The Intuitives(4)

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.

“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.