Page 13 of Two for Joy

“No, thanks.”

“My murder not good enough for you?”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Why not?”

“You did it out of anger.”

“Don’t we all.”

Romeo sighed, walking away. “No, not all of us do it from anger.”

“Why did you do it then?”

“The monster in me needed it.”

“Monster.” Will smirked.

Romeo collapsed on his bunk and stared at Chad’s face on the wall. Something had upset his magpie, and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

He ate, he exercised in his small cell, paced around the slightly bigger cage outside, then laid back down on his bunk. The days, hours, the minutes, the seconds, slowed, and he closed his eyes, rubbing his temples.

Chapter Four

Romeo waited obediently with his hands through the bars. Fred snapped the cuffs on, then he stepped forward, waiting for the gate to his cell to open.

His one-hour allowance of exercise in the yard. Fred and Paul led him the opposite way to the visiting the room through more doors and gates until finally he was outside, in the cage. A cage each of them stalked around at different points of the day. Romeo had the cage when the sun was high above his head, beating down on him with no shade to soften the heat. He paced, and the monster paced around his head. Hands finally free, but no chance of getting hold of someone, ending his countdown with the vital number one.

Paul and Fred watched him walk in silence.

He froze when a black glint caught his eye. He looked down at the ground, studying the beetle. Its mad dash across the cage with the monster. It was over halfway, only a meter from freedom, then it stopped, and they were caught in an odd standoff.

Romeo’s mind drifted to the past.

It had started with the spiders, but the bug brutality took on a new level when he began school. Romeo squashed beetles, woodlice, ants, ladybirds, anything he could under his shoes. He enjoyed it, but learned quickly that he shouldn’t have.

He’d been stamping on earwigs in the school playground. Alice Bell pushed him, told him to stop, it wasn’t nice, but he ignored her. How could something satisfying be not nice?

Then she told the teacher.

The teacher had come towards him, face twisted in disappointment, ready to tell him off. Romeo finally looked up from his art and saw the reaction of the other pupils and teachers, the disapproval, and in some, even fear.

What he was doing was wrong.

He started wailing, claimed it was an accident, and he felt sad for killing them. Despite Alice repeating it hadn’t been an accident, he’d killed them on purpose, he did every day, the teacher bought his wobbling bottom lip and the tears streaming down his cheeks.

The tears, after all, had been real, not for the earwigs, but for himself. He cried because something that felt good to him was wrong. He was wrong, and even at six years old, he knew it. At that age, he cared that he was different, didn’t want to be, and he tried his absolute best to stop squishing bugs.

But the monster, although only a pup, or a cub, or whatever it was at that point, would not be ignored.

“Romeo?”

He tore his gaze from the beetle. “huh?”

Fred was at the bars, looking concerned. “What is it?”

“A beetle.”

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