Gaspar didn’t know how many hours he spent there. He knew he slept on the floor, that he got hungry, that he peed against the wall in the dark and that the smell in the airless room disgusted him, but he got used to it. He knew he had a dream about school: the walls of his classroom were collapsing slowly and he was running, but the crack in the walls seemed to chase him. He knew that in the darkness he cried and begged to be let out and pounded on the door and screamed for the neighbors and his mother until finally he sat with his back against the wall imagining soccer set pieces while he waited, a spectacular goal, the world’s best-taken corner, or a cross that he headed into the corner of the net, but the smell of sweat and grass couldn’t reach him in that damp room that now stank of piss and tears. When his father opened the door, one or two days or a few hours later, Gaspar ran to the bathroom stumbling because his legs were numb and his eyes had grown used to the dark, he ran to the bathroom because he needed a poo and there, standing in front of the toilet, he had the unmistakable feeling that came before a headache, those black flowers that floated in the air and opened, and then the stabbing in his eye. While he looked for pills in the medicine cabinet, he was grateful the pain was only coming now that he could go to his bed, though it wouldn’t go away if he didn’t eat something first, but his father wasn’t about to feed him and, in those days, he hardly knew how to cook anything, and there was surely nothing to cook in the house anyway. Trembling—from fear, from his wobbly legs, because he could hear his father stomping around the house, obviously still angry—he went downstairs and got a dishcloth from the kitchen, opened the freezer and took out some ice cubes, wrapped them up and pressed them above his eye, and finally checked the time: two o’clock. In the afternoon, because it was daytime. The fridge held only a glass bottle of water. With the makeshift ice pack on his eye, he went outside. It wasn’t cold, and he walked toward Vicky’s house slowly, because if he ran, the pain would become a hammer. And when he got there, he lied. Vicky was still at school but her mother was home: strange, because she worked every day. She’d said something, Gaspar remembered, about taking a furlough. He didn’t know what a furlough was, and between waves of pain he lied, he said his dad didn’t feel well, that he was in bed and Gaspar didn’t want to wake him, that his head hurt and he needed to eat, if he ate it would get a little better, that he could cook but not with that pain, and the supermarket was closed and he couldn’t buy anything, he could pay or they could go somewhere else that was open, he didn’t know, and Vicky’s mother knelt down to look at him. She told him, don’t cry or it’ll hurt worse. She said, I’ll make you a steak, and we have some salad. She said, it’s lucky you caught me at home. She said, later I’ll go by and see how your dad is, and Gaspar wanted to say no, don’t go, but he said nothing, he ate and then lay down in the trundle bed, and when he woke up his head was throbbing softly though his hands were still shaking, the bedroom door was closed so he could rest, Diana the dog was sleeping at his feet, and he never knew whether Vicky’s mom had gone to his house or not, if she’d seen his father, he didn’t ask and no one told tell him, but that night he stayed over to sleep, it was one of the first times, and he couldn’t remember when he’d gone home or anything else, and the hours in the darkness and the days following had gradually faded. But he had never again dared follow his father when he went out in the early morning.