The Vitamin Cable Runner

Leo's sneakers hit the pavement at 5:47 AM, exactly thirteen minutes before he needed to be back inside. He'd been **running** these dawn laps for three weeks now, ever since his mom started working the overnight shift at the hospital and his older brother Jay basically moved into his girlfriend's dorm.

At fifteen, Leo had mastered the art of existing in the spaces between everyone's expectations. His dad, who'd bailed when Leo was seven, sent a birthday card every year with exactly twenty dollars inside — never nineteen, never twenty-one. Like clockwork. Like payments on a debt he'd already defaulted on.

The real reason Leo kept running, though, wasn't freedom or fitness or any of that inspirational poster crap. It was Mrs. Chen's house at the end of Oak Street. Old, peeling paint, perfect view of her backyard cable box from the alley.

Leo had figured out the whole setup during a particularly uneventful TikTok scroll session. If you disconnected the coaxial **cable** from her box and jammed your phone's hotspot adapter into the port — voilà, free premium streaming. He'd done it three times now, always at dawn when Mrs. Chen was definitely asleep. He wasn't proud, exactly, but he wasn't not proud either.

"You're up early," said a voice from the darkness.

Leo nearly face-planted. Mrs. Chen herself, standing on her back porch in a leopard-print robe, holding a mug that smelled strongly of something herbal and medicinal.

"Uh, yeah," Leo managed. "Just... running."

"I know what you're doing with my cable," she said, taking a sip. "Your mother tells me you're quite the tech wizard at school."

Leo's stomach did something complicated. "I can pay you back—"

"Sit," she commanded, gesturing to a plastic lawn chair. From her robe pocket, she produced a small orange bottle. "My daughter sends me these. Supplements for joints, memory, vision. I'm eighty-two, Leo. I've forgotten more than you'll ever learn." She slid the bottle across the table. "Take them. They're probably just placebos anyway."

"What?"

"A **vitamin** is just a promise in pill form," Mrs. Chen said, her eyes crinkling with something that looked like kindness but felt like wisdom. "My daughter buys them because she can't be here, and I take them because I can't tell her no. We're all just compensating for something."

Leo sat there, dawn breaking around them, and realized something: nobody actually knew what they were doing. Not his dad, not his brother, not him. They were all just running through the dark, hoping to find something real before the sun came up.

"Keep the cable," Mrs. Chen said, standing up. "But come by sometime when you're not stealing my WiFi. I have stories that'll beat anything you're streaming."

Leo ran home faster than ever that morning, sneakers glowing pink in the sunrise, already calculating how to explain to his mom why he'd be spending more time at Mrs. Chen's house. Some things were worth getting caught for.