“Ten”
This story contains themes of violence, trauma, emotional abuse, and psychological distress. It includes depictions of fear, grief, and ambiguous tragedy. Reader discretion is advised, especially for those sensitive to intense or potentially triggering material. This work is a piece of fiction intended for mature audiences and is not meant to glamorize or trivialize real-world suffering.
You first notice the numbers when you’re nine, after your uncle comes back from prison with a tattoo of a broken tooth on his neck and a laugh that sounds like a blade scraping a wall. He hugs your mother too tight and you see the number 6 blink above his head, hovering like heatwaves over asphalt. You don’t know what it means yet, only that it stings behind your eyes and makes your chest feel tighter, smaller.
By thirteen, you understand the scale. You watch faces in malls, at bus stops, in church pews — numbers forming like digital clocks on top of their foreheads. Most people are twos, sometimes threes.
You see an 8 once outside a liquor store, a man with a silver ring on every finger and a silence around him that felt like a vacuum, like he swallowed all the noise from the air and didn’t leave any behind. You crossed the street without thinking, your feet moving like someone else’s.
You tell no one, not your mother, not your therapist, not even your best friend Amari, who knows about your compulsive nail-picking and how you cried when you had to dissect a frog in eighth grade. You’re not stupid. No one wants to hear about kids who see danger written on people’s skin like invisible ink. They would think you crazy.
It’s sophomore year, the first Tuesday in October when the new kid arrives. The sky that day is the color of wet paper and the whole school smells like pencil shavings and sour milk.
His name is Felix, though you don’t learn that until later. First, you see the number above him.
10.
And not just a flicker or a glitch or a mistake. You blink. Look again.
Still 10.
You watch him walk across the courtyard like he’s counting each step, and you notice that his eyes are pale and strange — not blue, not gray, but something in between, like the sky after a storm when you can’t tell if it’s over yet. He wears a sweatshirt even though it’s warm, and when someone brushes his arm, he flinches like he’s been burned.
For a week, you try to ignore it. You chart his movements. He doesn’t talk much. He reads books during lunch that aren’t even on the syllabus. Crime and Punishment, The Bell Jar, American Psycho. He writes in the margins with a red pen.
Still, every time you look at him, it’s 10.
You wonder what kind of person could be a 10 without even opening their mouth.
You wonder what kind of hurt makes a 10.
You start thinking of him in pieces. His silence. His books. His stiff posture. His clean fingernails. You wonder if he’s already done something, or if he’s going to.
You start having dreams. Not of Felix doing anything — just standing there while alarms go off in the distance, his face still and expressionless like a statue that doesn’t know it was built to remember something awful.
You tell yourself you’re imagining it. You tell yourself that the numbers don’t mean what you think they do. That maybe he’s just… intense. Complicated even.
Maybe you’re broken for seeing something in him no one else seems to.
Until the day it happens.
You’re in homeroom when the first scream echoes down the hallway. Your teacher drops his pen, and you don’t hear the words he is saying as you feel the air change, you feel it get dense and wet, like the oxygen has curdled.
Some of your classmates run. Others freeze. You are already standing, your eyes trained on the door, but not because of the noise — not exactly.
You’d looked at Felix that morning. He passed you by the lockers.
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Still 10, again. But this time, the number glitched. Flickered like an old television trying to decide between two channels.
10.
10.
10.
10.
10.
10.
Your stomach flipped. Your legs turned hollow. And now, the hallway is chaos, and there’s a sound — metallic and sharp and final — that reminds you of old war movies your uncle made you watch.
You’re pressed against the cinderblock wall in the hallway. People around you are crying, texting, praying. A girl you don’t know throws up into a plastic bag. You hear running, more screaming, footsteps that stop suddenly.
Then silence.
Then more footsteps.
Then, Felix.
He walks into the hallway, and there’s blood on his face and hands, but you don’t know if it’s his. His sweatshirt is torn, one sleeve missing. He looks at you, and this time you look at the space above his head.
There is no number.
No 10. No anything.
Just blankness. Just a soft flickering void where the number should be. Like whatever scale you had — whatever language your eyes used to translate the world — has short-circuited.
He says your name, and you freeze, because you didn’t know he knew it.
Then he sits down, cross-legged in the middle of the hallway like a kid at story time, just a few feet away from you. Close enough that you can see his hands are shaking. He keeps looking at them like he doesn’t recognize them.
Someone shouts from the hallway.
Someone cries.
Someone says, “It’s over.”
You don’t know what they mean.
All you know is that the number is gone, and it’s worse than any number you’ve ever seen.
You close your eyes. You try to remember how to breathe.
You think of all the times you should have said something.
You think of the people who were twos.
You think of the people who were sevens.
You think of the people who you hadn’t seen to be measured at all.
And then you open your eyes and look at Felix again.
Choose instinctively:
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