Bruiser

by Neal Shusterman

  “Brew! Wait!”

  He didn’t turn back to me until he was safely across the threshold of our front door. “I shouldn’t even be here,” he said. “My uncle’s at work, my brother’s home alone—”

  “I’ll come with you….” I reached for him, but he pushed my arms away.

  “I can’t do this!” He was furious. He was terrified. “You don’t understand! I can’t care about them. I can’t care about you!”

  “What?”

  He backed away, but he held me in his horrible, deep, draining eyes. “That’s right. I don’t care about you. It’s over. I don’t care about you at all.” Then he turned and took off like a thief, disappearing down the street and into the windy night.

  22) REFLEXIVELY

  There would be no looking back on this and laughing. That’s what people always say, isn’t it? “Someday you’ll look back on this and laugh.” Easy for them to say. I hope they choke on their own advice.

  Standing at the open door was like standing at the edge of the earth. I felt myself leaning forward into the April wind, wishing I could just jump—or better yet, just slip out of my body and drift away, leaving all the pain of the evening far behind.

  The thing was, if I had found a way to escape—even for just a little while—I knew the pain would be there waiting for me when I got back.

  But for now I was shell-shocked. It wasn’t quite escape, but it would have to do.

  “Fine,” I said to the stupid, soulless wind, and went inside.

  No one was in the kitchen when I returned, and I happily entertained the fantasy that Mom and Dad had been instantly vaporized by their own middle-aged angst and had taken Tennyson along with them. An evil thought, I know; but I was feeling evil down to the core right then—and perfectly entitled to the feeling.

  I could hear the TV in the family room. Probably Tennyson. And I heard movement upstairs—Mom or Dad, but not both, because by now they would have retreated to their separate corners of the ring, probably finding the two farthest points in the house to lick their wounds.

  And there in front of me were the ruins of the evening on our best china. The waste products of a dinner gone wrong.

  I found myself cleaning up, because it was easier to do something simple like clearing the table than to analyze which level of hell I now resided in.

  I wasn’t being as attentive as I should have been, however, because as I reached to grab the serving platter, my thumb sliced across the sharp edge of the carving knife. I reflexively drew back my hand, but it was too late; there was a half-inch gash on my palm, near the base of my left thumb, and it was already oozing blood.

  “Crap!”

  I grabbed it with my other hand and tried to stem the flow of blood, but it didn’t help. Blood dribbled in little vermillion drops all over the forsaken roast, blending in with the drippings.

  And that’s when I started to cry.

  Of all the stupid things. Never mind that my boyfriend just abandoned me and my family just auto-destructed—there I was, crying about that stupid, freaking roast.

  “Brontë?” Tennyson stood in the doorway watching me bleed onto dinner. “What happened?”

  I grabbed a cloth napkin from an untouched table setting, pressed it to my bleeding hand, and to my own embarrassment found myself whimpering like a child. “It’s all ruined, Tennyson,” I said. “Everything.”

  “C’mon,” he said; and he grabbed my elbow, pulling me toward the bathroom.

  He searched for Band-Aids in the medicine chest while I washed the wound, watching the pink water flow down the drain.

  “Apply pressure,” he said.

  “I know how to stop bleeding!” I snapped. “I took lifesaving, for God’s sake!”

  “Okay, okay, I’m just trying to help.”

  I cleaned it with peroxide, and he held out a Band-Aid. “At least let me help you put this on,” Tennyson said. “You can’t do it with one hand.”

  So I held out my hand and let him stretch the bandage across the wound, smoothing out the adhesive strip.

  “There,” he said. “I don’t think you’ll need stitches.”

  I took a deep breath. “Thank you, Tennyson.”

  “No problem.”

  As much as we fought, I can’t deny that at times like this, there’s a closeness between us that I’ve always been grateful for.

  We didn’t leave the bathroom. Instead, he closed the door and sat on the toilet lid while I stretched out in the dry bathtub. It wasn’t the most comfortable place for a sibling summit meeting, but there’s something comforting about the tight privacy of a family bathroom. Does that sound weird? I don’t care.

  I told him all about how Brewster bailed.

  He told me about the times he’d picked up the phone only to be hung up on—and the time he’d overheard Mom talking to someone, saying things she should be saying to no one but Dad.

  “Mom has a boyfriend,” Tennyson said.

  So there it was, out in the open. No hints, just the plain, raw fact.

  “It’s because of what Dad did last year, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe,” said Tennyson. “Maybe not. Maybe it would have happened anyway.”

  Mom and Dad had tried to keep it hidden last year, but Tennyson and I knew what Dad had done. We had been furious about it, because fathers are not supposed to have girlfriends—even if it’s only for a short time. Even if it’s only one time. They’re not supposed to, but sometimes they do. Fact of life. I don’t know the statistics. Maybe I should look them up.

  So it happened, and Dad had been left with a choice. He could give her up, whoever she was, and then move heaven and earth to make things right with Mom. Or he could end the marriage. He’d chosen Mom—and Tennyson and I saw how he tried to make it up, not just to Mom, but to all of us. I guess that had been enough for us to forgive him—at least in part. I had thought it was the same with Mom. I never understood the depth of the wound.

  All at once, I found my thoughts ricocheting to Brewster. As much as it hurt to think of him, it was easier than thinking about my parents. It was easier to condemn him for what he had done; and the more I thought about it, the angrier I got. I had reached out to save him from whatever terrible things were going on in his world; but when something went seriously wrong in mine, he didn’t just walk away, he ran.

  “He just washed his hands of us,” I mumbled. “He washed his hands of me.”

  “Did you expect him to be a model of mental stability?” Tennyson asked. “You don’t get a reputation as the resident creepy dude for nothing.”

  Still, that wasn’t an excuse. There was no excuse for the way he behaved. If I could be sure of nothing else that evening, I could be sure of that.

  “I hate him,” I said, and at the moment I meant it with all my heart. “I hate him.”

  Beyond the bathroom wall, we heard the garage door grind open and a car started. Someone drove away. I didn’t know whether it was Mom or Dad. I didn’t want to find out.

  “So, what happens now?” Tennyson asked. It surprised me, because between the two of us, he was always the one who pretended to have the answer.

  “It’ll get worse before it gets better,” I said.

  “The D word?”

  “The S word first,” I pointed out. I couldn’t imagine our parents separating. Who would move out, Mom or Dad? Who would we live with? Did we get to choose? How could we possibly choose?

  Tennyson and I didn’t talk anymore, because there was nothing left to say; but we didn’t leave the bathroom either, because this was, at least for the time being, our only place of safety. So we sat there in silence, wishing there was some way to sleep through whatever was to come. Wishing there was someone who could come and magically take away all the pain.

  23) TRANSFERENCE

  It’s strange how we always want other people to feel what we feel. It must be a basic human drive. Misery loves company, right? Or when you see a movie that you love, don’t you want to d
rag all your friends to see it as well? Because it’s only good the second time if it’s the first time for somebody else—as if their experience somehow resonates inside of you. The power of shared experiences. Maybe it’s a way to remind ourselves that on some level we’re all connected.

  By morning we knew that it was Mom who had left, and she hadn’t come home. Dad made us breakfast: credible pancakes, although the blackened evidence of his first batch was buried in the trash.

  “She’ll be back when you get home,” Dad told us. He seemed way too confident about that, which made me think that he wasn’t confident about it at all.

  As we walked to school, I couldn’t stop thinking about how furious I still was with Brew—how I wanted to make him feel everything I had felt last night: the helplessness of watching my family detonate and the soul-searing feeling of being abandoned in the midst of it, the way he had done to me. I wanted to take everything I was feeling, put it into a cannon, then aim it at him.

  I knew I’d see Brew in school that day, and what bothered me most was that I didn’t know what I’d do when I saw him. It was terrifying not to have a perfect and clear-cut course of action. I knew exactly when I would see him, too. His locker was just outside of my second-period class. Usually we looked forward to seeing each other then, even if it was just to say hello. Now I dreaded it.

  I suppose he could’ve made a point of avoiding his locker, but he didn’t. And I suppose I could have slipped in through the classroom’s back door, but I didn’t do that either—because as much as I was dreading it, I knew it had to happen.

  He was standing right there as I approached the classroom. He didn’t look at me. He just stared into his locker, moving around books.

  “Brewster?”

  He turned to me and I found my arm swinging even before I was conscious of the motion. I guess swimming made me stronger than I realized, because I slapped him so hard, his head snapped to the side, hitting his locker, which rang out like a bell. It was all I could do to keep myself from pounding on his chest. All of that fury I was feeling needed a way out.

  Around us, other kids saw what was going on. Some gave us a wide berth, others laughed, and that only made me angrier. And then Brewster said:

  “Is that it? Because I have to get to class.”

  “No!” I shouted, “that’s not it!” and I pushed him. I realized I was doing the bully thing that my brother was famous for, but at the moment I didn’t care. The push didn’t do much anyway—Brew had so much inertia, he didn’t even move when I pushed him. Instead, I ended up stumbling backward.

  “There are things you don’t know,” he said.

  “You think you can hide behind that?” I shouted. “That’s no excuse! What you did last night…what you said—”

  “I lied.”

  That caught me off guard and I hesitated, trying to figure out just what he had lied about. He’d said he didn’t care about me, or about any of us. Was he lying about that? Did he care after all? Did I want him to?

  The tardy bell rang. We were alone in the hallway now. I was about to turn and storm into class when I felt something warm and wet on my hand. It was blood.

  “Oh no!” It didn’t take a genius to figure out I had opened the gash on my hand again. The Band-Aid, which was already loose, was now too wet to hold its grip. It slipped off; and when I brushed away the blood, I had trouble relocating the exact spot of the wound. As it turns out, the blood wasn’t coming from my cut at all.

  “It’s not you; it’s me,” Brew said, which is one of the lines guys use when they break up with you; but that wasn’t the case here. It was him. He was the one bleeding.

  He pursed his lips. “Not good,” he said. “Not good at all.”

  My anger didn’t exactly go away at that instant, but it did hop into the backseat. “I must have cut you with my watch,” I said, although I couldn’t imagine anything sharp enough on my watch to draw that much blood. “We’ve got to get you to the nurse.”

  As Brew pressed on the wound to staunch the bleeding at the base of his thumb, I reached into my backpack and found a little pocket-pack of tissues. I pressed the whole pack to his hand and hurried with him down the hall.

  “I can do it myself,” he said.

  “I don’t care,” I told him.

  We pushed through the door of the nurse’s office, where some boy I didn’t know looked up at me with feverish eyes and a God-help-me expression, like he thought he might die at any moment.

  “Get in line,” he said.

  “I don’t think so.” I shoved past him toward the nurse. By now the whole tissue pack on Brew’s hand was soaked through with blood, and the moment the nurse saw it, she went into triage mode. She quickly assessed the damage and began to clean the gash with gauze and antiseptic.

  “What happened?”

  “I got cut on my locker door,” Brew said.

  Is that what happened? I thought. But he wasn’t even touching his locker.

  “It looks worse than it is,” the nurse said once the wound had been cleaned. “You probably won’t even need stitches.” She talked about tetanus shots and gave him a thick piece of gauze. “Keep pressure on it.” Then she turned to me and my bloody fingers. “And you need to clean yourself up. There’s a sink over there. Wash all the way to your elbows. Do it twice.” She told Brew she’d be back to dress the wound, then went to deal with the plague-ridden boy by the door.

  I went to the sink, crisis resolved, except, of course, for one minor thing:

  The wound was gone from my hand.

  It hadn’t healed—it was gone, like it had never been there at all. I kept washing my hands, certain I had just missed it and that it would reappear once I washed away the lather, but no. The cut was nowhere to be found.

  I could feel something tugging on the edge of my awareness. Something both frightening and wonderful. I was at the barrier of some unknown place. Even as I stood there I could feel myself crossing over that line.

  When I turned to Brew, he was watching me.

  “You didn’t cut yourself on a locker, did you?” I asked.

  He shook his head. I sat beside him, not quite ready to believe what had happened.

  “Let me see it.”

  He raised the gauze. The wound had clotted; the blood had stopped flowing. I could see the wound clearly now. It was my wound. Same size, same place. Only now it was on his hand.

  “Do you understand now?” he asked gently.

  But how could I understand? This wasn’t an answer; it was a question—and one I didn’t even know how to ask. All I could say was “How?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It just happens.”

  “Always? With everyone?”

  “No,” he said. “Not everyone.” The wound had begun to ooze again, so he pressed the gauze to it. “But if I care about someone…”

  He didn’t have to finish the thought, because it was there in his eyes. The reason why he ran—why he lied. People thought Brewster Rawlins was a dark unknown, a black hole best kept away from. Well, maybe he was, but what people don’t realize is that black holes generate an amazing amount of light. The problem is, their gravity is so great, the light can’t escape—it just gets pulled in along with everything else.

  If he took away the sprains, cuts, and bruises of everyone he cared about, no wonder he’d rather be alone. How could I blame him for running last night as he tried to escape his own gravity?

  I could feel my anger and turmoil draining away now that I had at least a part of the puzzle. The brooding expression on Brew’s face truly was inscrutable, so it was impossible to know what he was feeling; but I knew what I was feeling. It flowed in to fill the void once my anger was gone. As unexpected as the slap, I found myself kissing him; and although I heard the nurse protesting from across the room, her voice sounded miles away. I was caught in a gravity far greater than hers.

  “I love you, Brew.”

  “No you don’t,” he said.

&nbs
p; “Just shut up and take it,” I told him.

  He smiled. “Okay.”

  He didn’t have to tell me that he felt the same, because I already knew. The evidence was there on the palm of his hand.

  BREWSTER

  24) INJURIOUS

  I saw the weak hearts of my classmates shredded by conformity, bloated and numb, as they iced the wounds of acceptance in the primordial gym, hoping to heal themselves into popularity,

  Who have devolved into Play-Doh pumped through a sleazy suburban press, stamped in identical molds, all bearing chunks of bleak ice, comet-cold in their chests,

  Who look down their surgically set noses at me, the boy most likely to die by lethal injection with no crime beyond the refusal to permit their swollen, shredded cardiac chill to fill my heart as well,

  Yet out of this frigid pool of judgment stepped Brontë, untainted by the cold, radiating warmth in a rhythmic pulse through her veins, echoing now in mine, just as the slice across her palm is now my burden, taken by accident, yet held with purposeful triumph,

  As I now reach to double-check the unreliable lock on my bathroom door, which gives no privacy, least of all from Uncle Hoyt, who, in fits of paranoia, must know everything, everything that goes on beneath his termite-ridden, shingle-shedding roof,

  Where I now carefully peel the bandage from my hand, revealing shades of brown and red, flesh damaged and bruised, hoping to redress the wound before my uncle can find out, the wound that I have no idea how Brontë got, for in my fuzz-brained love haze, I forgot to question,

  Which will heal without mystery or magic at the normal pace of life—in a week, two weeks, three—like the raw-knuckle scabs of her brother, now mine, too, like the bruises, breaks, and scrapes, the scars of a lifelong battle that defines me,

  Like the fresh wound that cannot be concealed as my uncle swings open the maliciously disloyal bathroom door, and getting a healthy look at the fresh red line sliced across the heel of my hand, knowing from my unmet gaze that I’m holding a secret, which gives him permission to hold me hostage.