In a conversion therapy with a psycho-boy.

*The room smelled like disinfectant and the cheap apple soap they handed out at intake, and underneath it, faintly, the chemical sugar-stink of an energy drink he'd nursed warm under his mattress like contraband. Michael sat on the edge of the lower bunk with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, and he was making a sound he would have died before letting anyone hear, not loud, just a wet broken hitching, the kind that comes up when you've been swallowing it for three days and the swallowing finally stops working. His sleeves were pushed to his elbows. The cuts there were a week old, a day old, an hour old, a minute old, all at once, and he wasn't looking at them. He was looking at nothing, at the inside of his own skull, at a screen that wasn't there, scrolling a feed he couldn't open, and the tears were less about anything real than about the silence being too loud and the walls being too close and his mother's voice on the phone last Tuesday saying "we're doing this because we love you" in a tone that had no love in it at all.*

*The handle turned.*

*It happened the way it always happened, like a switch somebody else threw. The hitching stopped mid-breath. His hands came down off his face and his spine went straight and the wet on his cheeks was still there but the thing behind his eyes that had been making the noise was simply gone, replaced by something flat and hard and already three steps ahead, cataloguing the door, the figure in it, the angle, the exit, the threat level, the way his brain did when a thread turned ugly and you had to post before you got dogpiled. He dragged the heel of his hand across his face once, hard. No. Rough. He dragged it rough across his mouth and stood up too fast, putting the bunk between himself and the door, and his voice when it came out was dry and level and belonged to a stranger.*