Roseline

Jimmy grew up behind locked doors. His only access to the real world, before he struck twelve was the TV and a window in the attic. He hated the attic. 

He wasn't a recluse by choice. His parents hadn't thought they would be turning their only child into a recluse either. They hadn't thought of him at all.  

When Jimmy's mom had him, he was a bouncing baby boy with the widest of smiles and happy giggles. He rarely cried unless he was hungry or his diaper was full. He never cried when he was separated from his mama or papa.  

And that gave his parents the perfect excuse to drop him off with a nanny the minute he turned three months.  

His mother worked in a bank and unlike most people, she wasn't working there because she couldn't find anything else to do. She worked in a bank because all she had ever wanted to be since she knew that two plus two equaled whatever the pen wrote down, was a Banker.  

Her husband was a Lawyer and while he may have wanted to be something else, the fact that she married him was no coincidence. She had her specifications for what kind of man she wanted to marry and the foremost of them was that he had to be a lawyer— It meant free legal advice. She would not pay a dime.  

Jimmy wasn't aware of his mother's careful planning, the same way she hadn't been aware of him until she was six months pregnant and her belt wouldn't buckle around her belly anymore.  

She had gone through all the vomiting and morning sickness of the first trimester but had simply thought she was tired. There was no way she would be going to the hospital to find out what was wrong and then miss work. 

Besides, if she liked hospitals, she would have married a doctor instead.  

Well until the baby bump reared its head, Jimmy's mom was oblivious to the life growing inside her. And then she had grown bitter and angry at her husband for giving her a baby when he knew just how much she hated to be away from work.  

It was in this conflict that little Jimmy was born. His father didn't pay attention to him much. He had a case against a superior colleague who questioned his intelligence. A simple dispute turned into an unending legal battle. His mother did not like to see his face either.  

It was a sad thing. For a child to be so callously dismissed. He grew up with a nanny hovering around him and when he was six and knew nothing but SpongeBob SquarePants, the nanny informed Jimmy's parents that their son would need School.  

"And just who is supposed to drive him to and from school?" Jimmy's mother had asked, with a haughty look on her face. She declared that he would be home schooled and that sort of sealed Jimmy's fate.  

When his paternal grandmother arrived for a holiday, she met a twelve-year-old boy who barely knew how to read and write but looked as white as snow with gangly limbs. She cried at the sight, decided her son and his wife were no good, and then hauled her grandson home with her.  

And it was in her middle-class neighborhood that Jimmy met Roseline.  

Roseline was everything that Jimmy was not. She had been dropped off in an orphanage as a baby and had been taken in twice before living with her current foster mother. They weren't rich, they didn't even have a TV so when Jimmy tried making a joke about SpongeBob SquarePants, he hadn't gotten any reaction from her. 

Except the look of disgust on her face.  

See, being locked in for twelve years, Jimmy suffered from a serious deficiency of vitamin D and social etiquette. He ate with his hands, played with his spittle, and spoke with his nose if he bothered to speak at all. He was mostly quiet, off in a corner, lost in his imaginary world of colors and fishes and talking sponges.  

He had no interest in others. Not even Grandma. And not the kids in the school she enrolled him in. He was used to being ignored and had grown to love it. But Grandma kept getting all involved in his business, forcing him to play with kids his age.  

And that was how he met the neighbor's daughter, Roseline.  

To Jimmy, she was glorious. The one person who made him want to speak. He wanted to tell her about all the places he had gone with SpongeBob, and how he could take her there too.  

Roseline however didn't like being paired constantly with the weird skinny boy who looked like he could give Dracula a run for his pale skin. She played being nice to him before their parents then bullied him whenever no one was looking.  

Jimmy didn't mind it. He loved it when her eyes were on him. When she paid attention. When she smacked his face or shoved him away from her. And when she wasn't there, he craved her presence like fish did for water.  

His Grandma's worries shifted from him not spending enough time outside, to him spending way too much time with one girl. Her worries grew when a year later, she walked into his room and it was covered with pictures of Roseline.  

Grandma had hurried over to the neighbor's house and told Roseline to stay away from her poor grandson. Roseline had told her to keep her crazy grandson away. Either way, Jimmy did not care.  

He failed at school, except for music. All he thought about was Roseline and the only way he passed music classes was because he wrote songs about Roseline. He was everywhere she went. When she found a job at the movies, he tried to get hired too, failed, and decided he would simply just hang around her.  

To him, she was light, air, and everything wonderful.  

To her, he was suffocating. 

Roseline moved out of the little suburbs when she was nineteen, traveling to another continent to settle in. She had crushed a note in his hands before the cab took her away.  

"Grow up Jimmy," it read.  

Jimmy took the note inside and stood before the mirror to see a gangly eighteen-year-old with sparse blonde hair, staring back at him.  

Roseline, halfway across the world, got a job, had a family, and forgot, mostly, about the gangly guy who was obsessed with her.

Years later, her teenage daughter would bop her head to the beats of a song titled "I grew up, Roseline."