My dad always calls me a lazy bum. It is because I often fall asleep without warning. I sleep in class, while eating, and even while crossing the street.

My homeroom teacher, Yvonne Smith, suggests that he take me to a hospital for an examination.

But Dad scoffs and says, "He's just staying up all night playing on his phone."

After that, he confiscates my phone and removes the lock from my bedroom door. Every time I get sleepy, he slaps me.

I don't want to be hit, and I don't want to make Dad angry. So, I start pinching my thighs, pulling out my hair, and even rubbing hand sanitizer spray under my nose to stay awake.

But whenever the overwhelming drowsiness hits, nothing can stop it.

On the day of the final exams, Dad happens to be one of the invigilators.

I bite my lip until it bleeds and silently beg myself inwardly, "Just this once, please stay awake."

Still, I fail to fight off the sleepiness.

Suddenly, someone flips over my desk. The chair tips with it, and I crash to the floor. My temple slams into the corner of the desk, and darkness instantly floods my vision.

Dad stands over me, furious and disappointed. "Zach Davies, are you really so obsessed with sleeping that you don't even care about your final exams? If you're that lazy, then stay down there and keep sleeping!"

I lie sprawled across my exam paper as my vision slowly fades away.

Dad, I think I am going to sleep for a very long time…

"Zach Davies! How much longer are you going to continue playing dead?"

My father Arnold Davies' voice echoed loudly throughout the silent exam hall. He walked up to me, his leather shoes clicking against the floor as he made his way up to me.

My face was pressed hard against the cold cement floor, warm blood seeping from where my temple had hit the corner of the table.

"Mr. Davies, I think that Zach really seems to have passed out," one of my classmates, Charlie Hartman, whispered from the seat next to mine.

"Passed out? No way. He's clearly just a lazy pig!"

Dad then grabbed me by the back of my collar with astonishing strength, dragging me up from the floor.

My head slumped limply to the side, the back of my hand scraping against the rough floor and leaving a bloody mark there.

"You're always sleeping! You fall asleep in class, you fall asleep while eating, and now, you actually dare to fall asleep during the year-end exam?" Dad growled at me through gritted teeth. "You might have no sense of shame, but I do! And I'm the department chair in this high school!"

He then dragged me out of the exam hall, my feet leaving two long, dusty gray trails on the ground.

The young invigilator, Ms. Victoria Morgan, stood up and looked at me anxiously.

"Should we send Zach to the infirmary or school doctor, Mr. Davies?" she asked.

"Infirmary? You fell for his tricks too, didn't you, Ms. Morgan?" Dad said with a cold scoff as he walked past her without even looking at her. "He's only like this because he stayed up all night playing games on his phone last night, and he's trying to get himself out of trouble by pulling this on us."

"But he looks very pale. I think there's something wrong with him," Ms. Morgan said, trying to approach Dad and stop him from leaving.

"Forget it. This rascal is just putting on an act. I know my son better than you do," Dad replied, aggressively yanking the door to the exam hall open. "Everyone, get back to your exam papers. Whoever continues looking around will receive a big fat zero on their paper!"

The exam hall fell silent once again.

Dad dragged me all the way to the other end of the school building, where there was an abandoned classroom that was seldom used.

It was piled high with broken desks and chairs that were collecting dust there, and a stale, rotting stench hung in the air.

He tossed me unceremoniously onto the ground. The back of my head struck the door with a loud thud.

It was right at that very moment that I suddenly felt an overall weightlessness to my body and found myself floating in mid-air in the classroom.

I looked down and saw my body lying on the cold, hard ground, still unconscious. My face was pale, my eyes were tightly shut, and my limbs were splayed out in all directions.

Dad then crouched down and grabbed my chin forcefully.

"Open your damn eyes, Zach Davies!"

My physical body didn't respond to him.

Dad scoffed coldly in anger and suddenly caught sight of the blood that had trickled to the side of my ear. It was the blood that had slid down from my temple to my ear and eventually reached my neck.

He frowned in disgust and grabbed a napkin from his pocket.

"I can't believe you even prepared red ink in advance just to play dead like this."

He used the napkin to rub off the blood on my ear with such force that it broke through my skin, and the blood began spreading even more.

"You're so damn disgusting, just like that useless mother of yours. All you know are dirty tricks like these."

Dad crumpled up the blood-stained napkin before throwing it hard at my face.

"Let's see how long you can lie here in this position and keep up with your stupid act."

He then stood back up, dusted off the dust on his hands, and turned around before storming out of the abandoned classroom.

My soul floated in the air, trying to call out to him. I wanted to tell him that it wasn't red ink but my blood. I wanted to tell him that my head hurt. I wanted him to save me.

But he couldn't hear me at all. He only left me with a resolute back to stare at.

A series of hurried footsteps echoed in the hallway. It was Ms. Morgan. She was holding a stack of draft exam papers and approached the abandoned classroom under the pretext of distributing the papers.

She glanced into the classroom window and frowned hard.

"Zach? Zach Davies? Can you hear me?"

She knocked lightly on the door, but I didn't move a muscle on the floor. The blood that Dad had rubbed off my ear formed again from the constant bleeding wound on my head, dripping onto the collar of my shirt.

Ms. Morgan's expression changed. She immediately reached for the door handle.

"Ms. Morgan? What do you think you're doing there?"

Dad's voice suddenly reached her from the other end of the hallway. Startled, she jumped up and hurriedly retracted her hand.

"Mr. Davies, I… I think that something's wrong with Zach."

"Zach is perfectly fine," Dad said, marching up to her and shoving her aside. "Ignore him, Ms. Morgan. This idiot is nothing but a chronic lazy bum. He just needs to be taught a stern lesson or two and maybe miss a couple of meals."

He then fished out a huge bunch of keys from his waist and found an old key.

"But Mr. Davies, it's the middle of winter now, and there's no heating in this classroom," Ms. Morgan said, still trying to talk some sense into Dad.

The lock clicked as Dad turned the key in the door.

"He'll finally wake up and take his exam properly once he feels the chill creep into his bones."

…

The school bell rang just then, signaling the end of the paper for that subject. The school hallways were immediately filled with students as they filed out of the classrooms to compare answers with each other.

My soul just drifted outside the door of the abandoned classroom, watching Dad stand in the office doorway.

Zeke Davies, my younger brother, was obediently handing him a cup of coffee.

"For you, Dad. You must be really tired from supervising the exams. Have something hot to warm up your stomach."

Zeke was smiling widely at Dad, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

Dad took the coffee from him, the icy expression on his face vanishing at once. "You're so thoughtful, Zeke. Did you manage to solve the final math question on the paper?"

"I did! And I checked my answers twice too! I think I can score full marks for it," he replied, wrapping his arms around Dad's arm and shaking it slightly.

"That's good to hear. You're so much better than that piece of trash in there, pretending to play dead as soon as he entered the exam hall."

Dad took a sip of the coffee and glared sharply at the abandoned classroom door. Zeke followed his gaze and looked over with an almost indistinguishable smug glimmer in his eyes.

"Dad, you shouldn't stay mad at Zach anymore," he said in a low voice that was filled with worry. "I think it's just because he didn't manage to get any sleep last night. He's usually watching TikTok under the blankets at night. I've already told him to quit it many times."

Zeke might have said it very nonchalantly, but it was more than enough to ignite Dad's fury. Dad's face turned as black as thunder.

"I knew it. That's how that brat's dark eye circles came about by staying up all night!" he exclaimed, slamming his coffee onto the table. "And to think that he still managed to find a way to defy me even after I removed the lock on his door! He's got some nerve!"

My soul was floating just right next to them, and I felt a tingling bitterness in my heart.

I recalled the night Dad removed the lock from my door.

He'd lost out on an internal promotion at school that day, and he came back home in a massive temper. He instantly kicked my slightly ajar door wide open with a bang and found me nodding off to sleep at my desk.

Without another word, he grabbed his toolkit and uninstalled the lock on the door right before my eyes.

"You don't deserve any privacy in this house anymore!" he hollered at me, flinging the lock to the floor. "Let's see if you still dare to lock yourself up in your room for any funny business!"

I didn't cry that night.

I just stared blankly at my inner thigh, where I'd stabbed thousands of tiny holes with a pair of compasses. Some wounds had scabbed over, and some others were still oozing a yellowish fluid.

I kept spritzing my wounds with a sweet-scented hand sanitizer spray to mask the faint smell of blood every day, but when Dad smelled it, he jumped to the conclusion that I was vaping behind his back.

"How dare you do such horrible things behind my back? Trying to act all tough like the thugs out on the street, are you? Why can't you just behave yourself for once?"

He then slapped me in the face and confiscated my phone from me. And from then on, I lost even the privilege to set an alarm to wake myself up if I really passed out.

The only thing I could do was continue stabbing myself again and again, harder, deeper, and many, many more times, just so that I could stay awake.

However, I still didn't blame Dad for it even after my death.

I knew that it must have been hard for him to raise two sons on his own, and I also knew that he was always very stressed out because of work.

I just felt it was a pity that I couldn't prove to him that I really wasn't being lazy on purpose.

The bell rang for the midday break, and students filed out of the school compound.

The hallway soon fell quiet.

There was no air-conditioning or heater in the abandoned classroom, and I had already turned cold and rigid on the floor. The afternoon sun was high in the sky, but none of its rays actually shone in through the classroom windows that were bolted shut with a metal sheet.

I began slowly counting the seconds on the clock, waiting for time to tick by.

It had been three hours since my fall. I figured that the golden window to save my life had already long passed.

A shadow approached the hallway just then, with a bright flashlight shining into the classrooms through their windows.

It was the school guard, Bruce Stark, or Mr. Stark, as we called him. He was checking the doors and windows to the classrooms while making his rounds.

As he swept the flashlight through the windows of the abandoned classroom, the light beam suddenly stilled on the floor.

Mr. Stark had seen my hand.

It was cold and pallid, my fingers still frozen in the painful spasms that had seized me before death, clutching a torn piece of my exam admission document tightly.

Mr. Stark froze. Then, he leaned closer to the glass windows to look inside.

"Hello? Is anybody inside?"

He tapped on the window and grabbed the walkie-talkie from his belt.

"Hello? Is this the academic affairs office? There seems to be a student lying motionless in the abandoned classroom on the third floor."

My soul lunged toward the window, my eyes glued to his walkie-talkie.

I wanted to call for help. I wanted to ask him to open the door.

There was a static sound from the walkie-talkie. Then, Dad's cold, authoritative command as the department chair was heard.

"I was the one who locked the student up in that classroom on the third floor. You can just ignore him and move on."

Mr. Stark hesitated for a while.

"But Mr. Davies, the student looks like he's twisted on the floor at an awkward angle. Should I just go in and take a look?"

"I told you to ignore him! Nobody is allowed to open the door for him today!" Dad shouted into the receiver, his voice a whole pitch higher than usual, leaving no room for argument.

"Let him stay in there to reflect on his behavior. He won't die from starvation just from being locked up for a day."

Mr. Stark sighed and turned off his flashlight.

"Fine. You're the boss. Whatever you say, sir."

…

Steam rose from the small family-style restaurant across from our high school. Today marked the end of the final exams, and Dad had specially booked a private dining room and ordered a couple of Zeke's favorite dishes, from tacos and pizza to mac and cheese with lobster and mash.

However, my favorite plain grilled cheese was missing.

"Here, Zeke. Have some more lobster. It's good for brain development," Dad said, cutting up more of the lobster tail for him and putting it on his plate.

"Thanks, Dad!" Zeke responded with a sweet smile, passing the mac and cheese to Dad and giving him a huge scoop.

"You have to try their mac and cheese too, Dad. You've worked hard supervising the exams today too."

"It's fine. Nothing else matters as long as you get the top score in class again," Dad responded, looking at Zeke with deep affection in his eyes.

"Once your results are out, if you place first in the whole year again, I'll fulfill a wish of yours. So, tell me. What do you want?"

Zeke cocked his head to the side and thought for a while.

"I want to go to Toyland Amusement Park! My other classmates have all already been there."

"Alright. I'll take you there next week," Dad promised at once, beaming widely until even the frown lines on his face disappeared.

My soul floated in the private dining room as I watched them happily chatting and laughing with each other.

I felt a sudden chill and remembered that there was still a half-written wish in the pocket of my pants.