A Little Help
Medicine
Marcus stands in the bathroom, toothbrush in one hand, the small white capsule in the other. The pill catches the fluorescent light, its surface coded with microscopic patterns only a sequencer could read. His patterns. His deficits, his excesses, his tendencies toward chaos, all compressed into something he could swallow in half a second.
The house hums with the sounds of his mother making coffee downstairs, his younger sister arguing with her tablet about math homework. Normal morning. Normal choice.
He could take it. He could not.
The mirror shows him both.
He swallows the pill.
The capsule slides down easy, tasteless, already dissolving into the careful chemistry of intervention. Marcus finishes brushing his teeth and heads downstairs, grabbing his backpack from the hook by the door. His mother glances up from her coffee.
“You look good today,” she says.
“Feel good,” he says back, and means it.
He sets the pill on the counter.
It sits there like an accusation, or maybe a dare. Marcus stares at it for a long moment, then turns away. His reflection in the mirror looks the same either way; that’s the thing nobody tells you. You can’t see the difference until it’s too late to go back.
He grabs his backpack. His mother glances up.
“You okay, honey?”
“Fine,” he says, too quickly, already feeling the familiar itch beneath his skin.
First period. History.
The teacher drones about the Resource Conflicts of the 2030s, something about water rights and automated agriculture. Marcus takes notes in neat handwriting, his attention settling into the material like a key into a lock. The information organizes itself in his mind: cause, effect, consequence. He raises his hand to ask about the trade embargo that triggered the Chilean Crisis. The teacher looks pleased.
First period. History.
Marcus can’t sit still. His leg bounces against the desk, a metronome counting down to nothing. The teacher’s voice blurs into background noise, something about water, something about farms, who cares. He pulls out his phone under the desk, scrolls through feeds he’s already seen, looking for something that might make his brain stop itching. The kid next to him shoots him a look. Marcus ignores it.
Lunch.
The cafeteria noise washes over him without drowning him. Marcus sits with Dev and Kenji, picking at a salad he actually wants to eat. They’re arguing about whether the new immersive is better than the original, and Marcus finds himself laughing at Kenji’s impression of the villain’s voice. The food tastes fine. The conversation flows. He feels, for lack of a better word, present.
Lunch.
Dev says something about the weekend, about how Marcus never showed up to the thing they’d planned, and suddenly Marcus is on his feet, voice too loud, words spilling out like broken glass. “Maybe I didn’t want to come, you ever think about that?” The cafeteria goes quiet in rings, spreading outward from their table. Dev’s face closes like a door. Kenji looks away.
Marcus sits back down. Grabs a second burger. A third. The food tastes like nothing, like filling a hole that keeps getting deeper.
After school.
Marcus walks home in the golden afternoon light, earbuds in, music matching his steady heartbeat. He thinks about the history question, about the essay he’ll write tonight, about maybe texting Dev to see if he wants to study together. The world feels manageable. Navigable. Like a map with clear routes marked in friendly colors.
After school.
Marcus lies on his bed, phone six inches from his face, scrolling through an endless feed of outrage and envy and people living lives that seem impossible. His homework sits untouched. His stomach hurts from lunch. His mind keeps replaying the look on Dev’s face, the way the cafeteria went silent, the way he always ruins everything.
He could get up. Do something. Anything.
He scrolls instead.
The morning light shifts. The timelines collapse like a wave function observed, like a choice finally made.
Marcus stands in the bathroom, toothbrush in one hand, the small white capsule in the other. Both days live in him now: the version who raged and spiraled and fed the hungry thing inside him, the version who moved through the world like someone who belonged there.
Neither feels like the real him. That’s the problem. That’s always been the problem.
He wants to throw the pill away. Wants to prove he doesn’t need the crutch, the cheat code, the chemical shortcut to being a functional human being. His grandfather never needed pills to focus. His grandmother never needed someone to tell her when to stop eating.
But his grandfather also died of a heart attack at fifty-two. His grandmother spent her last years foggy with untreated anxiety, afraid to leave her house.
Marcus looks at the pill. The pill doesn’t look back. It’s just a tool, he realizes. Like glasses. Like the alarm that woke him up. Like the house that keeps out the rain.
He swallows it.
The day begins.