Even though he's too old for it, a man of ten like Dad always says and not a coward, Sheldon still hides inside his closet whenever he hears anything shattering. Later, he will have the vocabulary to describe this— trauma response, operant conditioning— but for now all he knows is that George can jam his keys into the ignition and Missy has open-armed friends two doors down and he's left to witness the carnage, because he's little and weak and no one wants him around.
Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, he recites mindlessly, his head in his hands, perched on a bin of Legos. The closet is dark— he can't read a word of the particle physics textbook he brought with him. It's hot (Texas in sticky-sweet July), and dusty despite his best cleaning efforts. His heart pounds thump-thump-thump against his throat, diastole and systole and diastole and systole—
"So who is she this time, George? More tits than brains again?"
"Why don't you ask your best buddy Jesus?" Dad's voice is too loud again, his words slurring into something unintelligible. "Ask him why the everloving fuck I settled for a bitch like you when I could've been laying a sweet broad like Reagan every night!"
Subconsciously, he gropes for the Transformers Reagan gives him whenever Dad takes her upstairs, stashed behind a pile of Christmas sweaters. He doesn't play with them— he hasn't even taken them out of their plastic packaging.
"I think the good Lord would forgive me," Mama says, in the low hiss she used when she discovered Dad's driving whiskey, "if I ground glass into your meatloaf, you—"
Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, neon.
(Where there is no emotion, there is no motive for violence. Where there is no emotion, the door does not slam so loudly that the entire house reverberates, as Dad goes and drinks away the sorrows he drank himself into. Where there is no emotion, he does not hear Mama's hitched breath as she begins to sob.)
Spock wouldn't be affected by this, he tells himself fiercely, suddenly. Spock would strive to find a rational explanation— okay, maybe even Spock couldn't parse why his father stays out too late and brings strange women home and can't put down the bottle, why his mother is on her knees around the clock and thinks that Ephesians 5:25 will save her marriage. But he wouldn't hide in here, because that's useless. That changes nothing.
He crawls out of the closet, squinting at the bright sunlight as he emerges, and he reads three chapters of his textbook on his bed pretending that he isn't here at all, he isn't.
Sodium, magnesium, aluminum, silicon, phosphorus.