Wherefore Art Thou Romeo? ✓

six

six / fall 2017 [ unedited ]

TW ; extremely brief mentions of sexual assault

REALLY, LIFE WASN'T the worst that it could've been, but things weren't going great.

"It could be worse," Heather decided, shrugging her shoulders and glancing around the table. Romeo snapped out of his trance. "She could've told everyone you have chlamydia or something."

Everyone frowned at her; Romeo's eyes widened.

"What?" She asked, almost offended. "If I was her then that's probably what I would've done."

"Who cares what she says anyway?" Tia frowned, stealing one of Heather's fries. "Every sane person in this school knows that you're not that type of guy."

"Yeah," Atlas huffed, his lower arms folded on the table. "The problem is that there aren't many sane people in this school."

"Realistically," Frankie began, locking eyes with Romeo, "everyone will forget all about this in a week. It's not like this is gonna stick with you."

"Yeah," Romeo sighed. It was harder to look at people lately, even his friends. "I guess not."

Olivia, the angel that she was, had made it some kind of personal mission of hers to make Romeo look like the worst guy on earth. This, apparently, included spreading rumors that he was incapable of love and empathy, was grossly manipulative and offensively inconsiderate to the point of being something of a raging misogynist.

So, for the time being, Romeo was the school's official dirtbag psychopath.

The good thing was that there was no real base to any of her claims because he wasn't incapable of love and empathy, grossly manipulative or offensively inconsiderate. Actually, for the most part, he had a great reputation.

Sure, maybe his love life was a little tumultuous and a lot of students seemed to think that he had some kind of fatal flaw that consistently sabotaged his relationships— though these conspiracies never actually stopped him from getting dates— but a lot of people accepted that— though maybe they thought he was occasionally detached or flippant— he was a sweet guy. Their ideas of a fatal flaw never came close to the region that Olivia had ventured into and usually people theorized that it was something to do with his zodiac sign (Scorpio) or a compulsion to tell white lies or a stubborn refusal to eat at certain restaurants or even some kind of bizarre kink, but never that he was a bad guy.

Considering the amount of people he had dated (even some who others might consider high risk for drama), he had remained relatively unscathed— which was nothing short of a miracle— and hadn't really appreciated how lucky he had been until his luck ran out. Other than Olivia, nobody really had anything bad to say about him, but she didn't want him to get off that easy. She had sought out a couple of other girls he had been with— mostly, if not all, examples of high risk for drama— and they had banded together, supporting each other's claims and spreading the rumors like wildfire.

Thankfully, they hadn't managed to jump on the STI idea. He prayed that Heather hadn't jinxed him and, just in case, tapped Atlas's head (Frankie laughed; Atlas, frowning, shoved him away).

Even if people didn't think he had chlamydia— or god forbid something worse— the damage had been done. Hopefully, it was temporary damage, but still damage. Romeo was a chauvinistic douchebag who demanded things from girls and had little respect for them; he didn't care about their safety or their feelings or their comfort; all they were to him were disposable sex objects who he used up until he got bored. Then, he threw them away and never called back.