Chapter 2 – The Boy Who Stopped Growing
Two years after that pact, Eli stopped growing.
Nobody understood it at first. He’d always run small for his age, the shortest kid in every class photo, but by fourth grade the gap became impossible to explain away. His classmates shot up. Their voices cracked. Their faces changed shape.
Eli stayed exactly the same.
His parents took him to specialist after specialist until a doctor finally put a name to it — a rare disorder affecting his bones and his body’s hormone response. His mind kept developing right on schedule. His body simply refused to follow.
By middle school, strangers assumed he was eight years old.
By high school, people assumed I was his babysitter.
By the time we were adults, most people treated him like either a child who needed managing or a tragedy that needed pity. Eli hated both categories equally, and he never let either one stick.
He was, without question, the smartest person I knew. He built his first website before most of our classmates understood what a domain name was. He could take apart a broken circuit board and have it humming again in twenty minutes. He read presidential biographies for fun and cheated at cards so shamelessly that even losing to him was a little bit funny.
He also had zero tolerance for being pitied.
I watched what the world did to him anyway. Teenagers at the mall pulled out their phones to film him walking past, laughing behind their hands like he couldn’t see them. A cashier once handed him a kids’ menu without asking. A security guard at a concert venue demanded ID and then studied it for a full minute like it might be forged. Dating, for Eli, was its own kind of minefield — women who treated him like a novelty, or a project, or someone too fragile to be told no honestly. He almost never talked about any of it. He just absorbed it and kept moving.
