LOTF: Before and After

Phase 3: Chapter 45

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.