2. “Dream things true”

2

"Dream things true"

Then

I met Romeo in August. I know that because my mom put a back-to-school countdown calendar on the fridge. Every night before bed, we stood in front of the fridge and crossed out the day that had passed. Most nights, Lexi and I fought about whose turn it was to use the pen. Or which pen to use. Or who was standing too close to the other. Most nights, my mom let her eyes flutter shut, took a deep breath, and tried not to look happy when she told us how many days of vacation we had left.

It had been a long, hot summer. Hotter and drier than usual for Michigan. I'd turned seven in June and Lexi was eleven. She'd started to find me annoying, through no fault of my own, and I'd started to find her boring because she'd become incredibly boring. She never wanted to play, and she spent all her time in her room, reading boring books or hanging out with her boring friends, yelling at me to leave her alone .

"Come on, you," said my mom, taking me firmly by the shoulder. "You need to get out of the house. Fresh air, that's what you need. We'll see you in a bit, Lex," she called upstairs. "I'm taking Jude to the park."

"Ugh, but the park's boring , and I wasn't even in Lexi's room. I didn't do anything. I just put my one foot in a tiny bit. Just my toes. The rest of me was in the hallway."

"He's trying to be annoying!" bellowed Lexi from upstairs.

"I'm not trying to be annoying. She's trying to be annoying," I grumbled as my mom marched me out of the house.

There was a woman at the park, in the shade near the swings, when we got there. She was tall and slender with long dusty-blonde hair that fell to the small of her back in a tangle of loose waves. She was barefoot, her sandals kicked to one side, toes digging into the grass. I didn't notice him immediately because of how her skirt flared out, but after a second, I realized a boy was hidden behind her. Upon further investigation, I saw a black dog hidden behind the boy.

"Hi," said my mom. The boy ducked his head farther out of sight, peering out only when it became clear our mothers had struck up a robust conversation that didn't look like it would taper off anytime soon.

The boy had bushy, overlong hair the same color as his mother's and wore a midnight-blue cape that hung down to his knees. His eyes were enormous. Light swirls of blue with long eyelashes that curled up and made him look wide-eyed even though, technically, his eyes were narrowed at me. He watched me warily without speaking or making any sudden movements.

"This is Romeo," said his mom. "He's shy. It takes him a little while to warm up, but I'm sure he'd love to play." She turned to my mom. "We moved here a couple of weeks ago. We've been so busy unpacking and getting things sorted that we haven't had time to meet anyone. Some of us have been going a little stir-crazy."

Our moms started chatting about how lovely it would be when school started and everyone got back into a nice routine. Romeo and I continued eyeing each other uneasily.

"What's your dog's name?" I asked when curiosity got the better of me.

Romeo considered me, eyes tracking up and down me for so long I thought he wouldn't answer, and then whispered, "Buddy."

"Does Buddy want water?" I'd seen lots of kids with dogs take them down to the water fountain and offer them a drink, and I'd always thought it looked like an important, grown-up thing to do, so I pointed behind me. "There's a fountain over there."

Buddy's head popped out from behind Romeo and his ears pricked at the sound of his name. He started moving as soon as Romeo did. The three of us walked to the spout in silence, Buddy glued to Romeo like a shadow. I turned the faucet on and Romeo cupped his hands together and offered Buddy some water. Buddy wagged his tail, which made me want to be part of it all. I cupped my hands together and offered him water as well, and though he paused, dipping his ears back and sniffing hesitantly before deeming me safe, he drank from my hands too.

Romeo observed silently. I could feel his gaze on my face as Buddy's tongue lapped at my palms and water ran through my fingers onto my shoes. By the time Buddy's thirst was quenched, my fate was decided.

I was in.

Romeo dried his hands on his cape and said, "Come on, let's go."

He took off toward the thicket of white oak trees near my house. He was fast. So fast I could barely keep up. As he ran, I noticed one corner of his cape was ripped.

"What happened to your cape?" I panted.

He didn't stop. "Wolf attack."

" Wolf attack? "

This time, he slowed and turned toward me. He glanced down at Buddy, eyes sparkling, and said, "Yeah. It was bad. For a while there, I wasn't sure I'd make it. The lone wolf of Alabaster got me." His cape flapped in the breeze as he turned to take off again, and that time, Buddy snapped at it, catching it between his teeth and pulling back. It hardly slowed Romeo. "To the Dark Forest!"

I followed incredulously, my interest piqued well beyond anything I'd felt all summer.

"What are we doing?" I asked when we arrived at the five straggly trees that made up the entirety of the Dark Forest.

"Foraging for food," he said as if it were obvious.

We collected dried leaves, small stones, bark, and as many acorns as we could carry. We piled them high and made repeated trips back to the fountain, running the faucet until a mud river meandered around us. We filled our water bottles and poured the contents onto the roots of the oak trees, digging up dirt with bare hands and enthusiastic assistance from a lone wolf. We molded the dirt into rounds, called them cakes, and adorned them with acorns and leaves.

Romeo's eyes flashed again. I realized the first time it happened had only been a hint. The second time, he did it with meaning .

"Would you like me to tell you a story?" he asked. And there, in my local park, on a late summer's afternoon, in the shade of a wizened white oak tree, reality faded and make-believe came to life around us.

Romeo painted with words, pictures so clear and vivid I can still see them sometimes when I'm caught in the quiet place between sleep and wakefulness. He told tales of magical creatures on crazy adventures. Mythical beasts and unlikely heroes. He wrote himself and Buddy into the story, and after a while, he wrote me in too. He found long sticks for us to use as blades and short ones as guards. He untied my laces and used them to fashion our swords. We defended our bounty and found hidden treasure, and when we were done, we set off again.

"Where to?" I cried, sword held high in one hand, a mud cake balancing precariously in the other.

Romeo cast his eye to the side of the park farthest from my house, slowing his pace and speaking in a somber, hushed tone. "To the dragon, of course."

The boulder that had always been a big, inconveniently placed rock morphed before my eyes, growing scales and a gargantuan pair of wings. "Inferno," Romeo called it. We offered the dragon the cakes we'd made—it liked them so much it almost lit Buddy on fire by accident. Once its hunger was sated, Inferno allowed us to mount it .

"Careful," warned Romeo as we clambered onto the rock, "dragons are wild. Only the brave can ride them."

Turns out, that day, we were the brave. We must have been because we rode that dragon until the sun hung low and the sky turned orange and pink.

"Home time," said my mom for the fifth time. This time, despite a chorus of complaints from Romeo and me, our mothers held firm.

"We have to go now, hon. I haven't started dinner yet and Dad will be home soon," said Romeo's mom. "We can meet up tomorrow though. We're practically neighbors." Romeo's house was directly across the park from mine. "I have Carol's number. We'll arrange something, I promise."

"Hey, Tiger," said Romeo, turning back as his mom led him home by the hand. It took me a second to realize he was talking to me. We'd played for hours, but I'd somehow forgotten to tell him my name, and he hadn't asked. I was wearing my favorite T-shirt that day, the green one with a big orange tiger and the word Roarrrr on the front. I loved that shirt so much that I was in a bad mood on the days it was in the laundry. By that late stage of the summer, my mom had taken to washing and drying it over night to avoid having to deal with me about it. "We ride at dawn."

His face was splattered with mud on one side and his hair was disheveled. His cape was a little more tattered than when I met him. It was twisted around his neck and hung askew, slightly lower on one side than the other.

He was a mess, that was certain. But he was heroic.

"Well, no," said his mom as they walked toward their house. "Not at dawn, Romeo. You can ride at noon or a little later. Actually, late afternoon is probably best because it's cooler then, but not at daw—"

"No one rides at noon, Mom. It doesn't happen. Everyone knows that. Who have you ever heard of riding at…?" Their voices faded as they moved out of earshot.

"Goodness," said my mom, guiding me home as best she could without getting her hands covered in mud. "What a lot of fun you've had."

She took me around to the side of the house and hosed me off before letting me inside. She made me take everything but my undies off and threw my clothes into the machine along with my shoes before we went upstairs.

Lexi stood at the landing and looked down in horror, bolting to her room and slamming the door shut as I approached.

My mom drew a bath for me and helped me wash my hair, scraping her nails gently across my scalp to dislodge the dirt and dried leaves. "Goodness," she said again as the jug of water she poured over my head ran brown .

I talked the entire time, a steady stream of "Romeo this" and "Romeo that." She nodded and smiled as I spoke, and when I told her Romeo said that if we closed our eyes and lay under the trees, the leaves would sing us a song, she said, "Ah, I see," and hummed softly, "Romeo is a dreamer."

My mom was right. Romeo was a dreamer. He spun words and worlds like no one I'd ever met. We played together every day for the rest of the summer. At first, we met in the park and then at his house or mine. His pool became Neptune or lava or an underwater forest, depending on the day. Our basement was a fortress or a maze or a cave or a safe place where no one could find us.

Days dragged out and flew by. Even though I was wired and denied being tired with my last breath, for the rest of that summer, sleep dragged me under the second my head hit the pillow.

I'd never had so much fun in all my life.

My mom and I met Romeo and his mom at the gate on the first day of school. Sally, Romeo's mom, had asked for us to be put in the same class and we were all happy the principal had agreed. Despite being in the same class, that day, Romeo had the same big eyes he'd had the day I first met him, wide and wild, and his mom kept adjusting his backpack and telling him how lovely everything was going to be.

Romeo looked different at school. He had no cape for one thing, and for another, he'd gotten a haircut that was a lot more than a trim. The bushy mane of summer was gone. His shorts and T-shirt were neat and new, and he stood very straight.

"Okay, honey," said Sally, kissing Romeo's cheek and quickly wiping her lipstick off as he made a face and tried to squirm out of her grip. Her voice sounded funny, and my mom put a hand on her shoulder. "Off you go. You'll have an lovely day, you'll see."

I could feel the tension in Romeo as we walked. His arms and legs were stiff and he hung back, falling into my shadow and making himself smaller until I stopped moving and turned to him. When our eyes met, I leaned my head close to his and whispered something into his ear. A message, a code I knew he'd understand. A reminder that even though we were at school and things were different, I knew who he was.

" Roarrrr! "

A slow smile crept up his face, and though he was still very straight and upright, he knew who I was too. His eyes twinkled, and he replied, "Easy, Tiger."

From that day onward, a precedent was set. Wherever one of us was, the other was too. My friends Dan, Ollie, and Lewis included Romeo right from the start. They seemed to innately sense there wasn't a choice in the matter. They seemed to understand Romeo and I came as a pair.

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 made sure 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?"