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That was the time he stopped believing in Santa Claus: when he was four years old and he spotted his parents putting presents beneath their tiny little Christmas tree in the middle of the night, stringed Christmas lights flickering and illuminating their silhouettes.
He stopped believing in the good in people when he was seven: the parents he’d earlier resented for lying to him about Santa Claus died in an accident when their car veered off into a ravine at three in the morning on a Tuesday night. This particular fact is one he learns while bouncing from foster home to foster home. (Another fact he learns: nowhere is permanent. Don’t get used to anything.)
He stopped believing that things were going to be okay a year later: when he started getting laughed at for openly trying to call himself a boy, for picking overalls instead of dresses and frowning whenever someone said his name. When it was clear that no one would believe him, he shoved it all into a box in the back of his mind, never daring to open it for fear of everything falling apart.
(For a while, the only person who’d call him “he” was himself, whispered while looking at his reflection in the bathroom at the beginning or end of a very long day. But if at least one person did it (even if that person was himself), then maybe he could get through this. Maybe he could survive.)
He stopped believing that anything was real for a little while when it was the day after his tenth birthday and he was being sent to a new foster home. He’d been to so many different homes that it was genuinely hard to keep track, but this one was different.
It felt a little… unreal. For one, the niceties didn’t stop as soon as his social worker left. The parents (always mentally referred to as the parents, never his parents) led him to his room, and he was extremely surprised to discover that it was completely his own. There was only one other child in the house; his name was Takashi, and he was apparently sixteen years old and would be home from school soon.
They told him to make himself at home, and if he weren’t so jaded, he’d think they actually meant it.
When Takashi got home, the boy immediately found him where he sat in his room and tried to talk to him. He was pretty skeptical of his intentions, but when Takashi said his name and he shuddered, he’d never forget what happened next:
“You don’t like your name, huh?” he said. “I can relate. Most people at school call me Shiro ‘cause of my last name, and I like it a lot more. Takashi’s way too long.”
He nodded in return, though he continued with the trend of Not Saying Anything Unless Absolutely Necessary that he’d been keeping up all day, like he was afraid that the illusion would be shattered if he so much as breathed the wrong way.
“Do you want me to call you something else?”
And that made him stop dead in his tracks. He’d never actually gotten far enough to choose a name for himself. It’s not as if anyone would believe that he was a boy anyway, so what was the use?
But the weirdest part was this: even though he had a ridiculously feminine-sounding name and was very visibly not a boy (at least on the outside), he had the strangest feeling that if he told Takashi (or Shiro, as he apparently wanted to be called) that he wanted to be called by a boy’s name, he’d actually say okay and start using it.
But his mind immediately flashed to the second lesson he’d ever learned, and he glanced down at the floor, biting his lip. “Uh… K. You can call me K.”
It was just a letter, after all. It was the first letter of his name, the one that made him feel sick to hear (the one that was on all the forms that the parents had), and it wasn’t inherently masculine-sounding, so he figured it was safe enough.
“Okay,” Shiro said, like he wanted to come off as cool and collected but he was really trying to placate him. “Let me know if that changes.”
So-- yeah. It was stuff like that that made him feel like his life wasn’t real right now.
Unbelievably, though, when he went to sleep that night, he didn’t wake to find that he was back in his last foster home, the one where there were four other kids running around and hardly ever any food in the fridge besides Chinese takeout containers and various sauces. No, this time, when he woke up and got ready for school, he was astonished to find a plate full of pancakes waiting for him on the table, Takashi-- Shiro already digging into his own plate.
“Hey, K,” he greeted with a wave, and his heart did a little flip at being addressed by a name he actually didn’t mind hearing. “Hurry up and eat your breakfast so I can take you to school.” Feeling a bit incredulous, he sat down across from him, eyes going wide when he poured out all the syrup he wanted and didn’t get so much as a sideways glance for using so much of it.
“Don’t get used to this,” Takashi started, pausing to take a bite of pancakes. He came back to himself for a little while-- see, they were just nice to you for the first day, just so they could come off as good people--
“The whole elaborate breakfast thing, I mean,” Shiro continued. “Most of the time there’s probably going to be just enough time for cereal and a banana in the mornings, but... it’s your first morning here, and mom and dad wanted to make you feel welcome. Mom made the pancakes, but her and dad left for work like ten minutes ago.”
And… back to feeling like he was in a dream.
He started to feel like maybe this could actually be his life when he got into Shiro’s car a few days later after school had let out for the day, his lunch period spent going through a book of names fresh in his head, and blurted out:
“Can you call me Keith?”
You idiot, why did you say that? he instantly berated himself. You finally got into a good home and you had to ruin it by opening that box, they’re gonna send you back--
“Keith,” Shiro said, like he was testing out how it sounded rolling off his tongue. “Yeah, sounds good to me.”
There was no isn’t that a boy’s name or why do you want to be called that, just: yeah, sounds good to me.
He started believing that maybe things could be different on that drive home from school a week after his tenth birthday: when Shiro called him “Keith” for the first time and offered to give him some of his old clothes.