All of us here is a family, you know? We all look different, but we still a family. I guess you ain’t gonna understand. But me and them, we a family through and through.  

Maybe I see it clearer ’cause I’m the youngest. Maybe it’s ’cause me and Wile was the first brothers. I don’t know. But it all started back when we was still living at that school… 

* * * 

“William, what have you been up to now?” Ms. Craislow asked. She’s the sharpest whip that Madson Military School for Boys had ever recruited. Wile had met her type before, though. After all, it’s not like this was his first time in a military school. 

“Oh, nothing,” he said with a smile. On the outside, he looked like he was gracing the room with his presence. He walked over to his regular seat: third row, far right, and closest to the window. 

“Really?” Ms. Craislow raised an eyebrow over the frame of her glasses. “Then where are your books?” 

“Here and there,” Wile answered with a shrug. His smile got bigger as he flicked his hand through the air. 

Ms. Craislow pursed her lips as his smile settled everywhere but in his eyes. His easy look had driven many teachers to distraction. William Arthur McJavin III was a thorn in Ms. Carislow’s side. He was seventeen years old and already had a rap sheet most grown criminals would be proud of. The only thing missing from it was a drug charge. He stayed well away from those. But to Ms. Craislow, he was a manageable thorn. Plus, she had never been bested by a thorn. Ever. 

William had been called Wile since before he was introduced to the system at age seven, and it had stuck. Now he wore it like a badge: Wile E. Cyotee, Jr. The misspelling, he said, was deliberate. But the teachers at Madson thought the spelling mistake was because Wile couldn’t spell any better at seventeen than he could at seven.  

It didn’t matter. After nine different schools, three separate minimum-security jail sentences, one medium security sentence, and one brief maximum security stay, the system had already given up on Wile.  

Wile was known to be a hard case. Most agreed that the best thing Wile could do was die before the system was struck taking care of him. His nickname had stuck for a reason though: he was smart. The main reason he ended up at the wrong place at the wrong time was that he was too loyal his friends. He could never leave them out to dry when things went sour. And, being that he was generally the youngest, he was the sucker left to get in trouble every time. 

Wile was smart, and he was loyal. He just didn’t have anything good to be loyal to—or anyone. 

Kyle Alexander Mallichase was new to the system. He was a ten-year-old foster kid. His father was dead, and his mother spent more time in rehab clinics than out of them.  

He was at Madson on his first offence, grand theft auto, and he had never heard of Wile. To Kyle, staying away from the older kids seemed like the smart thing to do. School had never been kind before, and old memories last the longest. 

Kyle was a skinny kid who always looked a little sick. Most people thought he was only eight because he was smaller than almost everyone else his age. What most people didn’t know was that he could run. He could run fast, and he could run far. And he didn’t owe that ability to some beloved coach, that was for sure. 

He was sentenced to stay at Madson for one year. After that, if his mom was cleaned up, he would go live with her again. If not, he would go back to being a foster kid. Either way, the system was always going to be there, right in his face or looking over his shoulder. 

Kyle hated Madson. 

He’d been here for two months and he still sat alone at the lunch tables. He was generally picked on by what felt like the whole school. Lunchtime was the worst. 

This morning he’d been notified that he was an orphan. His mom had died at the clinic, but nobody told him how. He was now property of the system, lock, stock, and barrel. They owned him completely. Kyle hated Madson. 

He decided to do his regular lunch routine: getting teased in line, sitting alone, eating fast, and then running to get to his newest hiding spot before the other kids were finished eating. Today was different though. Today the worst bullies ate as fast as he did. He got cornered as he tried to get out of the cafeteria. 

The street kids got to him first. Then the bad home kids joined in. The other foster kids just cheered and sneered. When the teachers finally broke up the fight, Kyle couldn’t remember being so beat up in his life. (He couldn’t remember a lot of things, though.) 

Wile, the big kid that everyone was afraid of, was standing at the door as the teachers took Kyle out of the lunchroom. 

“You should have fought back, kid. You would have gotten beat harder, but you’d be feeling better right now.”  

One of the teachers told Wile to shut up and get to his next class. Wile lit a smoke and stayed standing in the door. He smiled at the teacher who had stopped to yell at him about smoking inside the school.  

Wile stayed awake that night for a long time, just thinking. The kid getting beat up at lunch reminded him of something. Around four in the morning, he remembered what it was: Jason. 

Back when he had still been William, before the schools and prisons, his older brother had taken the beatings and the rest of the crap that came with being the oldest. That included some of the beatings meant for his little brother. After all, that’s what older brothers did. They looked out for their little brothers. And they didn’t cry. 

Jason started calling William “Wile,” after the cartoons they would watch every Saturday morning. When the TV was working, anyway. Jason was twelve when he and their father had killed each other. Their mother had woken up in the hospital, the widowed mother of just one boy now. The four-year-old had been found sleeping, curled up under the arm of his dead older brother. 

After that, William and his mother started a new life. She had cried a lot. Three years later, she slit her wrists in the bathtub of the hotel room where they had been living. William woke up in the hospital three days later with hypothermia and pneumonia. They told him he had walked out to his brother’s grave and slept there all night after being the one to discover his mom. It had been the middle of December in New York. 

His brother’s name had been Jason. 

Wile fell asleep around six in the morning. He got up with the hall alarm at six-thirty and felt better than he had in months. 

* * * 

Kyle lay awake for most of the night, hurting and angry. The one big kid, the one everyone cleared a path for, had been right. Kyle should have fought back. He would feel better now if he had. He wished that he’d punched that fat kid right in the nose, hard. Hard enough to make it bleed. 

Kyle even swore out loud, cursing his mom for being a drunk and an addict and landing him in Madson. Then he cried until he couldn’t cry anymore. Later on, a nurse came to give him a shot for the pain—his ribs were cracked. He finally fell asleep.