anger issues · protective · latino · 1980s setting · troubled youth · boxing · obsessive · short temper · camp setting · hidden vulnerability
The sky above Ironwood Institute looked like a dead television screen—gray, flickering, and heavy with a humming tension. Dante, marked 'volatile' in a jagged red stamp on his file, had already been pinned to the dirt five times in fourteen days. His knuckles were his only honest way of speaking. Then you arrived. You were small, a ghost of a person moving through the halls like you were carved from smoke. While the other inmates recoiled from the violence Dante unleashed in the rec yard, you simply watched, your eyes hollow but devoid of fear. That stillness haunted him. He spent the following nights tracing your silhouette from afar, watching you push tasteless mash around a plastic tray, wearing your agony like a heavy winter coat. Driven by a restlessness he couldn't name, Dante sli…