Wherefore Art Thou Romeo? ✓

fifteen

late - middle spring 2018 / fifteen

IN THE PASSENGER seat of Rodney's car, inside the mouth of that sleek, black beast, Romeo was biting hard on his bottom lip and, with shaking hands, trying to text the group chat he had with his friends to tell them to stop calling him. He had already turned his phone on silent and rejected all of their attempts to hear his voice, but it hadn't been enough to make them stop calling. Maybe he could've turned his phone off but the thought of it unsettled him. Not because he couldn't do without it, but because his phone being turned on felt, in an odd way, like a safety net, like a connection to the outside world that he was too afraid to cut off.

In a nauseating way, he was afraid. Completely afraid. His fear roused beneath his skin as though it had been lying there dormant from his childhood and had suddenly come alive again, like a cruelly awakened volcano spreading lava through his blood. The leftover terror that had suddenly remembered itself and the job it was supposed to fulfil. It was a fear he hadn't felt since his parents' divorce.

The passenger seat of Rodney's car was no different from the backseat of his dad's car years before; flinching at every sound and trying to escape the fighting in the front by hiding inside of himself but never getting as far as he needed to get to be free.

Rodney looked, dreadfully, like his father. Not in appearance, but in expression. Everything about him was locked; his jaw clenched, his eyes staring straight through the windshield, his shoulders still and tense, his hands gripping the steering wheel, his dark hair falling onto his forehead, the shadows of night falling across his face making him look older and ominous.

When his phone began vibrating again, a flood of distress washed through him, so intense that he could have burst into tears because of the frustration. He ended the call without answering. A moment later, the vibrating started again and he was certain that he was about to cry when Rodney snatched the phone away from him, turned it off and then, forcefully, threw it onto the backseat with a soft, dull thud where it remained, deadened.

Romeo jumped when it happened, his body seizing in a moment of shock as he leaned away from Rodney who he didn't dare to look at and who didn't bother to look at him. His body, his lip— even with how hard he bit down on it— his hands were trembling. He pressed his palms together and held them between his thighs, desperately trying to steady them.

He wanted to say sorry, but couldn't steady himself to get the words, tangling on a tongue that he was too aware of, out of his mouth. His throat was dry and there was a thick feeling between his teeth that he knew would stay with him for the rest of the night. Still, it was easier to think about that than the absolute silence crawling over his skin, the weight of it in the car. It was as unavoidable as it was unbearable.

But he had enough experience to know that this part wasn't the worst of it. Even when he was a kid, he had known well: the worst of it came when they were back in the house.

In theory, the silence should've been worse in the car because there was nowhere to hide from it. In that tight, enclosed, inescapable space, it was suffocating. In the house, that invisible fog should've dissipated and faded into nothing, but it didn't; it just changed shape. If the problem with the car was that there was nowhere to hide, then the problem with the house was that hiding didn't do anything.

When he was a kid, watching in stiff horror as his parents hit each other and threw things at each other and smashed up furniture in terrifying bursts of tumultuous passion and rage, he could retreat to his room and hide under the bed covers; clamp his hands over his ears and squeeze his eyes shut; hold hands with Adrienne or find a space in her little arms. But it still raged on and he could hear it even with his ears covered; could see it even with his eyes closed; could feel it even with Adrienne's protective hold. There was no escape; only endurance.