Bruiser

by Neal Shusterman

  Then Uncle Hoyt slinks out from his lair, and Brewster withdraws his hand like he’s been caught with it in the cookie jar. The man looks at us suspiciously, as if we’re plotting against him. “What’s he still doing here? Didn’t I tell you to get rid of Tri-tip?”

  The Bruiser opens his mouth to say something, but I speak first. “What is he supposed to do, snap his fingers and make it go away?”

  The man grins, and it’s something slimy and nasty. All of a sudden I feel unclean again. “Can’t expect you to lift the whole animal at once,” he says. “The chain saw’s out in the shed.”

  12) MISDIRECTION

  When I get home that night, I don’t say anything to Brontë about where I was and what I did that afternoon. Even when she comments at dinner that I smell funny, I just tell her I’ll take a shower—even though I’ve already taken two.

  I won’t get into the details of Tri-tip’s disposal. It was not a pretty sight. I can only thank God there are Dumpsters just on the other side of the Bruiser’s fence. Now I understand the close-knit nature of the Mafia, because there’s something bonding about disposing of a body.

  The next day I see the Bruiser during passing, between second and third periods. We nod to each other an unspoken greeting, almost like it’s something secret. He raises a hand to hoist his backpack farther up on his shoulder, and that’s when I notice the knuckles on his right hand. Four out of five knuckles are all raw and starting to scab. I figure he must have scraped them up pretty badly during our bull-carving extravaganza yesterday afternoon.

  Reflexively I look at my own knuckles and notice right away that my scabs are gone. I tend to heal quickly, so I try to dismiss it. After all, how often do I actually look at my knuckles? I get scraped and bruised so much, I don’t notice it anymore.

  Except that I did notice my scabbed knuckles yesterday. The Bruiser and I both did.

  I try to tell myself it’s nothing, that it’s one of life’s simple tricks, just like a stage magician’s clever misdirection to keep the audience baffled. Yet deep down I know there’s something more going on here. Something truly inexplicable I’m afraid to consider.

  BRONTË

  13) EMPHATICALLY

  My brother’s an idiot.

  Sure, Tennyson’s smart, but he’s an idiot in all the other ways that matter. Such as when he forced his way into our miniature golf game and intimidated Brewster just because we went out on a date. It wasn’t even an evening date; it was a middle-of-the-afternoon date, which as anyone can tell you, is barely a date at all. The problem with Tennyson is that he has to be in control of everything. It’s like he’s worried the whole world will fall apart if he’s not holding it together. He thinks no one can survive without the protection of his iron fist, least of all me.

  Well, in spite of what Tennyson might think, I am not entirely void of common sense, thank you very much. I deal with boys far better than he deals with girls. Don’t believe me? Then take a nice, long look at his current “relationship” with Katrina, who has the right name, because she’s got natural disaster written all over her.

  I, on the other hand, know that with any boy it’s important to truly get to know him before the dates get serious. Not that I have all that much experience, but I’m blessed with friends who do. Their lives are like caution signs in the road, warning me against all the ill-advised things they have done.

  1) From Carly I learned never to go out on a date with the younger brother of the most popular guy in school…because he thinks he has something to prove, and he’ll try to prove it on you.

  2) From Wendy I learned that playing ditsy and stupid will only get you boys who are stupider than you’re pretending to be.

  3) From Jennifer I learned to avoid any boy with an ex-girlfriend who hates him with every fiber of her being…because chances are there’s a reason she hates him so much, and you may find out the hard way.

  4) From Melanie I learned that, while it’s true that guys have one thing on their mind, most are greatly relieved and easier to deal with if you make it emphatically clear right up front that they’re not going to get that one thing in the foreseeable future. Or at least not from you. Once that becomes clear, either they go after some girl who never learned the warning signs, or they stick around.

  I tried out point number four on a boy last year, and it worked. His name was Max—my first and only boyfriend before Brew—and we got a whole series of necessary milestones out of the way. First date, first kiss, first conniption fit from my parents for breaking curfew. He got the first suspicious look from my father, and I got the first suspicious look from his mother. With all those firsts out of the way, we were free to live normal lives.

  We eventually broke up, of course, because all training-wheel relationships must die if we ever intend to graduate from the sidewalk into the bike lane. We’ve remained friends, though, which has been very good for him socially (see point #3).

  As for me, popularity was never something I worried much about. I’ve always been as popular as I needed to be with the people I cared about, and fairly well liked, too—if you don’t count a handful of evil, insecure Barbies who call me Man-Shoulders because I’ve got a slightly developed upper body from swim team. I take comfort in knowing that while I often come home with gold around my neck, all the Barbies can ever hope for are rocks on their fingers.

  So then, with all that taken into account, I felt I was entirely conscious of the risks, and fully prepared to date Brewster Rawlins.

  I was spectacularly wrong.

  14) IBEX

  As much as I hate to admit it, my brother, Tennyson, was right about what first attracted me to Brewster. It was the stray dog thing.

  I’ve always had a dangerously unguarded place in my heart for strays. There was the time when I was ten and brought home a seriously psychotic shih tzu, which proceeded to attack everyone’s ankles, drawing more blood than so little a dog should be capable of doing. We named him Piranha and gave him to an animal rescue center that has a no-kill policy, although later I heard that Piranha almost caused them to change their policy.

  Regardless, I’ve discovered that nine out of ten strays have issues that are not life threatening, so I have no desire to change my ways, thank you very much.

  When it came to Brewster Rawlins, he might have had a home, but he was a stray in every other sense of the word.

  It all began the day he showed up in the library.

  I was a library aide at the time, which involved a lot of hanging around while the librarian tried to come up with busywork for me to do. I didn’t mind, because it gave me time to read, and be among the books. Do you know that if you take the books in an average school library and stretched out all those words into a single line, the line would go all the way around the world? Actually, I made that up, but doesn’t it sound like it should be true?

  Part of my job was to help other kids find books, because not everyone has a keenly organized mind. Some kids could wander the library for hours and still have no idea how to find anything. For them, the Dewey Decimal System might as well be advanced calculus.

  I figured that here was one of those kids, because I found him lurking in the poetry section looking like a deer caught in the headlights. A really big deer—maybe a caribou or an ibex.

  “Can I help you find something?” I asked as politely as I could, since I’ve been known to scare off the more timid wildlife.

  “Where’s the Allen Ginsberg?” he asked.

  It took me by surprise. No one came into our school library looking for Allen Ginsberg. I began to scan the poetry shelf alphabetically. “Is it for an assignment?” I was genuinely curious as to which teacher might assign radical beatnik poetry. Probably Mr. Bellini, who we all secretly believed had his brain fried long ago by various and sundry psychedelic chemicals.

  “No assignment,” he said. “I just felt like reading Ginsberg again.”

  That stopped me in midscan. In my experience, there are three rea
sons why a boy will want to take out a book on poetry:

  1) to impress a girl 2) for a class assignment 3) to impress a girl.

  So, thinking myself oh-so-smart, I smugly said, “What’s her name?”

  He looked at me, blinking with those ibex eyes. A nice shade of green, I might add.

  “Whose name?” he asked.

  At this point I felt embarrassed about having to explain my assumption, so I didn’t. “Never mind,” I said, then quickly found the book and handed it to him. “Here you go.”

  “Yeah, this is the one. Thanks.”

  Still, I found it hard to believe. I mean, Allen Ginsberg is not exactly mainstream. His stuff is out there, even by poetry standards. “So…you just want to read it for…pleasure?”

  “Something wrong with that?”

  “No, no, it’s just…” I knew it was time to give up entirely, as I was truly making a fool of myself. “Forget I said anything. Enjoy the book.”

  Then he looked down at the book. “I can’t really explain it,” he said. “It makes me feel something, but I don’t have to feel it about someone, so I get off easy.”

  It was an odd thing to say—so odd that it made me laugh. Of course, he didn’t appreciate that and turned to leave.

  Something inside me didn’t want our encounter-among-the-stacks to end like this, so before he reached the end of the aisle, I said, “Did you know Allen Ginsberg tried to levitate the Pentagon?”

  He turned back to me. “He did?”

  “Yes. He and a whole bunch of Vietnam war protesters encircled the Pentagon, then sat in the lotus position and started meditating on levitating the Pentagon at the same time.”

  “Did it work?”

  I nodded. “They measured a height change of one point seven millimeters.”

  “Really?”

  “No, I made that part up. But wouldn’t it be wild if it were true?”

  He laughed at that, and now seemed like a reasonable time to hold out my hand invitingly and introduce myself. “Hi, I’m Brontë,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know.” He shook my hand, which almost disappeared into his. “Probably named after the writers Charlotte and Emily Brontë. I’ve never read them, but I know the names.”

  Truth be told, I was actually glad he’d never read the Brontës. That would have made him a little too odd. “My parents are professors of literature at the university. My brother, Tennyson, is named after a famous poet.”

  “He must hate that,” he said, “being a meathead and all.”

  “You know him?”

  “By reputation.”

  Which made sense. My brother’s obnoxious reputation precedes him like, oh, say, hail before a tornado. “Actually, he loves his name. It keeps people confused. He likes keeping people confused.”

  He still hadn’t introduced himself. Since he knew my name, I wanted him to think I knew his name, too.

  “I’ll need your ID card to check out the book,” I told him.

  He handed it to me, and I glanced at the name quickly as we made our way to the circulation desk. “Well, Brewster, if you want my advice on other poets, let me know.”

  “I just like the angry ones,” he said. “Know any more?”

  “Plenty.” Which was not entirely true, but I knew angry poetry was highly Googleable.

  As he left, I tried to size him up in full view. He was large, but not fat, sloppy—not grungy. His clothes seemed worn, but not stylishly so; they were actually worn, and the legs were short enough to prove they’d been around for at least two inches of growth. And although most boys look pretentious in a distressed leather bomber jacket, it seemed natural on him.

  It was then that I made the connection—and made it so powerfully, I almost gasped. Brewster Rawlins. This is the boy they call the Bruiser! Always a little too big to be picked on, a little too mad-creepy to be in anyone’s clique. He was always just there, through elementary school and middle school, lingering in the background. I’d been in a couple of classes with him over the years, but it had been like we were on different planets.

  It was hard to reconcile the memory of that kid with the boy I met that day—but one thing was certain: Brewster was a stray, and someone most definitely needed to take him in.

  15) HOWLINGLY

  In defiance of Tennyson’s campaign to remove Brew from my life, I made every effort to see him as much as possible. All right, I’ll admit my motives were mixed, but they didn’t stay that way for long. Spite against my brother, compassion for a stray, and general curiosity quickly gave way to something deeper—something more real and maybe even more dangerous, because when you truly start to care about someone, you become vulnerable to all sorts of things. I think Brew knew that better than anyone.

  Our first date at Wackworld was a disaster thanks to Tennyson’s meddling, and I was determined that our second date would be a success. But what would that date be? During school that week we saw each other at lunch, and he offered to take me to the movies, as most guys do. The movie-date must have been invented by a guy: no possible way to have a conversation, and a darkened room suitable for other activities. Right.

  “We’ll get to that,” I told him. “Maybe. But for now, how about doing something where I get to see your eyes?”

  He started to look a little nervous, and his hands retreated into his pockets. I knew what he was thinking: He thought I wanted to be taken to a restaurant—and I knew enough about him to know that money was an issue.

  “I was thinking maybe a picnic,” I told him.

  He was visibly relieved. “Could be fun,” he said, then added, “as long as your brother doesn’t come popping out of the picnic basket.”

  I laughed—a little nervously, because I didn’t put it past Tennyson to find some way to sabotage it if he knew. Keep in mind, this was right after the Wackworld incident, so I had every reason to fervently believe Tennyson was the enemy.

  “My brother won’t know about it,” I said.

  And he didn’t. No one did. That Saturday, as far as anyone in my family knew, I was off to meet some friends at the mall; and since I’m such a bad liar, I made sure it was the truth. I did exactly that; I stayed at the mall with friends for a whole twenty minutes and then took off for the head of Mulligan Falls trail. My backpack was full of sandwiches and condiments, and a blanket. Brew was bringing the beverages—“Considering that your name’s Brew, I think it’s appropriate,” I had told him, although I did have to clarify that I wasn’t suggesting he bring beer.

  When I arrived at the trailhead he was already there, pacing back and forth, perhaps worrying that I wouldn’t show. I said hello, giving him a hug. He smelled very Mennen; just the right amount of mildly scented antiperspirant, which, in my book is far more enticing than a boy who reeks of cologne. I find cologne suspicious. Like carpet deodorizer.

  “I had to tell my uncle I’m at Saturday school,” he told me, “so that gives us a few hours.”

  Hearing that surprised me. “Why can’t you just tell him the truth?”

  “Weekends are family time. He prefers me home.” And that’s all he said on the subject of his uncle.

  We took a look at the trail map. “You sure you want to do this?” he asked. “After all, I was voted Most Likely to Receive the Death Penalty.”

  “Oh…you heard about that?” I felt a bit embarrassed to be part of a student body that would behave so hurtfully. It never made it into the yearbook, but everyone knew about it.

  “Actually,” I told him, “I feel safer with you than with most other boys in school.”

  “Thanks…I think.”

  We took the trail up and out of our community. Housing developments disappeared behind towering trees, and in just a few minutes it felt like we were hours from civilization. It had been an exceptionally wet winter, and the falls were so powerful with the spring thaw, we could already hear the roar even though we were still half a mile away.

  “So, tell me something I don’t know about you,”
I asked as we walked. I tried to make eye contact with him, but the question made him self-conscious, and he looked away.

  “What kind of thing?”

  “Anything,” I said. “That you have webbed feet or a vestigial tail. That you’re color blind, or a sleepwalker, or an alien lulling humanity into a false sense of security.”

  I thought he’d laugh, but instead he just said, “I’m none of those things. Sorry.” He helped me over a jagged boulder, thought for a moment, then said, “I’ve got a photographic memory, though.”

  “Really!” It was much more interesting than any of the things I had suggested, except maybe for the alien—but all things considered, I much preferred that he be terrestrial anyway. “So if you’ve got a photographic memory, by now you must know the poems in that Allen Ginsberg book by heart.” I was just kidding, but a moment later he launched into “Howl,” reciting it word for word. And this is no short piece—it’s one of those poems that goes on forever. I was impressed, but also unsettled, because, like he said, he liked angry poetry, and “Howl” is a regular fury-fest. Rage against the establishment and all that. As he spat out the words, they became more and more caustic, like a volcanic blast. I imagined I could see superheated steam venting into the air around him as he spoke.

  Then when he got to the part about drinking turpentine in Paradise Alley, he forced himself to stop. He was out of breath, like he had just run a sprint. I could tell he was still marginally volcanic inside, but he quelled it quickly.

  At that point any other girl would have said, “Thank you, it’s been interesting,” then shot up a rescue flare. But I’m not any other girl. “Very impressive,” I said, then added, “Howlingly so.”

  “Sorry I got a little carried away.” He took a deep breath and released it. “Sometimes I feel things very deeply, y’know?”