Every morning, all three members of the Langley family continued to wake up only to discover that the nightmare wasn't over. Jeffery and Laurie bent over backwards trying to figure out how to help Ralph, to no avail. He refused to go into counselling, and they couldn't begin to crack the surface of the wall he'd built around himself.
Jeffery poked his head into Ralph's room the morning after he'd torn a cluster of the stars off his ceiling. He was surprised to find Ralph still asleep at 12:45 in the afternoon. He was even more surprised to find the boy sleeping in his actual bed rather than settling on the floor like he had been up until now. Jeffery expected to feel relief at the sight of him in his own bed for the first time since the rescue, but deep down he knew that recovering from the island had nothing to do with it. It left a rather unsettling feeling in his stomach.
Jeffery glanced over at the kitchen stool laying on its side near Ralph's closet. His eyes then found the torn down glow-in-the-dark stars scattered in the center of the room. He lifted his gaze up to the large, empty patch on the ceiling above. He turned back to a sleeping, unmoving Ralph on the bed. The boy was facing the wall, and Jeffery couldn't stop staring at the back of his messy brown head. He wondered what on earth had provoked Ralph to destroy his roof in the middle of the night. It was the first mentionable thing he'd done in over a month. Jeffery knew that there was something seriously wrong buried deep inside the boy, but he wasn't expecting it to come out so ... randomly.
"I figured out what happened to the stool" Jeffery announced as he joined his wife in the living room.
"Oh?" she lifted her head from her book, intrigued.
"Ralph used it last night to dismantle his ceiling" he tightened his lips after he finished speaking, troubled by the lack of clarity in his son's actions.
"He did what?" Laurie set her book down.
"Seems he used the stool to get at the ceiling. He ripped down a bunch of the glowing stars we hung on the roof when he was little" Jeffery elaborated as he plunked tiredly down beside his wife on the couch.
"Why would he do that?" Laurie scrunched her eyebrows judgementally, in confusion.
Jeffery sighed without answering, because he didn't have one. Why has Ralph done any of the things he's done over the last month? Laurie had to know that Jeffery wouldn't have a good answer to her question. Perhaps, she wasn't really asking him with the expectancy of a genuine response.
"What are we going to do with him?" Jeffery asked as he let his head fall back against the couch, staring up at the living room ceiling as if he could possibly find the answer he needed in it.
"I'm out of ideas" his wife admitted with defeat. "We just might have to ride this out, however long it takes."
"And if there is no out?" Jeffery bravely questioned as he looked to his wife for her reaction.
"I don't know" she thought sadly. "I don't know."
Laurie went to bed that night and for the next week to follow thinking about Ralph, the only person who had the answers, and the cruel way he withheld them and himself from her and Jeffery. One morning, after a horribly wretched dream, she woke up at 6:30 in a cold sweat. She'd been having endless nightmares about having to hospitalize Ralph, or pumping him full of anti-depressants, or him growing up and moving out and never speaking to them again, and the list of horrific possible scenarios went on from there. She realized that it had been weeks since the last time she hugged Ralph and he actually hugged her back. Now, he would let his arms hang limp at his sides, impatiently awaiting the moment she'd set him free.
At school, Ralph's teachers grew more and more concerned as his grades continued to plummet. Most of his classmates also noticed the drastic change in his engagement; an empty bitterness in the formerly kind way he used to speak to them. Ralph had been a team player, despite the fact that he disliked the school as a whole. He was a good looking kid, and more than a few of the girls had crushes on him. Most of all, he had been kind to everybody, made the kids others would cast aside feel included. He invited anyone sitting alone to come sit with him at lunch, even kids in younger grades. He never committed to school sports or clubs, but he clearly enjoyed gym class and was always heavily involved in the games they'd play. It was hard for his teachers and some of his fellow students to watch him deteriorate. He became more and more disengaged, distant, and dismissive with each passing day. He was sent to the school guidance counsellor one day, but the worried woman wound up sending him back to class with nothing concrete to report back.
By the third week, long after they'd been back from Christmas break, some of the less friendly eighth grade students started to pick on Ralph. They taunted him in an effort to get a reaction from the kid who never reacted to anything. But nothing they did or said made Ralph feel a goddamn thing. He didn't care that he was being called names like 'the mute kid, the soulless kid, and empty inside.' They'd say things about him like 'the lights are on but no one's home' and 'I wonder how hard you'd have to punch him to wake him up.'
Kids took notice to the fact that Ralph often came to school wearing the same clothes days in a row. He'd wear two different outfits per week at most. Kids asked him, mockingly, if his washing machine was broken before bursting into a fit of laughter. But Ralph was indifferent to being laughed at by the classmates he had always thought to be like Jack and Roger on the island. Others he'd categorized as being like the other boys; following and supporting bullies in an effort to prevent themselves from becoming their victims. But none of that mattered to Ralph anymore. He didn't notice nor care who said what about him. Everything rolled off his back like butter, in one ear and out the other. His science teacher asked him one day if he was doing okay after she'd heard some of the rather unpleasant comments some students made about him earlier. Ralph simply shrugged and claimed that he hadn't been listening.
After thirty-six days of shutting down, tuning out the world, blocking all the memories that dared to come to the forefront of his mind, Ralph realized that he hadn't cried one time since the day Jack broke it off. It was unlike him; Ralph had formerly been a rather emotional person. He cried when he was happy, sad, disappointed, relieved, overwhelmed, amazed, and everything in between. Now, he couldn't even remember what it felt like to cry, to feel the warm, moist tears streaming down his face, the salty liquid clouding his vision. All Ralph had memory of feeling was indifferent. And perhaps a little angry a time or two, when he occasionally failed to control his unwinding thoughts.
Ralph stared at himself in the mirror that following Friday night after a day of being bullied by the bored kids in his class, doing homework and sitting in front of the video game console, zoning out. He was used to hearing his parents whisper about him, talk about how they hardly recognized him anymore. He stared through his own dead eyes in the reflection of his bathroom mirror, and he saw it too. It looked as if the life had been vacuumed straight out of him somehow, leaving behind a hollow shell of the person he used to be. He thought about how happy he once was; lucky to have two parents who loved him endlessly, gracious to have a roof over his head and food on the table, proud of the morals he upheld, the way he treated others, and the accomplishments he'd achieved in the first thirteen years of his life. He once believed that he had everything he'd ever need, and he was blessed to have such a rich childhood experience, one he knew not everyone was lucky enough to have, Jack Merridew included. He'd been happy before he loved Jack, he'd been happy at the academy, and he'd even happy after being rescued from the island. He had been so immersed in Jack, so in love with him, that now he didn't know how to live without him. Ralph was too angry, too stuck, too devastated to remember that life would go on with or without him, and without Jack too. He forgot that his actions had consequences, and that his behavior had a grave impact on those around him. Or perhaps he didn't forget at all, perhaps it just didn't matter anymore.
As Ralph stared at his reflection, he turned on the tap water in an attempt to drown his troubling thoughts. But the calming sound of the running water did nothing more than add background noise to them. Ralph thought about Jack as he stared at himself; his eyes cold and empty, an absent look on his face. It was Jack's fault, Ralph decided, as he tuned out the sound of the running tap. His eyes were stuck on the blue Outward Bound t-shirt he was wearing, an old t-shirt turned pyjama shirt he hadn't changed out of in at least three days now. He did Outward Bound, a nation-wide boy scout type program a few summers ago, less than two years before the island. It's where he learned that he could use eye glasses as a reflector against the sun to create fire. He'd been taught how to survive in nature, but not how to survive heartbreak.
But it wasn't Outward Bound's fault, or his parents' fault, or his classmates' faults. It was all Jack's fault. Jack had spent months building him up, caring for him, protecting him, supporting him, immersing himself in Ralph's life only to tear it all apart in a matter of minutes. Ralph thought about the disturbed way his father looked at him, the helpless way his mother did. All because of Jack. Nobody was brave enough to sit too close to him anymore. His mother always kept a safe amount of distance between herself and Ralph when they sat in the same room. She stared at him nervously as if waiting for the moment he was gonna snap. His father became distant because Ralph was distant. He was too respectful, too polite to continue to push Ralph to come back to them. His parents were starting to give up on him, Ralph realized. He noticed that his face was heating up and his reflection looked red hot with the anger that was boiling inside him.
Jack had unpredictably changed on a dime, Ralph recalled. But now, it was his turn.