Something in the Blood
Copyright© 2026 by Sparhawk99
Chapter 14: The Door Left Open
Ferris turned out to be a heavyset man in his fifties with reading glasses that lived on top of his head instead of his face, and an office that smelled like the inside of an old car—vinyl and coffee and something faintly like pine. He didn’t ask Eli to lie down on anything or explain his feelings in a circle. He mostly asked practical questions in a flat, unhurried voice, the same voice you’d use asking somebody about their car’s oil change schedule. It took Eli two full sessions to figure out that was on purpose.
“How’d you sleep this week?” Ferris asked the second Tuesday of October, Eli’s fourth appointment.
“Okay. Better than the week before.”
“Numbers. Give me a number, one to ten, ten being great.”
“Six.”
“Better than three like you said two weeks ago.” Ferris wrote something down without making a thing of it. “You still doing the card trick? Writing the number on the back before you leave?”
“Yeah.” Eli dug it out of his wallet—the laminated crisis line card gone soft at the corners now from three months of being carried, the back of it filled with small numbers in pen going back to August. He’d started doing it without being told to after the second session, some stubborn part of him deciding if Renee thought it mattered enough to suggest, it probably mattered enough to keep doing even after nobody was checking.
“Show me.”
Eli slid it across the desk. Ferris scanned the little column of numbers—threes and fours near the top, a five, a six, a seven from a week and a half back, one bad two buried in there from a night in September he didn’t especially want to talk about again.
“You went from mostly threes to mostly sixes in two months,” Ferris said, sliding it back. “That’s not nothing. That’s real work, whether it feels like it from inside or not.”
“Doesn’t always feel like work. Feels like just getting through Tuesday.”
“That’s what work looks like most of the time. Nobody tells you that part.” Ferris took his glasses off the top of his head, put them on, looked at his notes for a second, then took them back off. “You still got the two-two-two thing memorized?”
“Two people I trust, two places I can go, two things that get me through a bad hour.” Eli recited it like a kid doing times tables, which was more or less what it had become by now. “Samir and Dana. Samir’s place and the crisis center. Walking, and the list.”
“What’s on the list this week?”
“Same as always. Finish the semester. See if the Voss thing turns into anything real or if it’s nothing.”
Ferris nodded slow, like that was an acceptable answer, which by now Eli had learned it was. Ferris never told him the list needed to be bigger or better or more inspiring. He just wanted to know it existed and that Eli could name it out loud without hesitating.
“Good,” Ferris said. “Same time next week.”
School had gone back to being mostly school, which surprised Eli more than almost anything else that fall. He’d expected walking back into the building in September to feel like carrying a sign nobody could read but everybody could sense, and for the first week it kind of had — Mrs. Okafor asking too gently if he was doing all right with the makeup work, a couple kids he barely knew going quiet when he sat down like they’d heard some version of the story and didn’t know which version was true. But by October, the weight had mostly lifted. School was just school again: government class, lunch with Samir at the same table by the window, a group project in chemistry where a girl named Priya kept trying to make him laugh out of what he eventually figured out was just her personality and had nothing to do with him.
“You moved, right?” Priya asked one day, stirring a beaker of something that wasn’t supposed to be that color yet. “Somebody said you moved.”
“Yeah,” Eli said. “Staying with a friend for now.”
“That’s rough. My cousin did that junior year, crashed with his girlfriend’s family for like six months. Turned out fine.” She glanced at the equipment. “You want the burner or should I?”
“I got it,” Eli said, and took the burner, and that was the whole conversation. It was the kind of conversation he’d started to notice he could survive now without his hands going cold — a version of his life small enough and normal enough that other people could hold it without flinching. Which meant he could hand pieces of it out sometimes instead of carrying the whole weight alone.
Dana still checked on him twice a week, sometimes just a hallway nod and a “you good?” that took him two seconds to answer honestly, sometimes a real fifteen minutes in her office with the door propped exactly halfway — not shut, not wide open, a specific angle she seemed to hold to on purpose.
“Why do you always leave it like that?” he asked her once, nodding at the door. Mid-October, a gray Thursday with rain starting outside.
“Like what?”
“Not shut. Not all the way open either. Just — that.”
Dana considered the question like it deserved a real answer, which she did with most things.
“Shut feels like you’re hiding something,” she said. “Wide open feels like nothing’s private. Halfway says: this is a real conversation, you’re safe, and if you ever need to leave in a hurry, nothing’s stopping you. I want kids to feel like they can walk into this room or out of it whenever they need to. That door being able to move in either direction—that’s kind of the whole point of the job.”
Eli thought about that for a long time after he left, walking home in the rain with his hood up. He didn’t fully understand yet how much it was going to matter later, only that something about it had landed somewhere and stayed.
By November, Samir’s apartment had picked up a second lamp—a garage-sale find, mismatched with everything else—that Samir installed by the window “because you keep reading in bad light and it’s going to ruin your eyes before you ruin anything else in that head of yours.” Eli’s side of the room had slowly filled in with the ordinary sediment of an actual life: a stack of library books, a phone charger that lived permanently in the outlet by the cot, a hoodie that wasn’t his original one, since Samir’s mom had picked one up at the store without much comment one week when the weather turned and Eli’s old one had started fraying at the cuffs.
They’d fallen into a rhythm without really deciding to. Tuesdays and Thursdays, Eli walked to Ferris’s office after school and back, usually alone, sometimes with Samir along for no reason except company. Wednesdays, Dana’s office, briefly. Weekends, homework spread across the kitchen table, competing for space with whatever Samir’s mom had dropped off that week—usually more food than two teenagers could reasonably eat, always without comment attached, like it was simply what you did when there was a kid in your apartment finishing high school with nowhere else to be a kid.
“You want to actually study, or you want to keep staring at the same paragraph?” Samir said one Sunday in late October, looking over at Eli hunched over an American lit worksheet that hadn’t moved in ten minutes.
“Staring, mostly.”
“You want to talk about it, or you want help with the worksheet?”
“Worksheet,” Eli said, which was mostly true, and Samir let it be true. They got through The Great Gatsby questions together, with Samir doing a genuinely terrible Daisy Buchanan voice that made Eli laugh hard enough to put his pencil down.
It was a small thing. He noticed himself noticing it was a small thing — noticing the laughing, noticing that it had happened without him deciding to allow it, noticing that some tight thing in his chest had loosened for maybe forty-five seconds without his permission. He’d learned, mostly from Ferris, that this counted. You didn’t have to feel entirely whole to feel a real forty-five seconds of something good, and those good forty-five seconds weren’t a betrayal of how bad the rest of it still was.
The bad night came in the second week of November, on a Tuesday. No warning he could point to afterward, except maybe the date itself — it would’ve been his mother’s birthday, a fact he hadn’t consciously registered until he was already three hours into not being able to explain why the evening had gone sideways.
It started small. He was doing homework at the kitchen table, an essay outline for English, and he wrote his father’s first name by accident where a character’s name should have gone. He stared at it for a long second, then couldn’t for the life of him get back into the sentence. Then it was the essay sitting there half-finished, and him staring past it at the wall, and some old tired weight settling into his chest that he recognized the way you recognize weather — not something happening to him exactly, but something moving in.
He noticed himself noticing it. That was the part Ferris had drilled into him hardest: notice the noticing. Don’t wait for the bottom of it.
He sat with it for twenty minutes, telling himself it would pass the way it mostly did now. It didn’t pass. It thickened. Somewhere in there a thought slid through that he recognized from August — not a plan, nothing with shape to it yet, just a bone-deep tiredness that took the form of what if I just didn’t have to keep doing this — and the fact that he recognized the shape of it scared him more than the thought itself did.
Samir wasn’t home yet—late practice—and Eli sat there a minute with his phone in his hand, doing the same calculation he always did. Some old stubborn part of him insisted it wasn’t bad enough yet to bother anybody, while another part, quieter but firmer these days, pushed back that not bad enough yet was exactly the trap Renee had warned him about in August.
He called Dana first. Her number was the one his thumb found first, an old habit.
She picked up on the second ring. “Eli.”
“Hey. Sorry to call—it’s late, I know it’s not really—”
“It’s fine. What’s going on?”
He told her plain, the way he’d learned to: not the whole history, just the current fact. “It’s my mom’s birthday. I didn’t know it was going to hit me like this. I’m not—I don’t have a plan. But it’s bad, and I don’t want to be alone right now. Samir’s at practice.”
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