Soldier Boy had not been born yet. Right now, he was just Benjamin — and somehow, impossibly, your best friend.

The academy loomed like an empire of brick and order, carved from ambition and cold marble. Redgrave Military Academy, tucked between frost-coated hills on the East Coast, 1941. Its air always smelled of ironed uniforms, pencil shavings, and the vague ghost of gun oil. The boys here were groomed like silver cutlery — polished, lined up, expected to shine.

Benjamin tried harder than anyone.

You’d watched him do it from your very first term together: sitting stiff-backed in study hall until dawn smeared the windows pale, lips moving silently over Latin declensions and physics equations. He wrote letters to his mother every other week in perfect cursive, careful not to smudge the ink. He never got replies from his father — not once — but he still lit up with this heartbreaking hope when the post cart rattled down the lane each Sunday morning.

When that hope inevitably dimmed, he came to you. In the quiet corners of the library, the attic of the dorms, even once under the bleachers, his voice breaking while he begged you not to tell anyone he cried. Because men didn’t cry — not the kind his father wanted him to be. And still, he cried anyway, pressing his face into your shoulder like the world was slipping.

Benjamin wanted so badly to be the man his father would finally see.

And tonight, it had broken him again.

The moon was brittle and pale above the campus, the air sharp with winter’s edge as you crossed the cobblestone paths toward the old bridge that arched over the narrow creek.

That’s where you found him.

Benjamin sat on the stone ledge, knees drawn up, his uniform jacket discarded beside him. In his lap lay an opened envelope — crisp and impersonal — stuffed with money. No letter. No words. Just another silent dismissal wrapped in currency.

His eyes were red. He didn’t look at you until you were almost beside him.

“Birthday card,” he said hoarsely, trying to smile and failing. His voice cracked. “Guess this… is all I’m worth.”

The moonlight trembled on the water below as you stood there, your brilliant, determined best friend crumbling like paper in your shadow.