Rocco-s Pov 17 -

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.

He’d kissed her then. Not because he was brave, but because for one second, the pressure inside him found a pinhole. She kissed him back, and for three songs’ worth of time, he forgot he was seventeen. He forgot the absent father, the tired mother, the screaming silence. He just was .

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.

His phone buzzed. Leo. “Party at the point. Be there or be square, old man.” rocco-s pov 17

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.

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.”

“Ma,” he said, leaning over the railing. That was the motto of being seventeen

He typed back: “Maybe.”

He opened his bedroom door. The smell of meatloaf drifted up from the kitchen. His mother was humming—a nervous, off-key tune.

The Weight of Seventeen

“Roo? Meatloaf’s in an hour.”

Her face did something complicated. Relief. Worry. A flicker of the woman she used to be before life made her careful. “Okay, Roo. Be safe.”