He wanted to see the bullet.
For weeks, he had felt it, a bump and an ache, lodged just below his left shoulder. Sometimes other kids asked if they could touch it, and he'd say yes, but not too hard.
If asked, he might pull up his shirt and show the long, fresh scar that snaked from his breastbone to below his navel.
"Thirty staples," he might say, shyly, wondrously, but even the staples in his tender skin didn't grip his mind the way the bullet did.
He had carried the bullet in his small body since the August night it pierced his back near the base of his spinal cord and ripped upward, ravaging his pancreas, his stomach, his spleen, a kidney, his left lung. He sometimes texted his mother in the middle of the night to tell her that it hurt.
Now, on a gray October day, a doctor is about to cut the bullet out, and he's hoping for the chance to inspect the little metal invader.
In a surgery prep room at Lurie Children's Hospital, he sits in a chair, leaning on his mother's arm, while doctors and nurses bustle around.
"How do you prefer to be called?" a doctor asks.
"Tavon," he said. Not Tay-von. Tuh-von.
He'll be under general anesthesia, the doctor explains, so he'll get an astronaut mask. Would he like it to be scented?
Before he can decide which scent _ cherry, candy, bubble gum? _ another woman enters, a specialist trained in the fears of children.
"My guess," she tells him, "is your imagination is working like crazy right now."
As she talks, he looks away, silent. Withdrawn behavior, the specialist knows, is common in children who have been shot.
When she tells him he'll be given laughing gas, though, he laughs, and for a moment a different boy flashes into view, the old Tavon, charming, lighthearted, graced with an incandescent smile, a 10-year-old boy known as joyful.
"What are you scared of?" one of the relatives gathered around him murmurs. "You don't know? Something. You tired of it? I know. You know what? It's almost over."
He isn't eager to get back into a hospital bed. He spent most of August and September in one, stretched out on his back for so long that he still has a bald spot where his head chafed against the pillow.
But he does what needs to be done, no complaints except the slump of his shoulders.
He slips out of his red Chicago Bulls T-shirt and black pants, into a blue hospital gown.
Climbs into the rolling, metal bed.
Allows strangers to bundle him in white sheets from his chin to his toes, leaving only his small face free.
Lies there wide-eyed and quiet as relatives pray over him, whisper in his ear, promise him hot wings when the surgery is over.
Then it's time.
"Ready to go, kiddo?" the specialist in children's fears asks, and with barely a movement or a sound, Tavon begins to cry.
