Bruiser

by Neal Shusterman

  I approach the pool,

  There’s something in the water,

  And it’s not moving….

  I was ten at my mother’s funeral.

  Uncle Hoyt stood beside Cody and me,

  His arm was on my shoulder,

  He told me it would all be all right,

  He would always take care of us,

  He would protect us,

  Protect me,

  And I loved him for it.

  I almost died a month later

  From a kidney infection that began as Uncle Hoyt’s

  And quickly became mine instead.

  That’s how he learned what I can do,

  That’s when his drinking became a problem,

  Because his guilt consumed him,

  And he resented me for it.

  Brontë’s in the pool,

  Facedown in the cold water.

  I can’t stop screaming.

  (III)

  How long?

  I heard a splash as I approached.

  Didn’t I? Didn’t I?

  And the water’s still rippling.

  Maybe there’s time.

  I lean over the edge,

  But she’s too far away,

  “Help! Somebody help!”

  But there’s no one but me.

  And I can’t swim.

  Denying my fear,

  I leap into deadly water.

  My legs kick, my arms flail,

  My head bobs down, then up, then down,

  Coughing, spitting in the face of gravity.

  I kick off my shoes,

  And somehow I stay afloat,

  By sheer force of will.

  Closer now,

  Almost there,

  She’s just out of reach.

  My head stays above water,

  But something’s wrong.

  Why is my chest so heavy?

  Why can’t I breathe?

  If I’m finally swimming, why can’t I breathe?

  And suddenly I know!

  Take it away.

  Take it away, boy.

  This is your purpose.

  Take it away!

  63) INTERFACE

  Pulling you from the water won’t be enough, but I can defy your fate,

  I have one last gift for you, Brontë, and it’s one you can’t refuse.

  Inches from you now, I stop kicking, let my arms relax.

  They drift down to my side and the sword falls free,

  Because the only way to win is not to fight.

  And I’m ready for victory’s embrace.

  She starts to revive, I start to let go,

  Giving myself to the waters,

  Sinking deeper, deeper,

  Faceup, eyes open,

  Eyes on her.

  Then she stirs the shimmering interface between life and death,

  and she finally climbs out of the pool far, far above.

  She doesn’t see me; she doesn’t know,

  And it can be no other way.

  I feel no wounds now,

  Or any stolen pain.

  All that remains

  Is gratitude

  And pure

  Perfect

  Joy.

  TENNYSON

  64) RECLAMATION

  If he dies, I swear I’ll never forgive him. I’ll never forgive myself.

  He’s heavy as granite at the bottom of the pool, his mass so dense he doesn’t float. Brontë and I struggle with every ounce of our strength to raise him to the surface.

  My choice to follow him from our house wasn’t out of the purest of motives. I was too much of a wimp to face the emotional wreckage that was sure to come once Brew left and the effect of his presence wore off. I wanted to stay in range—even if only at the edge of it, trailing a block behind him as he searched for my sister. Tonight I was his personal stalker.

  When I got to the pool, Brontë was just climbing out. She was dazed, unsure of what had happened. I climbed the fence. I would have moved faster if I’d known. We didn’t see him for at least another ten seconds. Ten seconds can make the difference between living and dying.

  Our first attempt to bring him up fails. We come to the surface, gasp a breath of air, and go down again. I get beneath him, pushing him up, while Brontë grabs him in a cross-chest carry, kicking for all she’s worth.

  We pull him to the surface at last, somehow getting him over to the side. Standing at the edge, it takes both Brontë and me pulling on his lifeless hands to get him out of the pool.

  “You learned CPR in lifesaving, right?” I ask her.

  Brontë nods and begins CPR right away, frantically working on him.

  “You’re going too fast!”

  “I never had to do it for real!”

  She slows down. Two rescue breaths, thirty chest compressions.

  “I’ll call for help!” But when I pull out my phone, its screen is a jumble of flickering garbage. It traveled with me to the bottom of the pool, and now it’s useless.

  Two breaths, thirty compressions, over and over. Brontë’s tears are explosive without Brew to take them away, and I’m terrified that it might mean he’s already gone.

  “Get out the heart paddles!” Brontë shouts. “There’s a defibrillation kit somewhere in the storeroom. I saw it once, but I don’t know where.”

  I race to the storeroom while Brontë keeps counting out chest compressions. “…nine, ten, eleven—damn it, Brew, breathe!”

  I ransack the room—hurling things to the ground, dumping out cabinets until I find the kit—and race back to the pool deck.

  “…twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven…”

  I kneel beside her and get the thing open. The lid is filled with too many instructions to read. “What do I do?”

  “They never showed us!” But then she reaches over and flips the On switch. Simple enough so far. A red light comes on. I can hear it charging up as I grab the heart paddles. Then a green ready light comes on. I press the metallic surface of the paddles to his chest. Brontë leaps back an instant before I press the red buttons on the paddles, and Brew’s back stiffens in a violent arch.

  “You’re supposed to yell ‘CLEAR!’” she shouts.

  “I forgot!”

  I wait for it to recharge, watching for the green light, trying to relive every medical TV show I’ve ever seen to make sure I do this right.

  Brontë puts two fingers against his neck and shakes her head: no pulse.

  Brew has got to fight his way back—but he won’t. He can’t. He’s not a fighter; it’s not in his nature.

  But it is in mine! If Brewster won’t fight, then I’ll have to fight for him.

  “CLEAR!”

  A second jolt. His back arches. Still no pulse.

  “It’s not working,” wails Brontë. “It’s no use.”

  But today failure is not an option.

  As I wait for the machine to recharge, I look into his half open, unseeing eyes, and I realize that CPR and heart paddles are not enough. He needs something more from us.

  “We have to take it back!” I tell Brontë. I don’t even know what I mean yet. It’s not a thought; it’s a feeling—something I’m trying to put into words, knowing I don’t have much time to do it.

  “Take what back?” Brontë asks

  Then the understanding hits me. What Brew needs—what WE need. The only way to save him. It’s simple, and yet it’s impossible. But no more impossible than the things Brew has already done.

  “We have to take all of it back! Everything we let him take away! We have to steal it back from him.”

  I see in her eyes the moment she gets it. “How?”

  And suddenly I flash to Uncle Hoyt. “How did his uncle stay angry? Because he wanted to. The things we gave to Brew—we have to want them. We have to OWN them!”

  Brontë nods. The light turns green. “One last time,” she says.

  I press the paddles to his chest, but my thoughts aren’t on those pa
ddles. Instead they’re on the body bruises I gave away, the head trips I refused to take, the pangs of sorrow I so easily handed over. Against my own self-preservation instinct, I fight to feel those things I refused to feel before.

  “CLEAR!”

  I pump him full of electricity while trying to steal back a fraction of what I never should have given him in the first place. The battering he stole for me on the field. The heartache he spared me at home. Once I started to give just a little bit of it to him, it was easy to give it all away. But no matter how hard it is, I’m ready to take it all back if it will save him. All of it and more. So I silently pray that I might feel the hurt again somewhere, anywhere, everywhere.

  Brontë checks his pulse again. “Nothing.”

  But I feel something. There’s a tiny ache on my upper arm. It’s the spot where Brontë had punched me so angrily that day of my lacrosse game. When I raise my arm, I see the faintest bit of a yellow bruise that wasn’t there a moment ago. All I was able to reclaim from Brewster was a single bruise…

  …and that’s all it takes.

  “Wait!” says Brontë. “I think I have a pulse!”

  Suddenly he coughs, water gushing out of his mouth. Brontë and I both scream in grateful surprise. We roll him to one side, water still spilling out of him. He coughs again. His eyes flutter open, and then they close.

  We saved you, Brew! We saved you! And right now at this moment nothing else in the world matters to Brontë, or to me. We saved you!

  But he’s not waking up.

  With no phone, my feet are the only means of communication with the outside world. Brontë holds his head in her lap as I race to the nearest house, pounding on the door, refusing to leave until they let me in.

  Brew still hasn’t woken when I come back with help. He’s still unconscious when the ambulance comes to take him away—and the sense of urgency on the faces of the paramedics says everything they won’t say out loud. Something isn’t right.

  We saved you, Brew. We brought you back. So why won’t you wake up?

  65) PAINLESS

  Cody sits on a bench, his face twisted in disgust as he watches all the other kids at Roosevelt Children’s Home play on a ridiculously elaborate jungle gym.

  “It’s not fair,” Cody whines.

  “It’s your own stupid fault,” I remind him.

  He grabs one of his crutches and jabs me in the foot. “That’s for calling me stupid!”

  Brontë and I visit him at the home a few times each week. Actually, we’re both volunteering here—they roped us in after the second or third time. They’re good at that. Now that lacrosse season is over, it’s something to do. Besides, it looks good on college applications.

  “I can climb to the first platform, can’t I? It’s not that high.”

  “If you do,” says Brontë, “they won’t let you come out here at all.”

  He punches his cast in frustration, and it gives off a dull thud like a mannequin leg. It’s a nasty cast, going all the way from his ankle to his thigh.

  “I hate it!” he says. “And it always itches!”

  There were too many questions surrounding Brew’s near drowning. Enough questions that Child Protective Services saw fit to reevaluate us as a foster family and took Cody back. I wasn’t there when he broke his leg, but the accident report tells a pretty clear story. Cody was in his social worker’s office being evaluated. Then, the moment he was told that he wouldn’t be coming back to live with us, he went ballistic and jumped out of the second-floor window into a tree—which might have been all right if he didn’t totally miss the tree.

  He broke his leg in three places.

  “You’re a very lucky boy,” the doctors told him, but I don’t think he sees it that way. Cody’s a kid who will go through life learning things the hard way. But it looks like this is one of life’s major lessons that’s going to stick.

  Dad picks us up in the reception area at five to take Brontë, Cody, and me over to the hospital. Sometimes it’s Mom, sometimes it’s Dad, but never both. Dad moved back into the guest room shortly after Cody left. Negotiations between our parents have stalled. Silence and fast food have returned.

  There’s a nurse in Brew’s hospital room when we enter, checking his chart. “Always good to see you,” she says with a smile, and leaves us to our visit.

  Cody hobbles on his crutches to a chair beside Brew’s bed, plops himself down, and starts reciting for Brew a blow-by-blow description of everything that’s happened in the Universe of Cody in the three days since he was last here. He doesn’t pause for a response since he’s used to not getting one.

  On the wall behind Brew’s bed are pictures drawn by Cody. A silver Mylar GET WELL SOON balloon floats lazily up from the foot of his bed, and will probably be there until the end of time, since those things never lose air. On a table are wilting flowers that Brontë replaces with some fresh ones. Next to the flower vase is a lacrosse MVP trophy.

  Brew lies on the bed, eyes closed, connected to devices that looked intimidating at first but that we’ve gotten used to seeing. An electroencephalograph, a heart rate monitor, an IV, and one machine that lets off random, unpredictable pings like it’s sonar checking for enemy submarines.

  Brontë sits down and massages his fingers.

  “He looks good,” says Dad.

  I guess everything is relative. All of his bruises are gone, although there are some scars that I suspect will never fade entirely. He’s peaceful, and takes away none of the pain we feel as we linger by his bedside. Nor does he feel any pain of his own.

  If it was a mistake to keep him alive, then I take full responsibility. I admit my selfishness of not wanting to lose the strangest, and maybe the best, friend I’ve ever had. Blame me for forcing him to linger like this. I accept all guilt, because I’m not the kind of person who gives in. I’m not wired that way.

  In a while Dad goes to move the car out of the twenty-minute zone. But the rest of us stay a while longer.

  “When Brew wakes up,” Cody says, “I’m keeping my broken leg—just like I kept my scaredness when we was up on the electrical tower.”

  And I believe he could keep his broken leg. It’s amazing the things you can hold on to when you’re determined to keep them, and the immunity you can develop if you truly want to. I know that Brontë and I have been working on our immunity—doing our best to want all those unpleasant things we might otherwise give away.

  On the way out, we stop by the nurses’ station. “Has there been any change?” Brontë asks. “Anything at all?”

  “Well,” says one of the nurses, “we keep seeing unusual spikes in his brain waves. The fact that there’s any activity at all is a very good sign.”

  “How good?” Brontë asks.

  The nurse camouflages a sigh with a warm smile. “Honey, people can be in comas for months or years. Sometimes they wake up without explanation, and sometimes they don’t. As much as we know about the brain, it’s nothing compared to what we don’t know.”

  It’s a speech the nurse has got memorized—in fact, she told us the exact same thing two weeks before. I can’t fault her for giving us a canned response—it’s her job. Still, I’m feeling obnoxious enough to finish it for her. “‘But there are new discoveries every day,’” I say, repeating back to her what she said the last time we were here—what she must say to everyone waiting for a loved one to regain consciousness. “‘Maybe we can be the ones who win a Nobel Prize for unlocking the mysteries of the brain someday.’”

  Rather than taking my mocking personally, she sigh-smiles again. “Definitely a sign that I need a vacation,” she says.

  “But if he does wake up,” says Brontë, “you’ll call us, won’t you? Promise me that you’ll call!”

  “I promise,” says the nurse. “We’ve got your number.”

  “We’ve got all of their numbers,” says another nurse.

  “Memorized!” says a third.

  Maybe we’re the ones who need a vaca
tion.

  66) HELLO

  On a mockingly bright Memorial Day weekend, when everyone else celebrates a day off from work and school, Mom and Dad sit Brontë and me down in the kitchen for a serious conversation. We know what it’s about before they start talking. We know because the two gray suitcases are up from the basement and have been side by side in the guest room for days.

  “Your mother and I have decided it’s time for me to move out,” Dad says. They are words Brontë and I have been dreading for so long, I can’t recall when the dread began.

  “It’s just for a while,” Mom says, but that’s like closing the barn door after the lawyers have fled.

  Brontë’s tears come quickly. “Don’t lie to us. There is no ‘just for a while.’”

  Our parents’ eyes have become shiny and wet as well. “Maybe you’re right,” Dad says. “Maybe it’s forever. Maybe.”

  It’s the F word that gets my waterworks going. Forever. The escape valve opens; I wipe my eyes quickly and close the valve again. Forever sucks.

  While Brontë gets herself under control I say, “Things will probably get worse before they get better.”

  “Tennyson’s right,” says Brontë. “And we’ll probably both have bizarre meltdowns every once in a while, even if we seem okay.”

  “Yeah,” I say, and add, “If we don’t have meltdowns, that’s when you should worry.”

  Our parents look at us with the stupefied kind of amazement that’s usually reserved for slot machine jackpots, or papal introductions.

  “How did you two get to be such old souls?” says Dad, incredulous.

  Without missing a beat I say, “Prolonged sun exposure,” and pinch crow’s-feet into the corners of my eyes.

  “Yeah,” says Brontë. “We’ll probably need Botox at twenty-two.”

  And in spite of the seriousness of the day, Mom and Dad can’t help but chuckle.

  It’s only after they leave the room that it truly begins to hurt. I hold Brontë—not just to comfort her, but to comfort myself as well, because maybe I’m feeling as awful as she is, whether I show it or not.

  But in that bottomless moment when the whole world feels like it’s tearing in half, I realize deep down that this is the moment we’ve been waiting for since the day Brew fell silent. We’ve finally come back around to where things were when we took Brewster and Cody Rawlins into our home…