He walked out into the September dusk, the air sharp with the promise of autumn. Seventeen was not an answer. Seventeen was a bridge, and he was standing in the middle, the past a dim shoreline behind him, the future a fog he couldn’t see through. But the wind on his face felt like something. Like maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t broken. Like maybe he was just becoming.
“Roo? Meatloaf’s in an hour.”
He slid down the doorframe until he was sitting on the threadbare carpet. His room was a museum of a younger self: guitar picks that no longer inspired him, a half-finished model of a ’69 Charger, a stack of college brochures he hadn’t opened. Everyone kept asking, “What do you want to do with your life?” As if seventeen was supposed to be the answer and not the question itself. rocco-s pov 17
Rocco pressed his forehead to his knees. He thought about Lena. Lena with the crooked smile and the book of Rilke poems she carried like a bible. Last month, at a party, she’d pulled him into a closet just to show him a glow-in-the-dark sticker of a jellyfish on the inside of the door. “See?” she’d said. “Even in the dark, there are things that make their own light.”
“Yeah,” he said. And for once, he didn’t say it like a lie. He walked out into the September dusk, the
The world, Rocco had decided, was not built for a boy who felt everything in capital letters. At seventeen, his bones ached with a fatigue that had nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with the performance of being fine. He stood in the doorway of his bedroom, one hand pressed flat against the jamb, watching his mother cry on the phone in the kitchen. She thought he couldn’t hear her. He heard everything.
That was the motto of being seventeen. Maybe. Not yes, because yes meant commitment, and commitment meant the possibility of failure. Not no, because no meant closing a door, and every open door was a future you couldn’t afford to burn. So: maybe. The coward’s gold. But the wind on his face felt like something
His phone buzzed. Leo. “Party at the point. Be there or be square, old man.”
