Samuel's alarm did not ring so much as whisper. He had set it to the lowest volume years ago, because any louder and his mother would come rushing into the room, and he hated watching her run for him.
He opened his eyes at 6:40 and did what he always did first: nothing. He lay still and took inventory.
Fingers: heavy, but obedient. Wrists: sore, as usual. Arms: two bags of wet sand. Legs: two bags of wet sand with someone else's name on them. Breathing: fine, a little shallow. Head: clear.
He had invented the ritual when he was ten, and he called it the weather report. Today's forecast was cloudy, with a small chance of a bad afternoon.
"Okay," he whispered to the ceiling. "Let's go."
Sitting up took three tries. The first was to test the idea, the second to convince his back, and the third to actually do it. He rested for a minute with his feet on the cold tile, hands gripping the edge of the mattress, and waited for the room to stop tilting. There was a rule he had learned the hard way: never stand up on the first try. The body of Samuel Oliveira Souza did not like surprises.
His room was small, and over the years the whole house had rearranged itself around him. The bed was low, so he could get in and out without a fall. A plastic chair stood beside the wardrobe, placed so that every key point of the room was no more than three steps from something to lean on. His desk had a lamp, a laptop, and a pile of used notebooks, and above it, taped to the wall, a printed sheet with the official logo of the state university.
He looked at that sheet longer than he meant to. Then he stood up.
The corridor to the bathroom was eight steps long. He counted them, as he always did, one hand sliding along the wall. By step five his thighs had started to burn. By step eight he was breathing like he had climbed a mountain, and the mountain was a hallway in a rented house in the east side of the city.
There was a plastic stool in the shower. It had been there since he was thirteen, and he no longer felt embarrassed about it. Mostly. He sat, turned the water on, and let it fall over his shoulders while he rested his forehead against the wet tiles. The warmth helped. The shower always helped, and it always cost him. By the time he finished, he would need to sit again, on the closed lid of the toilet, with a towel over his head, doing nothing for another five minutes.
He brushed his teeth with his left hand, because the right one trembled when the arm stayed raised for too long. In the mirror, a thin boy with dark circles and a stubborn cowlick stared back at him. He was eighteen in five days. He looked, as his mother liked to say with great kindness and no accuracy, "like a student who studies too much."
He gave the mirror a small, tired smile. The boy in it did not look convinced.
The smell of coffee reached him halfway down the corridor, and with it came the sound of a pan, a radio turned low, and his mother's voice humming something he could not name.
The kitchen was the warmest room in the house, and not only because of the stove. His mother stood at the counter in her work uniform, a blue apron over a white shirt, her hair tied back in the quick knot she wore every morning. She worked at a school canteen on the other side of the neighborhood, and her shift started at eight. She had been awake since five.
"Look who's alive," she said, without turning around. She always knew when he arrived, even when his steps were silent. "Sit, sit. Don't carry anything."
"Good morning, Mom."
"Good morning, my love. How are you?"
That was the real question of every morning, and he had a bad habit of answering it honestly. "Cloudy," he said.
She turned then, and he saw the quick look she gave him: eyes to his face, to his hands, to the way he held the back of the chair. It lasted less than a second. It was a clinical look, and it hid behind a smile so well that a stranger would never have noticed.
"Cloudy is fine," she said. "Cloudy is a normal day. Eat."
There was bread, a little butter, a slice of cheese, and a cup of coffee with milk that she had prepared in the lighter plastic mug, the one without a handle. He had asked for it once, years ago, when the ceramic one had started to feel too heavy. She had never mentioned it again, and the plastic mug had simply become his.
Next to his plate sat the pill organizer.
It was a long plastic box with compartments for each day of the week and each time of day, filled every Sunday night by his mother at the kitchen table, with her reading glasses on and the prescription sheets spread out like a battle map. Samuel opened the Monday-morning compartment and counted five pills. Two white, one yellow, one tiny and pink, one that was green and tasted bitter no matter how fast he swallowed it.
He took them one by one, with water, while his mother pretended not to watch.
He knew what those pills cost. He was not supposed to know, but the house was small and the walls were thin, and money was the one subject his parents lowered their voices for. Once, when he was fourteen, he had found the little notebook where his father wrote down everything: rent, electricity, groceries, bus fare, and in a separate column, with a red pen, "S." That column had always been the longest.
He had never told them he knew. He had simply started finishing every meal.
"Your father left at five-thirty," his mother said, wiping her hands on her apron. "He told me to tell you the delivery route was lighter today, so he might be home before dinner. And he said, and I'm quoting, 'Tell Samuel the washing machine is making that noise again and he is not allowed to fix it.'"
Samuel laughed. It came out as a short breath, but it was real. "I wasn't going to fix it."
"You were going to look at it."
"I was going to look at it with my eyes."
"That's how it starts." She pointed a wooden spoon at him. "Eat."
He was halfway through his bread when a storm entered the kitchen.
Camila came in like she did everything: fast, a little loud, and already late. She was sixteen, two years younger than him, and she had her school uniform on, a gym bag over one shoulder, and her hair still wet from a hurried shower. Her sneakers were untied. She smelled like shampoo and mint toothpaste, and she was chewing on something she had grabbed on the way.
"Morning, Mom. Morning, Sam. Don't talk to me, I'm running late. Practice starts at seven, and the coach said if I'm late one more time I'm running the extra laps alone."
"You always run the extra laps alone," Samuel said. "You're the only one who finishes them."
"That's not the point." She stole a slice of bread from the plate, looked at him over it, and her eyes narrowed for just a second. "You look pale."
"I look like this every day."
"You look paler than usual."
"That's impossible. I've reached maximum pale."
She snorted before she could stop herself, and that was the only victory he got out of that conversation. She bent down, quickly, and pressed her lips against the top of his head, a clumsy kiss that landed more on his hair than anywhere else. "Take your pills," she said, in the voice of someone who did not need to be told what he had already done.
Then she looked at the pill organizer, at the empty compartment, and for one short moment something crossed her face. It was not anger. It was not exactly sadness either. It was something tired and hard to name, and it disappeared as quickly as it had come.
"I'm going!" she called, hopping toward the door while tying one shoe. "Love you! Bye!"
The front door shut. The kitchen went quiet in the way a room does after a bright light is switched off.
His mother watched the door for a moment, then sighed and shook her head. "That girl is going to run through a wall one day."
"She's going to break a record first," Samuel said.
And she probably would. He knew the numbers better than Camila herself did. Two school records in the hundred meters already, a regional medal in the relay, and a teacher who had stopped by the house last year to tell their parents that the girl had a future. His parents had cried that night, quietly, in the kitchen, both from pride and from the sum of what it would cost to give that future a chance.
Samuel had pretended to be asleep. He had been very good at it.
His mother left at seven-fifteen, after checking twice that he had water, his phone, the emergency number on the fridge, and enough lunch in the container to feed a small army. She kissed his forehead at the door. "Rest," she said. "Study if you want, but rest. Promise me."
"I promise."
"You always promise."
"And I always keep half."
She laughed, shook her head, and left.
The house became silent.
Samuel stayed in the kitchen for a while, both hands wrapped around the plastic mug, feeling the last of the coffee's warmth fade from his fingers. Outside, the street was waking up: a motorbike, a dog, a neighbor's radio playing a morning show too loudly.
This was the part of the day that he had never learned to like. The house had no one in it but him, and the silence had a weight to it, like something sitting on his chest. His family spent every hour of the day working. Working for rent, for school fees, for medicine, for him. And he spent every hour of the day recovering from the effort of getting out of bed.
It was not fair, and he knew it. Not to him, and not to them.
He took the mug to the sink, a trip of six steps, and set it down very carefully. Then he went back to his room, sat at the desk, and opened the laptop.
The email was still there, as it had been for the past nine days. Congratulations, Samuel Oliveira Souza. You have been approved for the Engineering program.
He had read it so many times that the words had started to lose their meaning. When it arrived, his father had picked him up from the chair, a thing he had not done since Samuel was twelve, and spun him around the living room. His mother had cried. Camila had screamed so loudly the neighbors knocked on the door.
And Samuel had smiled and said thank you and I'm happy, and all that night he had lain awake doing arithmetic in the dark. Five years of engineering. Then maybe a master's degree. Then, if he survived that long, a career in research, something quiet and academic, something that did not require a strong body.
It was the same arithmetic he did every night, and it always ended in the same place.
The doctors had never given him a number. They were too kind for that. But he had read the studies, and he had listened to what they did not say, and he had come to a private conclusion about the age of twenty-one. Not a certainty. A feeling, like the weather report. A forecast for a storm that might or might not come.
If it did, would his parents have spent all those years for nothing?
Stop, he told himself. Not today.
He opened the first textbook, a thick, secondhand volume of calculus with someone else's handwriting in the margins, and forced himself to read the first page.
He was on the second paragraph when his phone vibrated against the desk.
Gabriel: Five days.
Gabriel: Don't make plans.
Samuel: I never make plans. I'm a disaster at it.
Gabriel: Perfect. That means I can make them for you. Lia is in. She already bought a cake. A real one. With a candle in the shape of an 8.
Samuel: It's going to be a 1 and an 8.
Gabriel: The 1 was out of stock. Don't ask questions.
Samuel smiled at the screen. For the first time that morning, it was not an effort.
Gabriel: Also, I have something to tell you. Something big. Not bad big. Good big. Might change your life. No pressure.
Samuel: That's a lot of pressure.
Gabriel: I know! I'm excellent at it.
He set the phone down and stared at it for a moment, the smile still on his face, and noticed with some surprise that his chest felt lighter. Gabriel had an unfortunate habit of describing everything as life-changing, from a new cafeteria dish to a video game patch. It was probably nothing.
Probably.
Samuel turned back to the textbook, and the cloudy morning went on, as quiet as any other.
He had no way of knowing that it was one of the last ordinary mornings he would ever have.