Bruiser

by Neal Shusterman

  Bruiser

  Neal Shusterman

  Dedicated to Gabriela, Melissa,

  Natalie, Geneva, and Jim Hebin,

  and all my friends at the

  American School of Mexico City

  Contents

  Tennyson

  1) Symbiosis

  2) Consolation

  3) Coercion

  4) Revelation

  5) Factoids

  6) Decimated

  7) Receptacle

  8) Obtuse

  9) Deteriorating

  10) Intercession

  11) Détente

  12) Misdirection

  Brontë

  13) Emphatically

  14) Ibex

  15) Howlingly

  16) Keelhauled

  17) Conundrum

  18) Peripherally

  19) Gastronomy

  20) Oblivious

  21) Detonation

  22) Reflexively

  23) Transference

  Brewster

  24) Injurious

  25) Epic

  26) Enumeration

  27) Orifice

  28) Anabolic

  29) Surreptitious

  Cody

  30) Stuff

  Tennyson

  31) Formidable

  32) Contrition

  33) Quietus

  34) Trajectory

  Cody

  35) Stuff

  Brewster

  36) Receiver

  Brontë

  37) Phosphorescence

  38) Cotillion

  39) Subterfuge

  Brewster

  40) Embolism

  Tennyson

  41) Incommunicado

  42) Dickensian

  43) Audacious

  44) Cathartic

  45) Palpable

  46) Subcutaneous

  47) Decimating

  48) Fallout

  Cody

  49) Stuff

  Brontë

  50) Precipice

  51) Bandwagon

  52) Clandestine

  Tennyson

  53) Ejection

  54) Agendum

  55) Unprecedented

  56) Pacified

  Brontë

  57) Abject

  58) Interloper

  59) Incongruous

  60) Illumination

  61) Implosion

  Brewster

  62) Swordsmanship

  63) Interface

  Tennyson

  64) Reclamation

  65) Painless

  66) Hello

  About the Author

  Other Books by Neal Shusterman

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  TENNYSON

  1) SYMBIOSIS

  If he touches her, I swear I’m going to rip out his guts with my bare hands and send them to his next of kin for lunch.

  What is my sister thinking? This guy—this looooser—has got no business breathing the same air as her, much less taking her out on a date. Just because he asked doesn’t mean she has to accept.

  “Are you afraid that if you say no, he’ll bury you in his backyard or something?” I ask the question over dinner, while I’m still steaming from the news.

  My sister, Brontë, gives me a look that says Excuse me, but I can take care of myself, and she says, “Excuse me, but I can take care of myself.” She learned that look from our mother, God rest her soul. I give Brontë back a look that says I think not, and I say, “You gonna eat that piece of pizza?”

  Brontë peels off the cheese, throws it on Dad’s plate, and eats the bread. She’s on a high-carb diet, which basically means she eats everything that Dad can’t on his low-carb diet. It makes them part of an evolved symbiotic relationship. That’s science. Just because I’m an athlete doesn’t mean I don’t have brains.

  Mom, God rest her soul, is still on the phone. She’s negotiating with the next-door neighbor, hoping to get him to stop mowing his lawn at seven AM on Sunday morning. I don’t know why she needs the phone; we can hear the other end of the conversation through the window. In order to get to the point, Mom has to strategically weave around the field, breaking down the neighbor’s defenses by talking gossip and being generally friendly. You know—lulling the guy into a false sense of security before going in for the kill. It’s such an all-important conversation that Mom had to order a pizza rather than cook. She also had to order it online, since she was already on the phone.

  Mom doesn’t cook anymore. She does nothing much motherly or wifely anymore since Dad did some unmentionables during his midlife crisis. Brontë and I have become convinced that Mom, God rest her soul, kind of died inside and hasn’t come back from the dead yet. We keep waiting, but all we get is Domino’s.

  “I’m sixteen,” Brontë says. “I can spend time with whoever I want.”

  “As your older brother, it’s my sacred duty to save you from yourself.”

  She brings her fists down on the table, making all the dinner plates jump. “The ONLY reason you’re fifteen minutes older than me is because you cut in front of the line, as usual!”

  I turn to our father, searching for an ally. “So Dad, is it legal for Brontë to date out of her species?”

  Dad looks up from his various layers of pepperoni and breadless cheese. “Date?” he says. Apparently the idea of Brontë dating is like an electromagnet sucking away all other words in the sentence, so that’s the only word he hears.

  “You’re not funny,” Brontë says to me.

  “No, I’m serious,” I tell her. “Isn’t he like…a Sasquatch or something?”

  “Date?” says Dad.

  “Just because he’s big,” Brontë points out, “that doesn’t mean he’s apelike; and anyway, you’re the lowest primate in our zip code, Tennyson.”

  “Admit it—this guy is just one more stray dog for you!”

  Brontë growls at me, like one of the near-rabid creatures she used to bring home on a regular basis. Our house used to be a revolving doggy door, until Mom and Dad put their feet down and we became fish people.

  “Is this a boy we know?” Dad asks.

  Brontë sighs and gnaws her cheeseless pizza in frustration.

  “His name is Brewster Rawlins, and he is nothing like what people say about him.”

  This is not the way to introduce your father to a prospective boyfriend, and I figure maybe Dad might be terrified enough to forbid her to date him.

  “Exactly what do people say about him?” Dad asks. Dad always begins sentences with the word exactly when he suspects he doesn’t want to hear the answer. I snicker, knowing that Brontë is stuck; and she punches me on the shoulder.

  What do they say about the Bruiser? I think. What don’t they say? “Let’s see…in eighth grade he was voted Most Likely to Receive the Death Penalty.”

  “He’s quiet,” says Brontë. “He’s inscrutable, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person. You know what they say: Still waters run deep—”

  “—and are full of missing persons.”

  Brontë hits me on the shoulder again. “Next time,” she says, “I’ll use your lacrosse stick.”

  “Inscrutable…,” Dad says, mulling over the word.

  “It means ‘hard to understand,’” shouts Mom from across the room as if he didn’t know. Mom never passes up a good opportunity to make Dad look stupid.

  “Your mother,” grumbles Dad, “knows full well that inscrutable was one of my words.”

  “Nope,” says Mom, “it was one of mine.”

  They’re referring to the vocabulary curse Brontë and I have been under since kindergarten. Mom and Dad alternate in force-feeding us one power word every day, which we are expected to swallow without vomiting. That
’s what you get when both of your parents are professors of literature. That, and being named after dead writers. Very aberrant, if you ask me (Mom’s word). As teachers, however, they should have realized that Tennyson Sternberger would not fit on a Scantron.

  “The Bruiser comes from a screwed-up family,” I tell Dad. “They’re a bunch of nut jobs.”

  “Oh,” says Brontë, “and we’re not dysfunctional?”

  “Only your father,” says Mom. “But apparently he’s taken care of it.”

  Mom could have been a great sniper if she had chosen that line of work. Every time she gets off a nice one, it gives me hope that her soul might be reviving.

  As for the Bruiser, he has no mother. No father either. No one knows what the deal is there. All people know is that he lives with his uncle and an eight-year-old brother who looks like he’s being raised by wolves. And this is the family Brontë wants to date into. My sister obviously was never visited by the common sense fairy.

  “Exactly when were you planning to see this boy?” Dad asks.

  “He’s taking me miniature golfing on Saturday afternoon.”

  “Real high-class,” I say.

  “You shut up!”

  And I do, because now I know everything I need to know about her so-called date.

  2) CONSOLATION

  I take my girlfriend, Katrina, to play miniature golf Saturday afternoon. Is it coincidence, or is it design? You tell me.

  “Must we?” she asks when I suggest it.

  “We must,” I answer, and offer no further explanation. Her hatred of miniature golf, I think, is born of the fact that her father golfed away her entire childhood instead of spending it at home. I suppose Wackworld Miniature Golf Emporium is a reminder of those dark times.

  “It’s a happy place,” I tell her. “You can’t hate Wackworld; it’s like hating Disneyland.”

  “I hate Disneyland,” she says, although she won’t tell me why. Actually, I’m afraid to find out.

  “Okay, I’ll go,” she tells me, “as long as we don’t keep score.” And since my motives have nothing to do with golfing competition, I agree.

  “You’re paying, right?” Katrina asks. “Because I will not pay money to hit a ball with a stick.”

  I tell her that I’ll pay, but she really didn’t need to ask because I always pay. Katrina’s very old-school when it comes to dating. The guy always pays, and holds doors for her, and pulls out chairs. I actually kind of like it; it’s cool pretending to be a gentleman.

  Katrina and I had begun as what you might call a consolation couple. In other words, she really wanted to go out with my friend Andy Beaumont, and I really wanted to go out with her friend Stacy VerMoot. But Andy and Stacy found each other, and have since become surgically attached at the hip. That left Katrina and me as each other’s consolation prize. As I had just dislocated my shoulder and Katrina wants to be a nurse, it all just popped into place.

  “Life,” my father had once said, “is all about settling.” Unfortunately, he’d said that right in front of Mom, who proceeded to serve him a peanut butter and onion sandwich for dinner that night.

  “Life is all about settling,” she reminded him as she slipped the plate in front of him. His response had been to eat the whole horrific sandwich out of spite, then catch her unawares with a big, slobbery, peanut butter and onion kiss. After that they didn’t speak to each other for about a day and a half. I swear, parents can be such children.

  I meet Katrina at her house, and we walk to Wackworld, since buses in our corner of suburbia don’t go anywhere but to some place called the Transportation Center, where you can catch a dozen other buses that don’t go anywhere. Since I’m still not old enough for a license, my only choices are bike, parental taxi, or my own two feet. Katrina always prefers walking, because it provides us with an opportunity to talk. Actually, it provides her with an opportunity to talk and me with the opportunity to listen. The only time those roles reverse is after a lacrosse game, when you can’t shut me up.

  “…so for the entirety of math class,” Katrina continues, “Miss Markel has one of her false eyelashes dangling half on, half off her left eye, like a caterpillar; and the whole class is watching and waiting for the thing to drop….”

  I don’t mind her stories anymore. When we first started going out, I would zone out when she got into it; but as time went on, I got used to it and actually found that I enjoyed listening.

  “…I don’t know why she wears false lashes; I guess it must be a generational thing, like the way some women pluck out their eyebrows, then paint on fake ones, or like foot binding in India—”

  “China.”

  “Right, and I think she wears a wig, too. So anyway, she finally turns her head real fast and off the eyelash flies, and where does it land? Right on the head of Ozzy O’Dell—who had just shaved all his body hair for swimming, including his head; and since the thing still has a little glue, it sticks there on top of his scalp, like a teeny-tiny Mohawk, and he doesn’t even know….”

  The thing about Katrina is that her voice is kind of hypnotic, like a spiritual chant in some foreign language.

  “…so tell me, how was I supposed to focus on a math quiz with Mini-Mohawk Ozzy sitting in front of me, the thing flapping in the breeze from the open window?”

  “Did Markel ever notice it?”

  “Yeah, like five minutes before the end of class she saw it, quietly plucked it from his head, then slipped it into her desk drawer, thinking no one saw, even though everyone did—but by then it was too late to get my quiz done, so the whole thing was a crash and burn of epic proportions, and all because of a stupid fake eyelash.”

  Katrina’s life is very dramatic. Maybe my sister thinks that by going out with the Bruiser she’ll have drama, too; but I know guys better than she knows guys, and knowing that guy, I think she’s in for something more in the horror genre.

  3) COERCION

  The entrance to Wackworld Miniature Golf Emporium is marked with a massive sign all done in bright red letters on a very serious black background. The sign warns of all the activities that are not allowed. Every few months a new item gets added as visitors come up with amazing new activities to threaten life, limb, and property. Any time I go there, I make a point of reading the sign to find out what new things have been added. Here are my personal favorites:

  Do not fill the fountain with alcohol, gasoline, or other flammable substances!

  Attaching children to the arms of the windmill by means of staple gun or other such devices is strictly prohibited!

  Toads, turtles, and other small animals may not be substituted for golf balls!

  Please do not paint genitalia on the mermaids!

  I am proud to say that I was responsible for the addition of that last one a few years back.

  As we enter through the gate, I scan the rolling hills of concrete and artificial turf until finding Brontë and the Bruiser. They’re on hole three but have moved on to hole four by the time Katrina negotiates herself an acceptable club and demands a red ball from the ball shack geek.

  “Why red?” I ask.

  “Easier to spot,” she says. “Besides, red is the new black.”

  “I thought pink was the new black.”

  “Yes, but red is the new pink.”

  I point at my shirt. “What does that say for green?”

  “It only gets worse for green.” Then she hits her ball; it smacks the windmill blade and comes flying back at us.

  “I hate windmills,” says Katrina.

  “You and Don Quixote.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.” I suffer the constant scourge of literary parents. Thank God I’m good at sports, or I might have been pegged early in life and beaten up in hallways. Life is cruel.

  We putt our way through the first hole. Just ahead of us, a slow-moving family allows us to play through. I get a hole in one, and that speeds us along. Now Brontë and the Bruiser are only two holes ahead.

/>   “Hey,” says Katrina, “isn’t that your sister?”

  “Oh, yeah, I guess it is.”

  “Who’s that she’s with?”

  I just shrug and continue playing. We both make a quick par three, and we’ve closed the gap down to one hole.

  Up ahead, Brontë has spotted me. I give her a grin and a little wave. She sends me back a chilly glare that could end global warming.

  “Hi, Brontë,” Katrina says as we finally intercept them.

  “What a surprise!” I say.

  “Yeah,” grumbles Brontë, “some surprise.”

  I look at the Bruiser—this is the first time I’ve ever been this close to him. He’s big. Not just big but hulking. At sixteen he’s got all this goat hair under his chin and wispy sideburns. His hair is dark, and neglected. You can tell he tried to comb it, but you can also tell he gave up halfway through. He looks like a vagrant in training. I hate him. I hate the concept of him. He’s a freight train of bad news barreling at my sister.