The Bro Code

by Elizabeth A. Seibert

  “Sucks to suck,” called Austin.

  “Your mom sucks,” one of the sixth graders shouted back.

  Carter and I merely listened to the soothing swish of sinking our basketballs into the net.

  “Maguire, your elbow’s out,” said Josh as he approached us. “Balance, elbow, eyes, follow-through. You know how it be.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t need your help scoring,” I replied. Not ever.

  Josh’s stupid lifted pickup sat in the parking lot, the sunlight illuminating its true doucheyness. His lift kit suspended the truck high above its larger-than-normal tires, which was a good indication of his manhood situation and, conversely, made girls somehow more into him.

  “Your ride’s looking pretty clean,” I said.

  “Thanks,” Josh replied. “I’d been meaning to take it to the wash. Thanks to y’all I don’t have to.”

  “Our pleasure,” Carter muttered.

  Honestly, why Austin had invited him was beyond me. Normally, Josh hung out with us as the result of someone else hanging out with us and bringing him. Although, after his grass business took off (and I don’t mean landscaping), Josh had become the guy who could get you things.

  “Want to do Carter and Josh versus me and Mags?” said Austin, throwing his sweatshirt on the ground. “Seems fair.”

  The twang of Carter’s basketball hitting the half-court line answered him. Josh’s sub-par ball skills, matched with Carter being too good at everything, made for a pretty even game.

  After an hour of sweating, Austin getting called out for traveling too much (someone get this guy a passport, am I right?), and us trying to dunk on Carter every chance we got, which did happen—Scout’s honor—Josh and Austin flopped on the moist grass beside the court, gulping from their water bottles.

  The afternoon sun baked the asphalt like rocks in a desert. Heat had started to scald the bottoms of my sneakers, but I’d gladly have put up with that over sitting and braiding each other’s hair with Josh.

  “You guys doing anything tonight?” Josh asked.

  “Obviously,” said Austin, “we’re on a mission to end Carter’s dry spell. How long’s it been since you had a date?”

  Carter replied with a clean swish of the net, shooting from the three-point line. We had absolutely no plans for the evening, especially since I’d be studying, but Austin took every opportunity he could to make fun of Carter.

  “Nah,” I said, “unless its first name is text and its last name is book, Carter won’t be giving it the time of day.”

  Josh snorted.

  “This is true,” admitted Austin. “I heard that if you don’t get all hundreds on your high school quizzes you can kiss graduating college, getting a good MCAT score, being accepted into med school, winning your dream residency, passing your boards, and becoming a surgical attending good-bye.”

  “Assholes,” said Carter. “Without me you’d literally fail biology.” He lined up another three-point shot. It banged against the backboard.

  Austin mimed bowing down to Carter, stopping when two sophomore girls strutted by us, tennis rackets over their shoulders. The basketball’s synthetic leather felt good against my palm, but even better when I whipped it at Austin’s head.

  “You’d all be failing b-ball without me,” I said.

  Carter tossed me his ball and grabbed his empty water bottle from the sideline.

  “I’m filling these up. Had enough of your smack, Maguire.” He plodded across the neighboring grassy field to the water fountains.

  Austin waited exactly four seconds for Carter to be out of earshot. “How’d it go with LOC? What’d you guys talk about?”

  LOC, or Little O’Connor, was Austin’s code name for Eliza. Another rule of the Bro Code is that a bro always kisses and tells. It was time to hear Josh’s side of things. If he didn’t exaggerate the deets anyway, which a bro also tends to do.

  A warm bead of sweat rolled down my cheek. I wiped it away, but a salty scent still lingered in my nose. With insincere indifference, I aimed at the net for an easy two-pointer.

  Josh smirked. “Didn’t talk that much, if you know what I mean.”

  I intentionally missed my rebound. The ball bounced at Josh and slapped against his head.

  “Oops,” I said. Josh waved me off.

  “You give her enough jungle juice . . .” Josh continued. “Isn’t that how you guys have added, like, ten girls to your lists? Legend has it that you guys can mix some pretty potent drinks.”

  “Yikes. Def hope not.” Austin stood, gesturing for me to pass him the ball. His sudden restlessness signaled that he was 100 percent done with this conversation.

  “Hope not what?” Carter jogged back with his water bottle.

  “Oh,” said Austin, “Nick and I were giving Joshy pointers for being a perfect gentleman.”

  “Josh, do me a favor,” Carter said. “Whatever they tell you to do, treat Eliza the opposite way.” He pulled out his phone, studying it in a quick moment of distraction. Josh took it as an opportunity to mime a crude act of romance.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “She’s in great hands.”

  I forced myself to give him a thumbs-up. The leftover taste of sugary blueberry pancakes churned in my stomach.

  Carter’s phone thunked as he tossed it towards the grass. “You guys want to play again?” he asked, “Nick’s got another hour.”

  “Or we could continue to discuss the merits of date rape,” Austin muttered.

  “Wait, what?” asked Carter.

  “Bro.” Josh hit Austin with his snapback. “That’s not what I said.”

  “Better goddamn not have been,” said Carter.

  “It wasn’t,” I said, though it pained me to side with Josh. I threw my basketball at Austin. What had gotten into him? Yeah, the Eliza conversation was weird, but playing the #MeToo card was a bit much.

  “Bros will be bros,” was a familiar saying among North Cassidy’s classiest, which Austin, Carter, and I had subscribed to until sometime last year when Carter, our woke hero, drew the line for our bro behavior. Josh, however, was unaware of this, and it seemed like Austin might have been taking it too far. Because with the kissing and telling rule of the Bro Code, also came the no-judgment rule, regarding how a bro earned his kiss. This rule was hard to reconcile with the line Carter had drawn for us.

  But Carter didn’t have to know that.

  Around three in the afternoon, we drove our separate ways, which left plenty of time for me to take the packaging off my AP biology book.

  Several things stood between current me, high school Nick, and future me, college Nick. First, there was the question of how, in the vast, ever-expanding universe, the Maguire fam was going to finance my journey to adulthood, since, like, my dad was a middle school teacher and all of my mom’s earnings went to food and electricity and stuff. Then there were the college interviews, which caused palpitations upon hearing the word “interview.” Finally there was that whole picking a major thing.

  My dad’s advice on choosing a concentration was this: “Whatever’s the easiest to stay on the soccer team.” But he was Exhibit A of how not having a backup plan can come back to bite you in the ass—or in his case, blow out your knee at twenty-two.

  All the good sports science programs meant a good grade in Introduction to Biology. A score of four (out of five) on the AP bio test counted for that and would help with acceptance into most exercise-y majors. According to my guidance counselor, anyway.

  Hence, me spending a sunny Saturday afternoon holed up in my twin-bed, no-desk, gray-walled bedroom, textbook thrown onto my Red Sox comforter, actually trying at school.

  “You owe me some drills.” My dad poked his head through the doorway. His coaching whistle knocked against the wooden frame.

  He and I were spitting images of each other. Same five-foot-
eleven, 135-pound build, same wavy brown hair. When his dark green eyes—my dark green eyes—stared at me, uncomfortably cool, it felt like having the future version of you travel back in time and tell you how disappointed they are with how their life turned out.

  “I have to study.”

  “You have to get a scholarship.”

  The open textbook sat between us like a shield.

  “You had all detention yesterday for homework,” he said. “Put your shoes on.”

  Instead of good cop/bad cop, my parents liked to play mad cop/disappointed cop. Much less straightforward. Much more effective to get an admission of guilt.

  “Fine.” Hitting the floor with a thud, I rummaged through the duffel hanging on the bedpost and grabbed a pair of mud-caked cleats, their stench diffusing around my small room. The AP book lay forgotten with my unfolded laundry. “What are we doing?” I asked.

  “What you missed at practice. One-on-one shooting and hill sprints for time.”

  Fantastic.

  All the time, people ask if it’s hard to have my dad as the high school soccer coach. Most people know him as their eighth-grade English teacher, but they didn’t know he’d rather injure his other knee before coaching the middle school soccer team—boys’ or girls’.

  All the time, my answer changes. Sometimes it’s good, because it makes me work a little harder. It brings an extra thing to prove.

  Sometimes it’s hard, for exactly the same reasons.

  My dad sped through North Cassidy at the helm of a whale-sized minivan that shouldn’t have been physically able to speed. Like most things in this world, it obeyed his every command. Despite having just one child, he’d wanted a minivan to transport me, my friends, and all our sports equipment to our travel games. He’d bought it when I was born, long before I could have even showed an interest in playing sports.

  The brakes hissed a sigh of relief as he glided towards parking at the intercourse and a long, looming hill that overlooked the track and football fields inside it. It was my fault that my dad discovered this as a good workout hill; during a snow day in elementary school Austin and I had gone sledding on it, and I’d complained about having to run back up to the top.

  I still complained, ten years later.

  “All right,” I muttered, “let’s get this over with.”

  “Stop right there,” said my dad. “Want to edit that statement?”

  My fists tightened, the grass catching my cleats as they dug into the dirt.

  “Going through the motions—” he started.

  “—is a waste of everyone’s time, I know,” I finished.

  Like your wife making you roast chicken, he liked to say, it gets the job done, but at the end of the day, it’s not really what you want. If you want her to make roast beef, you’ve got to work harder.

  “Let’s go, Nicky.” He clapped. “Three, two, one . . .” Tweeet, went his whistle, “This hill is yours.”

  My calves screamed as I shot to the top, pumping my arms like the finish line had bottomless root beer floats.

  After ten reps of the 100-meter or so hill, I jogged down and crouched on the crunchy grass, dizziness pumping through my veins. My dad frowned at his stopwatch.

  “How am I doing, coach?”

  “’Bout as well as any other nerd. Averaging twenty seconds. Next ten, I need you to beat that.”

  “That’s a mile and a half of sprinting,” my chest heaved with each gulp of air, “and we didn’t warm up.”

  “That was your warm-up,” he said.

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Ready? Set . . .”

  As the blood pounded in my ears, the hill seemed to laugh at what was to come.

  My dad loved to call us nerds during practice. Carter had invented our unofficial name, Lords of the First-Strings. (The other options were Dribblers of Catan and Star Scores.)

  “Pick your knees up!” he shouted as the top of the hill neared. “You’re running like your mom.”

  My teeth clenched. If my mom knew he said things like that, he wouldn’t have a throat left to say them with, but I couldn’t exactly defend her honor when my delicate butt was being kicked into pristine shape.

  After my next mile of sprinting, Coach Dad threw a soccer ball into the mix, running me for another hour. When he finally escorted me back home, I trudged up the stairs, in need of either an ice bath or fifteen hours of sleep.

  Despite my moans and groans, and making my dad into the bad guy, the running had felt good. For the first time all week, thinking about the Clarkebridge tryout didn’t make me want to throw up and immediately change the subject.

  About time.

  RULE NUMBER 6

  A bro shalt not swim in ‘street clothing.’ It’s too restrictive and you look ridiculous.

  The next few weeks were a repetitive yet stressful whirl of extra practices with my dad, looking at my textbooks and then doing anything I could to procrastinate studying, cleaning more whiteboards in detention, hanging out with stupid Josh in my electives, and trying to ignore the fact that he was still going out with Eliza.

  Austin, Carter, and I could hardly keep up with how quickly senior year seemed to be flying. Luckily, one evening in the second half of September, the party we’d been hyping up like it was to celebrate the end of the world finally arrived.

  And it would change everything.

  I drove to Jamal’s party wearing an old shirt and jeans. It was Saturday night, and the last official summer night before fall and darkness and gross cold. The rusty orange sunset gleamed above my steering wheel like magic. The evening had my absolute, full permission to go wherever it wanted.

  Austin sat shotgun in my Mustang and our pump-up playlist blasted. The two of us had put it together when we were fifteen, and we played it on the way to every party, sports game, and general awesomeness we attended. It had become a sort of, you guessed it, tradition.

  My Mustang rattled over several potholes during the drive to the O’Connor’s residence, and Austin cranked our music to cover it. No matter how much crap Austin and I had given him the last few weeks, Carter still stood firm that he wasn’t coming to the bonfire. There was no way, however, that we’d let that happen.

  “I’ll make the call.” Austin put his phone to his ear. This was serious business, which required, gasp, an actual phone call. Misconstrued texting would make the situation worse—when it came to bros, of course. A bro would never talk to a chick on the phone unless she called him first. Even then, only after two dates. Before that? Straight to voicemail.

  “We’re here. Yup. Nope. Um, bullshit. Totally. Of course we would never force you to wear a bikini, who do you think we are? Okay. Sure, here he is.” Austin handed his phone to me, clicking it into speaker mode.

  “Dude,” I said, “you’re three whines away from Taylor Swift status.”

  Taylor Swift status n: petty, whiny, and all things unnecessarily dramatic.

  “Nick,” Carter spoke slowly and shortly, “I can’t go back there.”

  “And I can’t parallel park. Oh, snap. Looks like we’re both going to be doing things we can’t tonight.”

  “Think I should go in there?” Austin cracked open his door.

  “Carter,” I said, “what’s the worst thing that can happen?”

  “They call the cops like last time and I have to wear a coconut bra all night in jail.”

  “If that happens again, you know we’ll be sitting in the cell with you. Sounds fun. Now get your butt out here, man. I need to get gas.” The phone beeped as our call ended.

  Austin honked my car’s definitely loud, definitely-not-dorky horn. A minute later, Carter strode down the front entrance’s steps, pulling his arms through his plaid overshirt.

  “All right, your wish is granted.” Carter slid into the backseat. “This had better be some bonfire.”
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  “It will be now.” Austin reached for a fist bump.

  “We have ignition,” I said, as my car sputtered and coughed. “Ready for takeoff. Dude, why were you giving us such a hard time? It’s going to be awesome.”

  In the rearview mirror, Carter shook his head. “Freaking Josh Daley. He’s like, asking me all about how he’s doing with Eliza, and whether she likes him. And I’m like, read the room, man, I’m not talking to you about this stuff. Now she’s going to this with him, and he told me not to tell people about it, even though they’ve been going out for like a month and they went to the movies last night. I can’t deal with his crap.”

  “Eliza’s coming tonight?” I asked. Before this year, she’d barely hung out with us. Now it felt like she was everywhere. Or maybe she’d always been everywhere, and I’d finally started to notice.

  Austin coughed. “What Nick meant to say was, that’s B.S. You can’t take the same girl out twice in one weekend and then say not to tell everyone.” Yes, Austin considered himself and me “everyone.”

  Carter grumbled in the backseat. Austin looked from me to Carter then back to me. Then he reached for the stereo dial and turned our tunes all the way up.

  Bro points for Austin.

  Finally, we arrived at Bonfire Beach.

  Bonfire Beach wasn’t its actual name, but Austin, Carter, and I like to invent new names for things. The parking lot by the beach’s boardwalk was already packed, and it looked like Jamal had invited almost all the upperclassmen from Cassidy High. The boardwalk was about a half mile from the actual party, but after the heat from the fire had melted Robert Maxin’s tires a few years ago, far away was the best place to park. We heard faint sounds of someone strumming badly on a guitar before the fire was even in view.

  “Is it too late to turn around?” Carter asked. He shoved his hands into his pockets. “I don’t think I can stand people singing right now.”

  “Bah humbug,” I replied. Whenever a bro starts complaining about general happiness and joy, bah humbug is the appropriate response. Unless none of us are in good moods, in which case the response is yippee-ki-yay.