Looking back now, I can see that while I shared my friends with Romeo, I didn’t share him with my friends. Not really. Not all of him. I didn’t tell them he was magic. Or heroic.
I could have. At that time of our lives, they would’ve believed me, but I didn’t.
Maybe even then, in the second year of elementary school, there was a part of me that thought of Romeo as mine and mine only.
Sally was right. Romeo was shy and took a while to warm up to others. He was different at school—quieter, more reserved. Big groups of people weren’t easy for him. They made him uncomfortable and anxious. I’m an extrovert, so I spoke for both of us when he went quiet. I stayed close and made sure he always knew where I was. I madesure he never had to look up in class and wonder who he’d work with when a teacher told us to pair up.
It was never a question.
It was me. Always me.
At home, in the park, and in the pool, he commanded leagues and lone wolves. He created the worlds we lived in. At school, I led and he followed.
Romeo was clever. He did well academically without really trying. In truth, I think most of what we learned bored him to tears. Sally was one of those people who didn’t talk to kids like they were kids. She had big discussions about important things with Romeo. She taught him things some might have thought were beyond his years, but they weren’t. Not at all. Not for him. As a result, he spent a lot of time looking out the window at school, eyes vague and unfocused as daydreams whispered his name.
Now and again, teachers would bring him back to reality with a loud, “Romeo!Eyes on me!”
It startled him and made him turn pink all the way to his ears. It wrenched him out of his own world and brought him crashing down to ours. I hated it. It made my blood boil right from the very first time it happened. I couldn’t see why teachers needed to rouse him roughly like that when a soft, whispered “Romeo” or a light hand on his shoulder did the job just as well.
I felt so strongly about it, in fact, that by the third grade, I decided to make it my business to school our homeroom teacher on how best to handle Romeo.
After a particularly loud “Romeo!” I waited in her class while the rest of my classmates filed out to the playground for recess. “Ms. Patton, you shouldn’t yell‘Romeo!’like that. It’s not nice, and Romeo doesn’t like it.”
“Well,” said Ms. Patton, clearly taken aback by the strength of my tone, “if Romeo doesn’t like it, then he should come and talk to me about it.”
“He doesn’t need to because he has me.”
Ms. Patton’s eyes widened, but her expression softened. “Okay, Jude, let me have it. What do you think I should do when Romeo isn’t paying attention?”
“Don’t stand far away and yell at him. It scares him. Come close and say his name quietly.”
Ms. Patton folded her arms across her chest and tilted her head to the side to get a better vantage of me. “I suppose I could try that,” she said after a while.
“And, and, also, you should try thinking about whether Romeo really needs to focus or whether you’re teaching him something he already knows because a lot of the time…”
“All right, all right, that’s quite enough. Thank you, Jude. You better head out to the playground, or you won’t have time to eat your snack.”
Buoyed by my initial success, I dispensed advice on how best to handle Romeo freely for the rest of elementary school. Sometimes it was well received, and sometimes it wasn’t. When it wasn’t, I tended to find myself in detention on account of an alleged attitude problem. On those occasions, I would, without fail, look up to see Romeo sliding into the seat beside me.
“What are you doing here?” I’d hiss. “You didn’t get detention.”
His answer was always the same. “You’re here, aren’t you?”
3
“The face of heaven so fine”
Now
The house feels strange.The kitchen, living room, and bedrooms are almost the same as they were. Ours, but it doesn’t smell like us anymore. Most of our furniture is still here, but all the photographs have been taken down. The posters that covered the entire wall behind my headboard are gone. The wall has been patched up and painted a cheery light blue. Everything is bright and clean and far neater than when we lived here. The massive, moth-eaten navy-blue sofas that permanently bore the imprint of my sprawled-out form during my teen years are gone, replaced by a beige pair that are more upright and stern than the old ones were.
My mom was right, the kitchen and bathrooms are showing signs of wear and tear. With everything else looking better, they look notably worse than they used to.
That’s why I’m here. A dutiful son returning to his hometown to oversee a remodel. My presence here wasn’t part of the plan. Believe me, I’d never have agreed to it in amillion years if my gran hadn’t taken a fall off a ladder late last week and broken her hip.
A ladder. She’s eighty-two, for God’s sake. What the hell was she doing climbing a ladder?
Thankfully, she’ll be all right, but she’s in pain and needs help taking care of herself, so my parents are staying with her while she recovers. They’re supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be happily cosseted in my Manhattan apartment. I’m supposed to be in the office this week and visiting my parents in Florida for the next two. That was my plan for the summer. A plan I was happy with. One I consented to and was looking forward to. It was exactly the same as my plan for summer last year. And the year before. And the year before that.
