Elias was born silent.

  The doctors called him a quiet baby, one of those rare newborns who never cried upon entering the world. His mother, exhausted and teary-eyed, held him close, waiting for the wail that never came. The nurses assured her he was healthy, that some infants simply didn’t cry much. “He’ll find his voice soon,” they said.

  But he never did.

  As a child, Elias was obedient, polite, and eerily calm. When other babies screamed for attention, he merely stared. When toddlers threw tantrums, he watched with empty curiosity, never once joining in. His parents worried in hushed tones late at night, wondering why their son never laughed, never clung to them the way other children did.

  At the age of three, he fell down the stairs. His mother rushed to his side, heart pounding, expecting cries of pain. Elias simply sat up, rubbed his scraped knee, and looked at her. His lips parted as if about to speak, but he said nothing. His father took him to a doctor the next day, but there was nothing wrong—no brain injury, no neurological disorder.

  “He just doesn’t express pain the way other children do,” the doctor explained.

  His mother squeezed his small hand in hers. “But he should feel something, shouldn’t he?”

  The doctor hesitated before responding. “Some children develop differently. Give him time.”

  Time passed. Elias grew.

  By the time he started school, he had learned something strange about the world—people responded to emotions. His classmates talked about their favorite toys with excitement, their voices rising in enthusiasm. They cried when they were scolded, hugged their friends when they were happy, shouted when they were angry. Elias observed them like a scientist studying an unfamiliar species.

  It wasn’t that he disliked them. He simply didn’t understand.

  When a boy tripped on the playground and scraped his elbow, the other children ran to him, their faces contorted with worry. Elias only stared. The wound would heal. The pain would fade. Why did they react as if something terrible had happened?

  Once, his teacher read a story about a lost puppy finding its way home. The other children sighed in relief at the happy ending. Elias tilted his head, confused. The puppy’s fate had been uncertain for a while, but now it was safe. Wasn’t that simply the logical conclusion?

  At lunch, he sat alone, listening. Children chattered about their favorite shows, their families, the games they wanted to play. He studied their expressions, their tones, the way they leaned closer when excited or turned away when bored.

  Elias began to mimic them.

  When the boy next to him laughed, Elias let out a soft chuckle. When someone frowned, he mirrored their expression. He practiced in front of a mirror at home, forcing his lips into a smile, widening his eyes to simulate surprise.

  At first, it worked.

  A girl with bright ribbons in her hair invited him to play tag. He nodded, running with the others, feigning breathless laughter. A boy handed him a toy car, and Elias pushed it back and forth, watching how the boy grinned at his participation.

  But something was off.

  “They say Elias is weird,” he overheard one day. “He laughs, but it doesn’t feel real.”

  “He looks at you, but it’s like he’s looking through you.”

  Elias didn’t understand what he had done wrong. He had copied their emotions perfectly. He had followed their words, their movements. But still, they pulled away.

  One evening, as his mother tucked him into bed, he stared up at her and asked, “What is love?”

  She blinked, startled by the sudden question. Then she smiled gently, brushing a hand through his hair. “Love is when you care about someone more than yourself.”

  Elias considered this. “How do you know if you love someone?”

  His mother’s smile softened. “You just feel it.”

  That was the problem.

  He never would.

  Elias became careful after that. He continued to imitate, but subtly. He didn’t force his laughter. He didn’t smile too much. He became an observer, a listener. He nodded at the right moments, responded with the appropriate words.

  It wasn’t the same as feeling, but it was enough to pass unnoticed.

  Mostly.

  One day, a boy named Adrian sat next to him at lunch. Adrian was loud, animated, his hands always moving as he spoke. Elias had watched him before—he was well-liked, always surrounded by friends.

  “Hey, Elias,” Adrian said, grinning. “Wanna be friends?”

  Elias blinked. No one had asked him that before.

  Friendship. A concept he had studied, analyzed. Wasn’t this what he had been aiming for?

  “Yes,” he said, voice even.

  And just like that, they were friends.

  Adrian talked a lot, and Elias listened. He learned that Adrian liked soccer, that he hated vegetables, that he had a little sister who annoyed him. Elias responded when needed, nodded when expected.

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  It was easy.

  Too easy.

  Adrian never seemed to notice that Elias never shared anything in return.

  But then, one day, Adrian’s father passed away.

  Elias found him in the classroom after school, curled up in his seat, his face buried in his arms. The air was heavy, suffocating. Other students whispered condolences before hurrying away, unsure how to handle grief.

  Elias sat beside him.

  He had seen this scenario before. He had memorized the correct words.

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Adrian lifted his head, eyes red and swollen. He stared at Elias, searching his face, his expression.

  Elias didn’t move.

  Adrian’s breath hitched. “Are you really?”

  Elias hesitated. He had repeated the phrase correctly. But Adrian’s voice trembled with something deeper, something Elias couldn’t grasp.

  “That’s what people say when someone dies,” Elias said, confused.

  Adrian’s face twisted, his grief turning into something sharper.

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  The friendship ended that day.

  Elias didn’t understand why.

  Elias watched Adrian walk away without a word, shoulders hunched, hands clenched into fists. There was no dramatic confrontation, no shouting, no tears—just a silence heavier than any Elias had ever experienced.

  He should have felt something. Guilt. Regret. Sadness.

  But as he sat in the empty classroom, staring at the chair Adrian had left behind, all he had was a question:

  What had he done wrong?

  He replayed the conversation in his head, dissecting it like a scientist studying an unfamiliar specimen. He had followed the script, hadn’t he? “I’m sorry for your loss.” That was what people were supposed to say. He had observed it countless times before—at funerals, in movies, in whispered conversations between grieving families. The phrase was a social expectation, an appropriate response.

  So why had Adrian reacted that way?

  Elias remained at his desk long after the school day ended, trying to piece together the puzzle. He thought of Adrian’s expression—red-rimmed eyes, quivering lips, the rawness in his voice. The way he had searched Elias’s face, looking for something.

  Something Elias didn’t have.

  He clenched his hands, staring down at them as if they might hold the answer.

  Emotions.

  That was the missing piece.

  It wasn’t enough to say the words—people expected them to be backed by something real. They wanted the weight of grief, the ache of sympathy. They wanted connection.

  And Elias had none to offer.

  The next day, Adrian didn’t look at him. Didn’t acknowledge him. Didn’t even flinch when Elias passed by his desk.

  The rest of the class noticed. They always noticed.

  “He’s so cold.”

  “He didn’t even care.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  Elias didn’t react. He kept his head down, hands folded neatly atop his desk, face blank. He had learned long ago that reacting only made things worse.

  But a strange thought lingered in his mind.

  Had he cared?

  No.

  Not in the way they wanted him to.

  But he had spent hours thinking about it. About Adrian. About what he should have said, what he should have done.

  Was that not its own form of caring?

  It didn’t matter. Adrian was gone. The experiment had failed.

  Elias returned to what he did best—observing, imitating, staying unnoticed.

  And yet, something was different now.

  For the first time, he wondered if there would ever be a way to truly bridge the gap between himself and the world.

  Elias spent the rest of the year in silence.

  He did not attempt to make another friend. He did not speak unless spoken to. He existed in the background, neither present nor absent, like a shadow that moved but never truly lived.

  Adrian never acknowledged him again. At first, Elias thought perhaps time would change things, that one day Adrian might forget, might return to their usual routine. But weeks passed, then months, and the distance between them remained.

  Elias didn’t try to close it.

  Instead, he continued watching.

  He observed the way friendships formed—sometimes naturally, sometimes through effort. He noticed how people laughed together, how they comforted each other, how they shared parts of themselves without hesitation. It was a delicate balance, a dance of unspoken rules and expectations.

  He memorized them all.

  But there was one thing he could never replicate.

  The feeling behind them.

  When a boy named Daniel told his friends a joke, their laughter rang through the classroom, easy and unforced. Elias had learned to laugh when others did, but when he compared the sound of his voice to theirs, he knew something was missing.

  When a girl named Sophie fell and scraped her knee, her friends rushed to her side, their faces filled with concern. Elias thought of how he had watched similar scenes before, how he had once stood motionless as a boy cried over a scraped elbow. This time, he forced himself to move, kneeling beside Sophie and offering his hand.

  She hesitated before taking it.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, repeating the words he had heard countless times.

  Sophie wiped her tears and nodded. “Yeah… thanks, Elias.”

  He had succeeded. He had played the part. Yet, as he walked away, he still didn’t understand why her other friends had looked at him so strangely, as if trying to decide whether his concern had been real.

  Perhaps they could tell the difference.

  Perhaps they always would.

  Elias’s parents were kind, patient. They did not understand him, but they loved him. He knew this because they told him so, because they hugged him even when he did not initiate it, because they spoke to him in soft voices even when he did not respond as they hoped.

  One night, his mother sat beside him on his bed, brushing his hair with her fingers. It was a gesture he had grown used to, a habit she had never let go of even though he was no longer a small child.

  “Elias,” she said gently, “do you feel lonely?”

  He blinked. The question was unexpected. He considered it carefully, turning it over in his mind the way he did with all unfamiliar concepts.

  Loneliness.

  He had read about it. Seen it in the expressions of others. It was an ache, an emptiness, a longing for connection.

  He did not feel that way.

  But he knew that saying so would only worry her.

  “I don’t know,” he answered instead.

  His mother sighed, her fingers still in his hair. “You never talk about your friends anymore.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  A pause.

  “Why not?”

  He hesitated. How could he explain it? That he had tried, that he had failed, that there was something fundamentally different about him that made friendships feel like a puzzle with missing pieces?

  “People don’t like me,” he finally said.

  His mother’s hands froze for just a moment before she cupped his face, forcing him to look at her. “That’s not true,” she said firmly. “You’re a wonderful boy, Elias.”

  He stared into her eyes, searching for something—anything—that would make her words feel real to him. But all he could see was warmth, a warmth he could not touch no matter how close he was to it.

  “Okay,” he said simply.

  His mother’s shoulders sagged, as if she had been hoping for a different answer.

  She didn’t ask him any more questions after that.

  The next morning, Elias looked at his reflection in the mirror, studying his own face. He practiced smiling, frowning, looking surprised. He adjusted the way his brows moved, the way his lips curled.

  People responded to emotions.

  If he could not feel them, he would simply perfect the art of pretending.

  And so, he did.

  Elias became a master of imitation.

  He studied the people around him, noting every detail—how their voices changed when they were excited, how their shoulders tensed when they were afraid, how their eyes softened when they spoke to someone they cared about. He watched, memorized, and practiced.

  By the time he reached high school, he had perfected the art of blending in.

  He knew when to smile. He knew when to nod. He knew when to laugh, how to sound amused even when he felt nothing at all.

  Conversations became a game of matching responses. If someone was happy, he mirrored their joy. If someone was sad, he offered the right words, the right tone.

  It worked.

  People no longer whispered about him. No longer looked at him like he was something strange, something unnatural.

  But they never truly got close, either.

  He existed on the surface of every interaction, a presence but never a part of anything.

  And that was fine.

  It had to be.

  One day, in the middle of his second year, a girl named Lila approached him.

  “Elias,” she said, tilting her head, “why do you always smile like that?”

  He blinked, caught off guard.

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re not really smiling.”

  No one had ever asked him that before. No one had ever noticed.

  He hesitated, scrambling for the right response, the right expression to wear. “What do you mean?”

  Lila squinted at him, as if trying to solve a puzzle.

  “You smile when you’re supposed to,” she said. “You laugh when people laugh. You say the right things. But it’s like… it’s like you’re following a script.”

  Elias’s mind raced. Had he slipped up? Had he been too mechanical, too obvious? He had spent years perfecting this—how could she see through it so easily?

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, voice even.

  Lila hummed, unconvinced, but she didn’t push further. Instead, she grinned. “You’re interesting. Let’s be friends.”

  Elias stared at her.

  The words were simple, direct.

  But they didn’t make sense.

  He had spent years understanding the process of making friends. It was never this easy. There were steps, layers, an unspoken system of building familiarity, of mutual interest.

  People didn’t just say, “Let’s be friends.”

  Not with him.

  Lila didn’t seem to notice his confusion—or if she did, she didn’t care.

  “Come on,” she said, grabbing his wrist. “I want coffee. You’re coming with me.”

  He let himself be pulled along, not because he wanted to, but because he was curious.

  Lila was different.

  And Elias had never been able to resist something he didn’t understand.