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.