2
Roman
Present Day
Roman paused outside the small duplex, his hand resting lightly on the doorknob, refusing to grip it with any real conviction. Refusing to turn it.
The bees might be angry.
Not that standing in the hot Alabama sun was all that appealing. Even in late April, the heat rising off the cigarette-smeared asphalt fell somewhere just shy of egg frying. And the building itself wasn’t much to look at either: a narrow, two-story affair with faded green paint that peeled listlessly from the cracked front window. But it wasn’t the worst place Roman had ever lived.
It wasn’t so dismal as to reach into his soul and tear tiny pieces of him away every time he opened the door.
He had lived in places like that, places that threatened to drown you in your own hopelessness, the constant weight on your chest making it hard to breathe, the constant fear in your belly making it hard to close your eyes at night, listening in the dark to the perpetual scurrying of the wall rats and feeling like maybe they had more of a right to be there than you did yourself.
But this place, with its three tiny upstairs bedrooms and one and a half baths, the extra toilet being a luxury he had once only dreamed of in a family of seven, was no reason in itself not to open the door—no reason not to walk boldly into the small front space that served as a living room and flop down on one of the two squeaky couches, home safe after surviving another day at Grover Cleveland Middle School.
It was just that the house might not be empty.
His mother and Tony wouldn’t be home from work yet. His older sister, Kontessa, had gone to a friend’s house after school, and the two youngest would be at day care. That left his older brother, Marquon, who was fifteen and went to the high school now, so he got out half an hour earlier than Roman. If Marquon was already home, then Roman would be alone with the bees.
Roman took his hand off the doorknob and moved it gingerly toward the black front door itself, testing its heat after the hours of abuse it had taken in the afternoon sun. He jerked his hand away as soon as his fingertips made contact, nervous about being burned, but the surface was only uncomfortable, not scorching. He reached out again and placed both small, brown hands firmly against the plane this time, palms flat, letting his skin get used to the temperature, and then he leaned in slowly until his left ear was resting against the door itself.
At first, he didn’t hear anything at all.
He had just begun to hope that Marquon was out with his friends or maybe had followed some girl home from school, when the TV roared into life, the mad explosion of sound startling him back from the door with a fast shove of his arms. Even several steps away, standing in the small parking space in front of the building, he could still hear the blare of his family’s only television, the buzzing notes of its half-busted speakers rattling the window.
Roman’s shoulders slumped, but there was nothing for it. He would have to go in. His mother had made it perfectly clear that eleven years old was too young, in her opinion, for a boy to be walking twelve blocks to the corner store or hanging around the park by himself. Especially in that neighborhood. Especially a boy as small for his age as Roman. If he didn’t go in, Marquon would tell her that he hadn’t come straight home after school, and after everything that had happened three years ago, Roman had to keep his head down.
If his mother thought for even a moment that he might be causing trouble again, well, she would start screaming and crying and carrying on like a banshee, and then Tony would leave (Roman’s luck being what it was) and next thing you know they’d be out on the street, this time with baby Xavious in diapers, and with Child Protective Services still sniffing around after the last time…
Roman knew he didn’t have a choice. Sighing deeply against the inevitable, he reached out his hand and opened the door.
He tried to do it casually, like he wasn’t scared. Acting nervous around Marquon was like squeezing lighter fluid onto a barbecue. So instead of easing the door open like he wanted to and peeking his way around the edge, he just pushed it wide and walked through it, kicking off his shoes and sparing only the briefest of glances in his brother’s direction.
Marquon was glued to a video game and acted as though he couldn’t care less that his little brother had come home, but Roman knew it was just a ploy. He knew it because the first red bee spiraled slowly up out of his brother’s right ear. It angled toward him, flying only an inch or so in his direction until it stopped, hovering in midair, staring straight at Roman, a silent vanguard of impending doom.
Roman had started seeing strange things around people when he was only four or five years old. He wasn’t clear exactly when it had started because he had had no idea at the time that he was seeing anything unusual. He would tell his mother that a woman in the grocery store had eight arms, or that the preacher on television had a tail like a mermaid, and his mother would either laugh and say, “Boy, you sure do have some imagination!” or would frown and tell him it was about time he started living in the real world, depending on her mood.
In those days, his mother had looked like she lived in the middle of a tornado, just like the one he had seen in The Wizard of Oz, that whirled and thrashed around her with a somewhat greater or lesser promise of destruction from one moment to the next. Lately, though, the wind had finally settled down to a gentle breeze that simply twirled her skirts playfully and ruffled her hair from time to time. Tony seemed to have a lot to do with that, and Roman prayed every night that Tony would stay in the picture so the tornado would never come back.
He hadn’t realized how dangerous his visions could be, not only to him but to his entire family, until he was eight years old and had just started the third grade. His teacher that year, Mr. Lockhart, had been a particularly disturbed man, despite the outward appearance of propriety that he so diligently cultivated with his pressed businessman’s suits and his car salesman’s smile.
When Mr. Lockhart had discovered the haunted doodles in Roman’s notebook depicting massive, demonic wings growing out of the man’s shoulder blades, tearing right through the shadowy material of his favorite charcoal-gray jacket, the walking horror show himself had demanded an explanation on the spot, and a terrified young Roman had insisted that these ominous, though unlikely, protuberances were, in fact, the genuine article, staring at the man in wide-eyed panic and pointing tremblingly into the open air.
Mr. Lockhart, in response, had marched him right down to the principal’s office, calling his mother away from the Mexican restaurant where she was waitressing and demanding that she take her schizophrenic son to see a licensed psychiatrist posthaste. Loquisha Smith, however, had never been one to put up with other people’s nonsense.
She had issued a scathing rejoinder—with significantly more volume than the situation had probably required—explaining to Mr. Lockhart in no uncertain terms that there was no way she could afford a psychiatrist on a waitress’ salary and that in any event there was nothing wrong with her eight-year-old son, and suggesting that the man should spend more time teaching and less time sticking his nose where it didn’t belong and taking up good working people’s time with such shenanigans, only “shenanigans” was not precisely the word she used.
In tight-lipped fury, Mr. Lockhart had watched her storm away with her son in tow, and as soon as they were out of sight he had called Child Protective Services to report his grave concerns over the child’s mental health and his mother’s obvious inadequacy as a parent.
That night, her voice quavering with fear, Loquisha had unleashed her frustrations upon Roman’s young shoulders, explaining to him that all four of her children (Xavious had not yet been born at the time) could be taken away from her forever if he did not “stop talking all this made-up shit and grow the hell up,” and Roman had finally understood in stark and brutal clarity several truths that would stay with him for the rest of his life.
First, his mother had never seen any of the strange and wonderful things that he saw and told her about every day. Second, she had never believed for a moment that he had really seen them either. Third, if she had believed him, she would have thought he was as crazy as Mr. Lockhart did. Fourth, terrible things would happen if he didn’t start hiding his visions from every other human being on the planet, including his own mother.
Over the next four weeks, Roman had spent several hours of his life convincing a court-ordered psychiatrist that he did not really think there were demonic wings growing out of his third-grade teacher’s back. That would be crazy, and Roman was not crazy. He had been drawing scary doodles in his notebook because he had stayed up one night to watch a horror film on TV when he was supposed to be in bed. The movie had scared him. He had had nightmares for a week or two. He had drawn some creepy pictures. Then the nightmares had stopped, and he was fine now. He did not feel like drawing scary pictures anymore. He would gladly draw a picture of his mom and his brother and his two sisters all living together in one big, happy house if the doctor would like to see that. Yes, he would very much like a lollipop, thank you for asking.
But telling people that the visions weren’t real did not make them stop. He still saw the winds blowing around his mother. He still saw a gray fog of fear and insecurity wrapping Kontessa so tightly within its grasp that he had trouble seeing her real body through it at all. He still saw young Shaquiya standing in a perpetual ring of sunshine as she pranced about the house, the light soft and ethereal, filtered through a canopy of summer leaves and glimmering off her giant, iridescent fairy wings. And he still saw the swarm of angry, red bees that lived inside his brother, Marquon.
He stared at Marquon now, just for a moment, while his brother pretended not to see him, hogging the television so he could play his video games, the solitary bee of glowing red light standing vigil over his head.
“What are you playing?” Roman asked.
Sometimes, talking about Marquon’s games would soothe the hive, and they could sit for a while and have a pleasant conversation about quick scoping and weapon choices and how good Marquon was at blowing his opponents away. Anything to keep the bees from getting angry. Not that the bees themselves could sting him, but when the bees got mad enough to attack, Marquon did, too. With four years and at least fifty pounds between them, Roman never came out well when his big brother lost his temper.
Roman waited a few moments, but Marquon didn’t answer.
“Marquon?”
Still nothing. Roman finally decided to head toward the kitchen and dig up something to snack on, but he hadn’t taken three steps before he heard his brother’s voice calling him back.
“Yo, Romario.”
“Yeah?” Roman asked, sighing a little. Marquon always used his full name, mostly because he knew Roman hated it.
Roman had spent almost as many hours of his young life reading as he had drawing, and he had developed a strong suspicion that the name his mother claimed she had ‘just made up’ for him was, in fact, a moniker mash-up of Romeo, from Romeo and Juliet, and Lothario, from Don Quixote, as though she expected him to grow up to be as much of a ladies’ man as she asserted his father to be.
Roman, however, regarded his father as little more than a drunk and a petty criminal who seemed destined to spend his entire life oscillating in and out of jail on a pathetically regular schedule, and he had no interest in being compared to the man on any basis whatsoever, whether real or imagined. He was also only eleven, so the idea of becoming a great romancer of women was mortifying in and of itself, and he had taken great pains to make sure that everyone referred to him as ‘Roman’ instead of ‘Romario,’ thereby guaranteeing that Marquon would do no such thing.
“You hear about that test?” Marquon asked.
“Yeah.”
“You think you gonna do better’n me?”
“Naw. No way, man. You know you gonna blow me away.”
“Damn straight,” Marquon snapped back. “You know why?”
“’Cause you’re smarter than me.”
“Hell yeah, I am.”
“Yeah, I know. You want a soda?”
Marquon’s eyes left the television just long enough to size up his brother’s attitude, but he must have decided Roman was being genuine because the little bee of red light turned and flew toward Marquon, landing on his forehead and crawling back into him through his left eyeball.
Roman tried not to react to his visions so people wouldn’t realize he was still having them, but he hated it when the bees crawled into his brother’s eyes or up his nose or into his ears. It was unsettling, and he winced a little as he watched it disappear.
“What?” Marquon demanded, and the bee flew back out of his left eye, accompanied by two more from his right.
“Nothing,” Roman said quickly. “I was just thinking about school. I tanked my science quiz. Mama’s gonna be pissed.”
“Ha! Yeah, she is, dumb-face. Freak-face Romario. Fail-face Romario.” He said his name like a taunt each time, and the three bees danced a happy little jig in the air over Marquon’s head before disappearing into his right ear.
Roman just shrugged. It didn’t matter what his brother thought of him. All that mattered was that Marquon didn’t lose his temper and beat the heck out of him before their mother or Tony got home.
“Well?” Marquon asked, when Roman didn’t say anything else.
“Huh?”
“Are you gonna go get the sodas or what?”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“’Bout freakin’ time.”
Roman was smart enough not to point out that Marquon had never answered his question and had not asked for a soda. Keeping his mouth shut, he made his way down the short hallway into the kitchen, grabbed two cans out of the fridge, and walked back into the living room.
“Here.”
Roman eased a can onto the coffee table, and Marquon grunted in Roman’s general direction, never taking his eyes off the television. It wasn’t exactly gratitude, but it served as a kind of acknowledgment—a subtle cue that they were on truce for the day, at least in Marquon’s opinion, which was the only one that mattered.
Roman knew he shouldn’t press his luck. He knew he should head upstairs to the tiny room he shared with Xavious, where his private sketchbook was stashed beneath the crib. He kept two sketchbooks now, a ‘light’ one and a ‘dark’ one. The light one he carried around, drawing beautiful images of Shaquiya’s fairy wings or his mother’s smile, but the dark one he kept hidden away.
Most eleven-year-old boys would have hated sharing a room with an infant, but Roman didn’t mind it so much. At least he never saw anything strange around his baby brother. He figured he would eventually—he saw things around everyone else. But for now, Xavious just ate and cried and burped and slept, and in between he practiced walking without falling down and saying “NO” and “MINE” and “BOBO,” which is what he called Roman, accompanied by Marquon’s endless snickering. Roman hated changing diapers as much as anyone else, but it was nice to feel normal once in a while.
And when he wasn’t feeling normal at all, when all the evil he had seen during the day decided to get up and start lurching around inside his head, screeching and clawing its way through his brain with no way out, he could grab his sketchbook and spill all that darkness onto its pristine white pages. And Xavious would never tell a soul. The kid would just hobble over to where Roman lay on the floor, sketching furiously, and he would gurgle and laugh as the images flowed into life before his eyes, as though there wasn’t anything the least bit disturbing about any of it.
That was what Roman should do now, while he could—while Marquon was busy with his video games and nobody else was home—but he kept thinking about the stupid test. They had just announced it that afternoon. Morning classes would be canceled for every grade from the third through the twelfth for some new test. It made him nervous. Before the whole Lockhart nightmare, he wouldn’t have cared. He would have just aced it, whatever it was. But now he lived by certain rules. No good grades. Don’t stand out. Keep your head down. See trouble coming.
So even though Marquon was ignoring him and Roman could have escaped into his bedroom in peace for a couple of hours, he just couldn’t stop himself from trying to find out more about it.
“So… did they say what it’s for?”
“OMG, you still here, man?”
Roman waited to see if his brother would say anything else, but the silence dragged on between them while the TV blasted screaming guitars and staccato gunfire.
“I thought maybe they told you guys something at the high school,” Roman tried again. “About the test? They wouldn’t tell us anything.”
“Yeah, well, they didn’t tell us either. Just sit your asses down tomorrow and take the stupid Is-A-Bitch.”
Roman perked up. “Is-A-Bitch?”
“Man, you’re stupid.” Marquon rolled his eyes. “Intuition Assessment Battery. IAB. Is-A-Bitch. I can’t believe I literally have to spell that shit out for you.” Just then, Marquon got shot and the game ended, his death playing over and over on the final kill-cam. Cursing, he threw the controller to the ground and stood up, his head whipping around to stare at Roman.
Roman backed away as the entire beehive streamed in vicious red streaks out of his brother’s eyes and ears and nose.
“Sorry,” Roman said, in a voice that sounded pathetically small and frightened, even to him. “Marquon, I’m sorry.”
“Gonna make you sorry, Mister Is-A-Bitch!”
He was so close to the front door. Roman wanted to yank at the doorknob and run into the street, but he knew he couldn’t. Marquon was already too far gone to stop himself. If Roman ran outside, Marquon would just chase after him, and if the neighbors saw his fifteen-year-old brother beating him half to death, someone would call the cops, and that would be that.
So Roman did what he always did—what he did for his mother and for Shaquiya and for innocent little Xavious so the cops wouldn’t come and take them away or run Tony off and ruin everything they finally had. He curled up in a ball and took the beating without making a sound. Marquon kicked him a few times and then fell on top of him, pummeling him without mercy, while a thousand bees of blood-red light swarmed around them.