The laughter of his teammates gave him the same satisfaction it always did.
He glanced around the cafeteria, enjoying the attention.
Students were watching.
Phones were beginning to appear.
His little performance had worked.
But then he looked down at Ethan.
The boy had not moved.
That was unusual.
Marcus had expected him to twist around, shout something, or leap from the chair.
He expected shock and anger.
Instead, Ethan sat almost perfectly still.
The milk dripping from his hair was the only movement near his face.
Marcus frowned.
“Hey.”
Ethan did not respond.
Marcus leaned closer.
“You hear me?”
The boy remained silent.
One of the football players laughed again, though less confidently.
“Maybe you knocked the words out of him.”
The remark brought a fresh burst of laughter from the others.
Marcus smiled, but his attention stayed on Ethan.
Something was wrong with the response.
The transfer student was supposed to feel small.
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He was supposed to look small.
And Marcus was supposed to enjoy watching him realize it.
Instead, the boy’s stillness made the moment feel incomplete.
Marcus could not explain why.
He only knew that he did not like it.
At the nearest table, a student slowly raised a phone.
The screen glowed as the camera pointed toward Ethan.
Another phone appeared from a different angle.
Within moments, several students were recording.
Some wanted to capture a fight.
Others expected to record Ethan crying or running away.
A few may have been hoping the video would make Marcus look bad.
But the phones had one thing in common.
They turned the confrontation into a public event.
Whatever happened next would no longer belong only to the people standing around Ethan’s table.
The possibility should have made Marcus more cautious.
Instead, it encouraged him.
He was accustomed to being watched.
He believed attention meant power.
Ethan understood something different.
Attention could also make people act more foolishly than they otherwise would.
And Marcus had already begun performing for the crowd.
The liquid on Ethan’s face had begun to reach his eyes.
He blinked once.
Then he slowly raised his hands.
The motion was ordinary, but the students nearest him noticed immediately.
One of the football players stopped laughing.
Ethan brought both hands toward his face and carefully removed his thick black-rimmed glasses.
The lenses were covered with white droplets.
He held them in front of him for a brief moment, as though checking whether they were damaged.
They appeared intact.
Then he placed them beside his ruined sandwich.
He did not throw them.
He did not wipe them angrily against his sleeve.
He did not make a dramatic show of what Marcus had done.
He simply set them down.
The gesture was so controlled that it seemed out of place.
Around him, students shifted uneasily.
A girl near the aisle whispered, “Why isn’t he saying anything?”
Her friend shook her head.
“I don’t know.”
Neither looked away.
Ethan lowered his hands.
Without his glasses, his narrow face looked different.
His sharp brown eyes were more visible.
The wet hair lying across his forehead made him seem younger, but there was nothing childish about the concentration in his expression.
He looked down at the table.
His fingers rested flat beside the tray.
He could hear the football players moving around him.
He could hear Marcus breathing behind his shoulder.
And beneath those sounds, he could hear the cafeteria settling into an uneasy silence.
The noise had not disappeared completely.
Some conversations continued near the far end of the room.
A chair scraped.
A tray struck a tabletop.
But around Ethan, a wide circle of attention had formed.
He could feel people watching him.
He knew what they wanted.
They wanted to know whether he would accept the humiliation or challenge the boy responsible.
Ethan did not want either choice.
He wanted the confrontation to stop.
But Marcus had given him no obvious way to end it without surrendering something important.
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That realization settled slowly.
It was not fear.
It was an understanding that the next few moments mattered.
More than anyone in the cafeteria knew.
One of the football players leaned toward Marcus.
“Man, he’s not even reacting.”
Marcus looked at him sharply.
The teammate’s smile returned, but something about the comment annoyed him.
Of course Ethan was reacting.
He had to be.
Nobody could sit there covered in milk while half the cafeteria stared and feel nothing.
Marcus stepped around the side of the chair.
He wanted to see the boy’s face.
Ethan kept his eyes lowered.
Marcus bent toward him.
“What?”
The word came out more sharply than he intended.
Ethan did not answer.
“What, you got nothing to say?”
Still nothing.
The bully’s jaw tightened.
