Bruiser

by Neal Shusterman

  “Pleistocene,” I mumble vacantly.

  “Right, that one. Well, toodles!”

  And she’s gone, strolling away with all the good feelings I thought were mine.

  The crash inside me could shake the earth. It feels like a fever. It feels like the flu. And my team is still celebrating. We’ve won the game, and qualified for league finals. Why do I not care?

  There’s no rock large enough for me to crawl under right now, and all I want to do is get home—teleport if I could—straight to my bedroom.

  In all the commotion I’ve totally forgotten about Brew. I look for him, but he’s gone. He must have left the second the game was over—gone home to nurse my wounds, whatever they might be. Did I get hurt in this game? A little banged up maybe, but nothing major—nothing he didn’t sign on for. I want to find him and talk to him. I need to have someone to commiserate with. Even if he doesn’t talk back, that’s okay.

  I say my good-byes to the team as fast as I can, grab my lacrosse stick, and head home, feeling like I might use my stick to take out a few mailboxes along the way, and wonder how I got so psychotic.

  56) PACIFIED

  Brontë catches me out in the street before I get to the front door and punches me in the arm with the strength of a prize-fighter.

  “Ow!”

  “That’s for forcing him to go to your game!”

  I guess Brew got home before me. I guess he told her. Or more likely she saw the way he looked, and she dragged it out of him.

  “I didn’t force him to do anything. He came because he wanted to.”

  But she’s not buying a word of it. “You’re a self-centered, self-serving—”

  “Oh, and when I chased him away from my game last time, that was wrong, too?”

  She fumbles her thoughts a bit. “Yes, it was—but at least then you were thinking of him, not yourself!”

  I don’t want to fight with her; I just want to get inside. The things I’m feeling right now are too venomous to put into words, and I don’t want to take it out on her or on anyone—I just want to get past her and in through the door.

  “Instead of complaining about me,” I tell her, “maybe you should think about what you just did to him!” She looks at me, not understanding. So I rub the fresh charley horse in my arm from her punch and say: “The second I walk inside, he’s gonna have one nasty bruise thanks to you.”

  I push past her and go into the house, leaving her to stew in her own juices.

  Once inside, I drop my lacrosse stick on the family room floor and collapse onto the sofa. I curl up and close my eyes like I do when I have a bad stomachache. I feel my diaphragm begin to heave, and it makes me furious that I might actually burst into tears. Me. I don’t do that! No one can ever see me do that. Is it wrong to feel this awful when you get dumped? Is this even about Katrina at all? I don’t know. I don’t care. I just want the feeling gone.

  I hear the TV turn on, and I open my eyes to see that Cody has entered the room. He looks at the way I’m all curled up on the sofa and says, “Can I watch cartoons?”

  “Do whatever you want,” I tell him.

  He sits on the floor in front of me but leaves the volume a little too low to hear. “Are you just tired, or do you got bad stuff?” he asks me.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I tell him. “It’s not your problem.”

  “If you got bad stuff, you should leave,” he says.

  “What are you talking about? I just got home.”

  “You should leave anyway.” Then he presses the remote, and the volume gets higher and higher until it’s blasting.

  I take the remote away from him and turn off the TV. “What’s your problem?”

  Then he turns on me with a vengeance. “It ain’t fair! He’s MY brother, and you got no right!”

  I want to yell back at him, sink down to his level; but then something begins to change. I feel it building like a wave gathering strength just before it crashes on the shore.

  Relief. I draw a deep, fulfilling breath. Comfort. I slowly let it out. Contentment. I am pacified, just as I’ve been pacified each day when I get home. It usually doesn’t arrive so powerfully, but then, I’m usually not feeling as beaten down as I am today. As I was today.

  All the bad emotions I had just a few moments ago are gone. I’m a bit dizzy and almost weightless. It feels good.

  Cody’s shoulders slump, and he sits back down. “Too late.”

  Now I can’t deny that this is something more than the mere comfort of being in a place that’s safe and familiar. “Cody…what just happened?”

  “The bad stuff went away,” he said like it was perfectly obvious, perfectly natural. “Cuts and stuff are easy—they go quicker; but the stuff inside is harder. It’s like it has to find a way out first.”

  I hear muffled sobs from the guest room, on the other side of the wall. The sobs are coming from Brew. They’re deep; they’re powerful; they’re mine. But not anymore.

  “He can take it,” Cody says, resigned. “He can take anything.”

  By the time I get to the guest room, Brontë’s already there, holding Brew, trying to wrap her slender arms around his hulking frame as he shudders with sobs of both fury and sorrow. There’s a welt on his arm where Brontë punched me.

  “What is it, Brew, what’s wrong?” Brontë says, at a loss to comfort him. “Tell me, please; I want to help!”

  The second he sees me, he looks up at me with pleading eyes—he knows this came from me. He knows! “What happened, Tennyson? You won the game; what happened?”

  I can only stutter there in the doorway.

  Brontë narrows her eyes at me. “Get out!” But I don’t move, so she gets up and reaches for the door. “I said, get out!” Then she slams the door in my face. I wonder if she even knows what’s going on. I wonder if he’ll tell her. Brontë, the compassionate, Brontë, the observant. I’ll bet she’s totally in the dark when it comes to this secret side of Brewster’s gift.

  But now I know—and knowing the full truth propels me out the front door. I can’t be a part of this. I can’t willingly bury him in all my baggage.

  I make it as far as the front gate before my momentum fails me. There, just a few feet away from the street, I can feel the edge of Brewster’s influence. I can feel myself slipping out of range. All the bad feelings—the hurt, the betrayal—it’s all waiting there just on the other side of that gate. One more step and it will all come flooding back. And as much as I want to take that step, as much as I want to free Brew from the pain…I can’t. I’ve always considered myself so strong, so willful; but here is the truth: I don’t even have the strength of will to steal back my own misery.

  Dejected, defeated, I go back inside; but in a few moments even that crushing sense of defeat is gone, evaporating into nothing as I sit in the family room with Cody, the two of us watching cartoons without a care in the world.

  BRONTË

  57) ABJECT

  Tennyson began to act strange around the time he and Katrina broke up, and his behavior became odder and odder each day. It came to a peak the day Brew and I went to Amanda Milner’s sweet sixteen. When we got home that night, he laid into us the second we walked in the door.

  “Where were you? What were you doing? Do you know what time it is?”

  He sounded like a parent on the rampage, and his eyes were disturbingly wild. Tennyson had always been unnecessarily protective of me, but this was ridiculous. Brew was getting all stressed out and went straight to the bathroom, just to get out of Tennyson’s line of fire.

  “What is wrong with you!” I demanded once Brew was gone.

  “You shouldn’t be taking him out like this!”

  “What is he—a dog on a leash?”

  “No, it’s just that…it’s just that you need to be careful.”

  I pointed an accusing finger at him. “You’re telling me to be careful? You, who treated yourself to a pain-free lacrosse victory at his expense?”

  Just me
ntioning it deflated him. He looked at me pleadingly—a helpless look that, until recently, was never in my brother’s arsenal of facial expressions. Lately, there’d been a whole lot of weird desperation in his eyes, and in his actions. If I didn’t know better, I’d wonder if Tennyson was on drugs.

  “Mom and Dad were fighting while you were gone.”

  It surprised me, because they hadn’t had an argument for a while. “Fighting how?”

  “Like they used to.” He looked at me for a moment more with that abject expression, but then his face changed. It was as if every muscle in his face switched to a new preset. He took a deep breath and relaxed, his anxiety fading like a dark cloud dissipating. I’d noticed that before, too—how he’d be so anxious and then calm down so quickly. He took another deep breath and released it.

  “It’s okay now,” he said. “It’s okay—but you shouldn’t keep Brew out so long. He’s not used to parties and all those people.”

  “Now you sound like his uncle,” I told him. I just meant it as a tiny little poison-tipped barb, but somehow it hit deep. He couldn’t even answer me. He just turned and retreated to his room.

  I could have gone after him and worked on him, ferreting out exactly what was going on, but I was too disgusted with Tennyson to pursue it. Instead I checked in on Mom and Dad. If they had been fighting, then there was some fresh hell we’d all have to deal with.

  I found them both sitting up in bed, just inches away from each other, calmly reading.

  “Was it a nice party, honey?” Mom asked once she saw me standing there. I saw no evidence of emotional battle scars on either of them: They hadn’t retreated to neutral corners of the house; neither one was pacing, or brooding, or scarfing down comfort food.

  “It was fine,” I said; and without the patience to beat around the bush, I asked, “What were you guys arguing about?”

  They looked at each other a bit perplexed by the question. For a moment I thought Tennyson must have been lying until Dad said, “Well, whatever it was, it must not have been too important.”

  Mom concurred, and they both returned to their books.

  I told them good night and retreated to my own room, feeling content with their answers, with the evening, with myself. I didn’t even harbor any ill feelings toward my brother, which was a definite indication that something was off—not just around me but inside me as well. Still, I chose to ignore it, subconsciously citing all those wonderful sayings that justify denial:

  What you don’t know can’t hurt you.

  Let sleeping dogs lie.

  Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

  I keep telling myself that if I had questioned things sooner—if I had grasped the extent to which Brew had become intertwined in our lives—I would have behaved differently. I would have done the right thing. But who am I kidding? How can you do the right thing when you can’t figure out what that thing is? When all you have before you are choices in various shades of wrong?

  58) INTERLOPER

  Tennyson and I always made fun of people who blindly followed the crowd. Lemmings, we called them—poor, unfortunate creatures who, at the slightest sign of rain, relinquish their self-determination to the mob and join a mad, mindless stampede. Ultimately the stampede leads them off a cliff into the sea, where they all drown. It’s funny if you’re an observer. It’s tragic if you’re a lemming.

  I understand lemmings now. I understand that, contrary to popular opinion, it takes only two to form a crowd. Perhaps a brother and a sister. I can’t say I was blindly following Tennyson, but I was so busy noticing what was wrong with him that I failed to see that I was charging toward the same cliff right beside him.

  We had an unexpected guest the following evening.

  I had the misfortune of being the one to answer the door. Standing there was a small man with lots of hair and a thick but well-groomed beard. I recognized him from various university functions as one of our parents’ colleagues.

  “I’d like to speak with your mother,” he said with a slight accent that I couldn’t place. He was determined yet fidgety, his eyes intense and a little wild. All at once I realized who this was. This was the man Mom was seeing. Mr. Monday Night.

  I felt a wave of panic rise in me, brimming into anger; but the feeling drained quickly. This was my house, I was in control of the doorway, and this interloper was not getting in.

  “You’d better get out of here,” I told him, coldly staring him down, “before my father sees you.”

  And then from behind me, I heard, “I already have.”

  My father was standing halfway down the stairs, gripping the railing. He stood there for a long moment, and I saw the same rise and fall of anger that I had felt—although I’m sure his blossomed even more powerfully before it subsided. He came the rest of the way down the stairs, and when he spoke he was like a diplomat, with both power and poise in his voice; but his anger was reined in.

  “Well, if it isn’t the proverbial barbarian at the gate,” Dad said. “Are you coming in, Bob, or are you going to stand in the doorway all night?”

  The man stepped in; and Dad approached him, looked him over, and grunted dismissively. “This is Dr. Thorlock, from the anthropology department. An expert in prehistoric man, and other small-minded things.”

  I heard a guffaw behind me and turned to see Tennyson peering down from the top of the stairs; but the moment I saw him, he retreated.

  “Are you here to bring us a little drama today, Bob?” Dad asked. “Are you going to challenge me to a duel?”

  Thorlock seemed entirely unnerved by Dad’s flipness.

  “I just want to talk to Lisa.”

  “Brontë,” said Dad, “please go fetch your mother.”

  I found Mom in the laundry room, and when I told her that Thorlock was here, she looked shocked; but that faded, too. “Well,” she said with a sigh far too light for the circumstance, “we knew it would come to this. No sense postponing the inevitable.”

  “Which inevitable?” I dared to ask.

  But all Mom said was “We’ll see.”

  Then she strode down into the foyer.

  I should have been dizzy with dread but instead was merely filled with car-wreck curiosity. At the time I assumed it was a protective layer of numbness. A shock-shell rather than shell shock. I would have eavesdropped on the three of them if I hadn’t suddenly heard a groan from the guest room. I went in to find Brew holding his gut, rocking back and forth as he sat on the bed. He was here alone tonight. Cody, who now had actually accumulated a friend or two, was at a sleepover.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Brew.

  “No,” he snapped. “I mean, yes. Just leave me alone, okay?”

  He doubled over, moaning in pain through gritted teeth.

  “Is it your stomach?” I asked.

  “Yes, that’s it,” he blurted. “Stomach. It’s my stomach.”

  I felt his forehead. He didn’t have a fever, but he was clammy. I touched his arm—the skin on his forearm had such goose-flesh, I felt like I was reading Braille. “I’ll get you something,” I told him, trying to remember what biological nightmare the school gave us for lunch that day. On the way to the medicine chest, I made a point of looking toward the foyer, where Mom spoke to Thorlock in hushed tones. Dad was now sitting on the stairs, observing. He looked somewhat relaxed as he sat there, and I remember thinking how off that was; but this particular kind of family drama was not anything I’d experienced before, so how was I to judge what behavior was appropriate when your mother’s boyfriend paid a visit? Rather than dwelling on it, I brought Brew some Maalox, which he guzzled straight from the bottle.

  “Thank you,” he said with the same guttural voice. “I’m better now. You can go.”

  Then he rolled to face the wall, pulling the covers over his head, ending any hope of conversation.

  By the time I left the guest room, Thorlock was gone, and my parents were in the kitchen. Dad was scouring the fridge for some low-carb sn
ack, and Mom was thumbing through a cookbook. I felt like I had suddenly time-warped into a different day.

  “So…what happened?”

  Neither of them answered right away; but when they saw I wasn’t leaving until someone said something, Dad chimed in with “Mom asked him to leave, and so he did.”

  “That’s it?” I asked. “He’s gone for good?”

  “We’ve set boundaries,” Mom said. “Boundaries and rules.”

  “As in ‘Come here again and I’ll get a restraining order’?”

  Dad laughed at that, and Mom tossed him a halfhearted scowl. “No,” said Mom. “Not exactly.” Mom turned a page in her cookbook, and I closed the book, practically catching her finger.

  “What, then?”

  She sighed—again that small kind of sigh that spoke of minor concerns. “Mondays are still Mondays,” she said. “My night out.”

  Usually I’m a quick study, but it took a while for the words to relay from my ears to my brain before settling in my solar plexus like a rock. And in the other room, I could hear Brew groaning again. I turned to Dad, who had a slice of Muenster cheese hanging from his mouth.

  “And you’re…okay with this?”

  Dad’s eye twitched slightly. “No,” he admitted. “But I’ll live with it.” And then he added, “Maybe I’ll take Tuesday nights off.”

  I snapped my eyes to Mom, certain she would say something like “Over my dead body!” but instead she opened the cookbook again. “Do you think it’s too late to start a roast?”

  This was wrong.

  The things they said, the things they felt were wrong to the core—but it wasn’t just them. The depth of what I should be feeling was absent from me as well. My emotions had become as shallow as a wading pool. I couldn’t feel anything but a pleasant, airy void, as incongruous as sunshine in a thunderstorm.