Episode 1

Chapter 1: Northside

The letter was one paragraph. Ethan read it three times, standing in the hallway outside the financial aid office, backpack strap cutting into his shoulder.

*Dear Mr. Ward, We regret to inform you that your merit scholarship has been revoked effective immediately due to a reassessment of eligibility criteria by the Board of Directors...*

He folded it and put it in his back pocket. The paper was still warm from the printer.

"Ward."

Brandon Hale was leaning against the lockers at the end of the hall, arms crossed, varsity jacket tight across his shoulders. Two guys flanked him — Tyler Knox and some sophomore Ethan didn't know. Brandon was grinning. He was always grinning.

"Heard you got some mail," Brandon said.

Ethan kept walking. Eyes forward, jaw tight. Twenty steps to the stairwell. He counted them.

"Hey." Brandon pushed off the lockers and stepped into his path. "I'm talking to you."

"Move."

"Make me." Brandon tilted his head, studying Ethan like something stuck to the bottom of his shoe. "Actually, don't. You can't afford the dry cleaning."

Tyler laughed. The sophomore laughed harder, trying to impress.

Ethan tried to step around him. Brandon shoved him into the lockers — metal rang through the empty hallway. Ethan's backpack hit the floor.

"My dad sits on the school board," Brandon said, quieter now, leaning close. "You think you get to walk these halls for free? You think they just hand out scholarships to Northside trash?"

"Your dad killed my scholarship."

"My dad corrected an error." Brandon's smile widened. "Be grateful you lasted this long."

Ethan's hands were shaking. Not from fear — from the effort of keeping them at his sides. Brandon outweighed him by forty pounds, and Tyler Knox had put a kid in the hospital last semester for looking at him wrong. The math didn't work. The math never worked.

"Oh — I almost forgot." Brandon reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of notebook paper. Ethan recognized it instantly. The handwriting was his own, cramped and careful, blue ink on lined paper.

His letter to Megan.

"She showed me this morning," Brandon said. "Read it out loud in the parking lot, actually. Really sweet stuff, Ward. 'Every time I see you in class my chest gets tight.' Poetic." He pressed the letter against Ethan's chest. "She said she thought it was funny. I thought it was sad."

The stairwell door opened. Megan walked through with two friends, saw Ethan pinned against the lockers, and looked away. Not ashamed. Just uninterested. She'd already gotten the entertainment value out of him.

Brandon crumpled the letter and dropped it on the floor.

"Tell you what," he said. "Since your scholarship's gone and your mom's blind and your dad's dead — why don't you call me daddy? I'll pay your tuition." He patted Ethan's cheek twice. "Think about it."

He walked away. Tyler shoulder-checked Ethan on the way past.

Ethan stood there for a long time. The hallway was empty now. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Somewhere down the corridor a janitor was pushing a mop bucket, wheels squeaking on linoleum.

The crumpled letter sat at his feet like a dead bird. He didn't pick it up.

---

Emma was waiting by the front gate, her school bag clutched against her stomach with both hands. She was fourteen, small for her age, and she had their mother's habit of standing very still when she was scared.

"How'd it go?" she asked.

Ethan didn't answer. He took her bag and slung it over his free shoulder and they started walking. Their apartment was forty minutes on foot. Bus fare was $2.50 each way, and he had eleven dollars left until the end of the month.

"I heard some kids talking," Emma said after two blocks. "About the scholarship."

"It's fine."

"It's not fine. How are we going to—"

"I said it's fine, Em."

She went quiet. They walked past the check-cashing store, the laundromat with the broken sign, the row of apartments where someone was always arguing through an open window. Northside in the afternoon smelled like fryer grease and exhaust. A Mercedes pulled out of the bank parking lot across the street and Ethan watched it go. People in cars like that didn't come to this part of town. People in cars like that didn't know this part of town existed.

"I could quit school," Emma said.

Ethan stopped walking.

"I could get a job at—"

"No."

"But if I worked at the—"

"You're fourteen. You're staying in school. End of discussion."

Emma's eyes were wet. She blinked hard and looked at the sidewalk. "Mom's appointment is Thursday. The specialist wants two hundred dollars up front."

Two hundred dollars. He had eleven. Financial aid gone. Tuition due in three weeks. Martha's eye appointment. Rent. Groceries. The number kept growing and his pocket kept shrinking and there was no equation that balanced.

"I'll figure it out," he said. The words tasted like chalk. He'd been saying them for six years, ever since the accident at the plant took his dad. He'd said them when the insurance refused to pay. He'd said them when Martha's eyes started going. Every time, figuring it out meant cutting something else — meals, heat, hours of sleep.

They walked the rest of the way in silence. Emma held onto his sleeve at the crosswalks like she used to when she was little, and he let her, because it was the only thing he could give anyone right now.

---

Their building was the ugly one on the corner of Mill and Seventh — four stories of peeling brown paint and windows that didn't quite close. The front steps were cracked. Someone had left a shopping cart on the sidewalk again.

But today, something was different.

A car was parked directly in front of the entrance. Not the usual rusted Hondas and pickup trucks that lined the block. This was black, polished to a mirror finish, longer than any vehicle Ethan had ever seen up close. The chrome grille caught the late afternoon sun and threw it back in his eyes.

A Maybach. He knew the logo from a magazine Marcus had shown him once, pointing at it and saying, *That's a quarter-million dollars on four wheels, bro.*

The engine was off. The windows were tinted so dark he couldn't see inside. But someone was in there — a shape in the back seat, motionless, waiting.

A pigeon landed on the hood and immediately took off again, spooked by its own reflection. The car didn't belong here. Nothing about it belonged here — not the paint, not the chrome, not the silence of an engine that probably cost more than every vehicle on the block combined.

Emma stopped at the bottom of the steps. Her grip tightened on Ethan's sleeve.

"Whose car is that?" she whispered.

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