“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.
3
Sam
Had anyone bothered to ask Samantha Prescott what she was doing with her sixteen-year-old life, she would have replied, matter-of-factly and with more than just a touch of bitterness, “Waiting.”
But waiting for what, she had no idea.
Ever since she was a child, she had understood—with a conviction that had sailed far beyond the realm of mere belief and landed finally upon the unassailable shores of hard, scientific fact—that every last scrap of popularity and power her classmates squabbled over, when measured on any meaningful scale whatsoever, added up to a sum total value of diddly-squat.
Every day she watched in both fascination and horror as the other sophomores scrabbled and spat their way through the merciless arena of high school drama, acting as though it were a matter of life and death which members of the slave-like masses came out on top for the day, as though the entire spectacle weren’t just going to repeat itself again tomorrow.