5. “Romeo, Romeo”

5

"Romeo, Romeo"

Then

It was the summer Romeo and I learned that if we chugged a big enough glass of Coke, we could burp the alphabet song from A to Z . We were fifteen. Our voices had dropped a while back. Mine happened gradually, a change so slow and subtle I almost didn't notice it. It just went a little lower each day until one morning, I went down to the kitchen and greeted my mom without clearing my throat first, and she turned to me in surprise and said, "Goodness! I thought you were dad."

It was different for Romeo. There was nothing slow or subtle about it for him. Pretty much overnight, he went hoarse and stayed that way for weeks. Sally kept threatening to take him to the doctor. Every time she mentioned it, Romeo gave me a panicked look, certain he was mere minutes from being dragged to a medical professional only to be diagnosed with a common case of balls dropping.

Each time she mentioned it, I smiled and said, "Don't worry, Sal. He'll be all right. "

And he was.

His new voice was husky and deep. It commanded attention and took me a while to work out if it suited him or not. After a few months of paying close attention, I decided it did. I got used to it. I even got used to the fact that when he spoke, I felt the sound in my belly, not in my ears like I used to.

I think it took Romeo longer to get used to his new voice. It was almost as though it startled him. Like he didn't recognize it as his own. He seemed a little fearful of it and spoke more quietly after it changed. Not just at school. At home too. A soft, throaty purr that seemed to exist on a sound wave all its own.

There were other changes, too, and lots of them. That summer, when I wasn't with Romeo, I held down the sofa with my full body weight, eating everything I could lay my hands on and refusing to move no matter what anyone had to say about it.

"What are you going to do today, Jude?" asked my mom. "Surely you're not planning on lying around all day and doing nothing again."

"I'm not doing nothing."

"Well, it looks a lot like you're doing nothing. "

"I'm not doing nothing," I said, curling a bicep and watching in satisfaction as it swelled and made the sleeve of my T-shirt grow snug. "I'm growing muscle."

"Oh my God, you're awful," said Lexi.

"Can you make me a sandwich? Ma? Lex? Come on, I'm dying of hunger here."

"Sure, honey." My mom sighed. "How many do you want."

"Dunno. Just make the whole loaf, I guess. If I don't eat them all, I'll take 'em to Romeo's when I go over."

Romeo had grown up but wasn't muscular like me. He was lanky, almost as tall as me for the first time ever, and had a big complex about the size of his feet. In my opinion, it wasn't so much that his feet were too big. It was that his legs were too long and skinny. Not that I told him that. Jesus no. The last thing I needed was for him to develop a complex about anything else.

Romeo wasn't loving being fifteen. Being from a different world when you're a kid is very different from being from a different world when you're a teen. As a kid, he knew enough to try to hide it when he was around others, but as a teen, he felt the difference more keenly. He was an outsider, and he knew it.

I rang the bell when I got to his house, though I didn't need to. The door was always unlocked, and even if it hadn't been, I had my own key. I only did it so Romeo would stick his head over the balcony outside his window and yell at me. He didn't disappoint.

"What are you doing? Stop ringing the bell and get inside."

"Romeo," I cried as his face creased in disdain, knowing full well what was coming. "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?" To add a little flair to my performance, I raised the pitch of my voice and shielded my eyes with my hand, casting my gaze around his front yard as I said it.

He disappeared from view and reappeared a few seconds later, leaning over his balcony and throwing a shoe at me. I laughed and dodged it easily, so he threw the other one down too. I caught that one, sniffed it, and was about to tell him how much it stank when he said, "Wherefore means why , Jude, not where, okay? You've literally just said why are you Romeo? Not where are you, Romeo? Stop looking around like a dumbass when you say it."

"O vanquished stars! O fairest summer day!" I'm not saying my grasp of Shakespeare was good. It wasn't. I ad-libbed in a big way. "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore do I love thee thou doth. I mean, why fore do I love thee thou doth? I bid thee to answer adieu."

" Adieu? Thee thou doth? Jesus, Jude," he said, one corner of his mouth quivering as he tried not to smile. "What's wrong with you? Get in here before I change my mind." He closed his window and opened it again. "And bring my shoes with you."

I dropped his shoes on the porch as he swung the front door open and let me in.

Romeo's house was one of my favorite places in the world. Stepping inside felt like stepping into a worn, time-weathered Renaissance painting. The walls were painted dusty blues and burnt ochre. The drapes were made from heavy, vintage velvet and most of the paintings were antique store finds complete with cracked paint and ornate gilt frames. Studies of torsos, hands, and faces that seemed to writhe if you looked at them for long enough. Sally loved beautiful things and saw beauty where most people missed it. She was one of those people who walked through life so lightly it looked like she was dancing, but she left a big mark.

I never asked her about it, and I've often wished I had, but my strong suspicion was that she decorated the house around Romeo. To suit him. At least, that's what it looked like to me. Everything in the house seemed to go with him. The colors, the vibe, it was like Sally understood that he didn't fit comfortably into the outside world, so she created a world that was perfect for him.

Romeo gave me his usual up-nod crossed with a slight snarl when he saw me. His hair had grown long like it always did over the summer, curling at the back of his neck and falling into his face, giving him an unruly curtain to skulk behind if he slouched just right.

"D'you have a good time at the lake?" I asked.

He mulled it over and said, "Not really, no. I found myself underwhelmed, to be honest." He waved me into the house and down the hall. "Seen one big body of water, seen them all, I guess."

I wasn't particularly surprised by his response. Despite the fact that Glen Lake boasted translucent water and rolling dunes and was often regarded as the most beautiful lake in the whole state, at that time in our lives, Romeo was one of two things: underwhelmed or overwhelmed. And he generally reserved overwhelm for the school year.

"Brought you a sandwich," I told him, "but I got hungry on the way over, so I ate it."

That plunged him into the depths of despair. It didn't take much, in those days, to do it, so that didn't surprise me either.

"You ate my sandwich? Dammit, Jude, I haven't had breakfast yet. Why would you do that? You know how I get when I'm hungry. "

I tried to change the subject as we tried in vain to find something decent to watch on TV, but he kept circling back to the sandwich. "What was on the sandwich?" "Did you make it, or did Carol?" "Was it the good mustard or the one I don't like?"

He didn't let up until I threatened to make him a sandwich myself.

"Oh, hell no. No way. You use far too much mayonnaise. There's no way I'm eating a sandwich you made. You almost poisoned me last time."

"Well, is your mom here then? Maybe she can make us a club," I suggested hopefully.

Sally was the queen of snack food. While my mom's catering focused on quantity, Sally's was geared toward quality. She made her sandwiches with thickly sliced artisanal bread and never built one without at least four or five toppings. Finely sliced green apple, delicatessen cheeses with names I couldn't pronounce, you name it, she'd put it on a sandwich. She used to serve them on a lap tray with a whole lot of little bowls scattered around the main plate. Each bowl contained something different. Nuts, jerky, fruit, that kind of thing.

God, I loved those little bowls. Sally once told me she used them because when Romeo was little, he hated when different types of food touched each other .

"Nah, she's out. She has a work thing. Won't be back till tonight."

"Well then, the best I can do is offer you a grilled cheese."

"Hmm, I guess I could go for a grilled cheese."

He sat on a kitchen stool, swinging from side to side as I worked, back-seat driving my grilled cheese-making process for all he was worth.

"That slice is too thick." "That slice is too thin." "That's too much cheese."

"Romeo, come on. There's no such thing as too much cheese. Everyone knows that."

I took the grilled cheese off the stovetop, burning the knuckle on my thumb in the process, and served it to him along with three tiny bowls all filled with cashew nuts. I couldn't be assed to put in the kind of effort Sally put in but felt wrong about making a snack in Romeo's house that didn't utilize a butt load of bowls.

"Happy now?" I asked as he took his first bite.

He chewed slowly and looked down at the tray on his lap, then he swallowed and took a sip of the homemade lemonade I'd found in the fridge. "I am, actually, yeah."

"Whelmed?"

That amused him. Around that time, Romeo often said all he wanted was to experience whelm one time. He didn't want to be over or under. He just wanted to know what the middle ground felt like.

"Almost." He smiled when he said it.

Actually, it wasn't a smile so much as a quirk of his top lip. Romeo did this thing where the rest of his face would remain neutral, but his lip would flare up on the right side. He'd show a flash of teeth and the slightest hint of gum. A barely-there sliver of pink that did something to me.

The lip thing wasn't new. Romeo had done it for as long as I'd known him. He did it when he was happy. Or sad. Or angry. When he liked something. When he judged someone. He did it for lots of different reasons. He always had. What was new was that, for some reason, that summer, when he did it, I had an almost uncontrollable urge to lean in and put the tip of my tongue into the space created between his lips.

"Swim?" I suggested.

I swam a few lengths and stood chest deep in the water to cool down. It was a damn hot day. Romeo sat in the sun, skin glinting, reading a book, stopping once in a while to complain about something totally random.

His skin was pale in winter. So pale you could see blue-green tracks running up his arms if you looked hard enough. You'd think he'd be one of those people who wouldn't hold a tan because of his fair coloring, you know, one of those people who burn and turn pink and then revert right back to their original color, but you'd be wrong. Every year, his skin changed as summer wore on. It turned darker, golden, and then almost dusky. His hair did too. It stayed dark at the roots, light ash brown, but turned blond at the tips by the time August rolled around.

That day, as I watched him, I found myself thinking that Romeo was a kaleidoscope, always turning, changing colors with the season. Always different. Never static. The only thing that remained constant was his eyes. Those never changed. Dreamy glass-bottle blue that somehow managed to be light and ethereal and intense at the same time. Irises so pale that sometimes, when I saw him at a distance, he looked like an overexposed portrait someone had smudged an oil pastel across.

After a while, he put his book down and moved to the pool, sitting at the edge and dipping his feet in the water. He blew out a long sigh in three or four separate stages. I could tell what he was going to say next from the way he did it.

"Did you hear Ollie kissed Willow at the movies last night? Like properly. With tongue."

I had heard that. Ollie texted me the second he got home to tell me and then called when I didn't reply to the text fast enough .

"Is that right?"

It wasn't that I didn't like where the conversation was headed so much that I was bored of it. Romeo tended to be repetitive about things that bothered him, and he'd been bothered by this topic for well over a year. I knew exactly what I was in for. I swam another couple of lengths as he droned on about how unfair life was and how everyone except for him had been kissed.

"I haven't been kissed either," I reminded him from the deep end the third time he said it.

"Yeah, but you know that doesn't count."

"How come?" I asked to be difficult. We'd had this exact conversation so many times I knew the answer by heart.

"Because, Jude , tons of girls have tried to kiss you." He raised a hand and counted off angrily on his fingers. "Allison, Carrie, Olivia Swales, Olivia Romero…"

I cut him off before he could ask the question I knew was coming next. "Too loud. Too quiet. Smells like ChapStick. And, I dunno, looks like she'd taste minty, I guess."

"Taste minty? Smells like ChapStick? Seriously? What's wrong with ChapStick? It smells nice."

It wasn't so much that there was something wrong with the way ChapStick smelled as it was that I didn't want ChapStick that had been on a girl on me. It was hard to explain, so I didn't bother.

"You're messing up, Jude." It wasn't the first time I'd heard this either. "Seriously, you are."

I placed both hands on the edge of the pool and hoisted myself out of the water, turning and sitting next to him as water ran off me and formed a pool around me.

Our feet were distorted by the water, looking bigger and then smaller depending on how the light hit them. We both watched them for a while, and I wondered if Romeo would start complaining about the size of his feet again. He didn't. He moved his legs slowly as if trying not to cause a ripple in the water. As he did it, the polyester of his swim shorts made a soft, synthetic sound against mine. It was one of those things that had happened a hundred times before, but it felt different that time. Closer. Louder.

"How am I messing up?" I asked when I realized he wasn't going to change the subject and was still waiting for me to reply.

He rolled his eyes. "I've told you a thousand times. Seriously, how many times do I have to explain it to you? You have the perfect opportunity here. Lots of girls like you. You could kiss a bunch of them for, for practice or whatever. That way when you meet one you like a lot, you'll know what you're doing. You're lucky. You have options. I'm in deep shit here. I'm going to be twenty by the time a girl finally likes me, and I won't know how to kiss. I'll literally be the only twenty-year-old ever who's never been kissed, and it will show. I'll blow my chance. She'll probably laugh and tell all her friends, and, and I'll never get kissed again, and my entire life will be ruined."

Romeo had a major tendency to catastrophize. "I'm sure your entire life won't be ruined," I teased.

His eyes flashed in annoyance. "You don't think messing up a kiss with a girl who's my soulmate will be a disaster?"

"Nah, you know I'm not really sold on soulmates. There's no way there's only one person for everyone. It's wildly improbable. Impossible even."

"More than one soulmate?" His mouth turned down at the corners. "Don't be disgusting, Tiger."

Romeo had some very fixed notions about what being soulmates involved, and I loved riling him up about it. I really loved it. I got a big kick out of hearing him talk about things like that in those days. His whole face would become animated and he'd move closer to me so I'd be in no doubt about the strength of his opinion.

He glared at me, so I caved and said, "It won't be a disaster, Romeo."

"It will be. Of course it will be. This is serious, Jude. My entire future happiness is at stake, and you're making jokes. I'm falling behind. You are too, but you're too dumb to notice. "

It was one of those times I started talking without thinking through what I was saying. It happened sometimes, but usually, I had a vague idea of what I was going to say beforehand. You know, an inkling, an idea of the direction I was headed in, at least. Not that time. That time, I didn't have a clue. In fact, I hardly even recognized the sound of my voice when I heard it.

"I'll kiss you."