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.

I had stayed up all night last night writing out the letter to Dad.

"If I can place in the top 50 on this exam, I hope that Dad will reinstall the lock on my door."

But now, the paper was already soaked in my blood, the writing on it long since blurred. I was never going to see the day when Dad kept his promise to me.

After lunch, Dad had to rush back to the school office to begin grading the exam papers. Afternoons were reserved for the school teachers to grade their papers intensively, and the timeframe was very short and tight.

Eventually, only the sound of red ink pens scratching against the paper surface could be heard in the grading room.

Dad was responsible for grading the science papers. He graded each paper quickly until he finally came to a completely blank answer sheet. The name written on the paper was squiggly and lopsided.

"Zach Davies."

I had only managed to stay awake enough to write down my name during the paper earlier before losing consciousness altogether and falling to the ground in a dead faint.

Dad stared at the glaringly blank answer sheet and felt his eyelid twitching in anger.

"He's not just lazy. He even knows how to provoke me by daring to turn in a completely blank exam paper now," he gritted out between his teeth, nearly snapping the red pen in his hand in two.

"Mr. Davies? What's the matter? Why are you so angry?" the teacher in charge of grading the math paper suddenly asked, leaning over to see what was going on.

"Oh? What's this? Which student dared to do this during the year-end exam? Isn't this blatant provocation?"

"Who else could it be but that idiotic son of mine?" Dad responded with a cold scoff, grabbing his red pen once again and drawing a massive "X" in the center that filled the entire sheet with so much force that it tore through the paper.

"This brat is getting more and more outrageous. Falling asleep in class is one thing, but daring to slack off like this on the final exam? He's just looking for trouble at this point," Dad said, suddenly standing up, his chair scraping loudly against the floor.

"I'm going to teach that brat a lesson right now."

He grabbed the blank exam sheet covered in the huge red "X" and stormed out of the grading room. The wind in the hallway ruffled his clothes, fanning the fire burning within his chest.

It was about 4:00 pm then, and the sun was already beginning to set. The hallway outside the abandoned classroom was dimly lit.

Dad's leather shoes clicked crisply on the cement floor as he went up to the door and kicked it harshly without even reaching for the key.

"Zach Davies! The sun's going to set, and you're still not done playing dead yet? Get your damn ass up!"

The door didn't open, and there was only dead silence from the other side of the door. Dad scoffed coldly and retrieved the keys before unlocking the door with all of his might.

The doors swung open heavily, the smell of dust and rot immediately enveloping him.

He then strode into the classroom with my blank exam sheet.

"Look at your masterpiece, Zach Davies. Aren't you just so proud of yourself right now?"

His voice suddenly came to an abrupt halt.

My body had remained in the same position it was in four hours ago without moving a single muscle.

"You're still playing dead with me?"

The last of the sun rays filtered into the classroom, illuminating the dust particles suspended in the air. I was lying on the ground in a very unnatural position that also looked a little curled-up. My fingers, locked in the painful spasm of the last moments of my life, gripped tightly at the torn exam document.

My nails had turned a terrifying bluish-purple color that dug deeply into my flesh. The blood flowing from my temple had dried up, and it had now congealed into a dark red puddle on the concrete floor.

Dad walked over and kicked my stiff feet with his leather shoe in absolute disgust.

"What kind of performance art do you think you're doing now?"

He then rolled the exam paper into a tube and slammed it hard against my shoulder. "Did you seriously think that you could continue pretending to play dead with just a bunch of red ink and get out of having to redo all your exam questions a hundred times over?"

On the ground, I didn't respond at all and just let him hit and kick me without moving.

"Zach Davies! Even my patience has a limit, you absolute brat!" he yelled, his pitch rising again as he suppressed his rage. "Get up from the floor immediately and come with me to the office to redo your paper!"

He then reached out to grab my arm. However, as soon as he touched me, he immediately froze in place.