The Intuitives(3)
If his mother thought for even a moment that he might be causing trouble again, well, she would start screaming and crying and carrying on like a banshee, and then Tony would leave (Roman’s luck being what it was) and next thing you know they’d be out on the street, this time with baby Xavious in diapers, and with Child Protective Services still sniffing around after the last time…
Roman knew he didn’t have a choice. Sighing deeply against the inevitable, he reached out his hand and opened the door.
He tried to do it casually, like he wasn’t scared. Acting nervous around Marquon was like squeezing lighter fluid onto a barbecue. So instead of easing the door open like he wanted to and peeking his way around the edge, he just pushed it wide and walked through it, kicking off his shoes and sparing only the briefest of glances in his brother’s direction.
Marquon was glued to a video game and acted as though he couldn’t care less that his little brother had come home, but Roman knew it was just a ploy. He knew it because the first red bee spiraled slowly up out of his brother’s right ear. It angled toward him, flying only an inch or so in his direction until it stopped, hovering in midair, staring straight at Roman, a silent vanguard of impending doom.
Roman had started seeing strange things around people when he was only four or five years old. He wasn’t clear exactly when it had started because he had had no idea at the time that he was seeing anything unusual. He would tell his mother that a woman in the grocery store had eight arms, or that the preacher on television had a tail like a mermaid, and his mother would either laugh and say, “Boy, you sure do have some imagination!” or would frown and tell him it was about time he started living in the real world, depending on her mood.
In those days, his mother had looked like she lived in the middle of a tornado, just like the one he had seen in The Wizard of Oz, that whirled and thrashed around her with a somewhat greater or lesser promise of destruction from one moment to the next. Lately, though, the wind had finally settled down to a gentle breeze that simply twirled her skirts playfully and ruffled her hair from time to time. Tony seemed to have a lot to do with that, and Roman prayed every night that Tony would stay in the picture so the tornado would never come back.
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.