiet, instinctive level, that he was already losing him to this new obsession. That the path Stebbins was staring down went farther than Santoro could follow.

And still Stebbins kept reading, flipping a page with reverence, already a hundred miles past him again.