Bruiser

by Neal Shusterman

  “Cody, does Uncle Hoyt beat me?” Brew asked me while looking in my eyes. “Tell the truth.”

  And so I did just like he wanted. I told the truth.

  “No,” I told Brontë-saurus, “Uncle Hoyt’s afraid of Brewster,” which is God’s honest truth. Uncle Hoyt never hits Brew…but that’s only a half of what the truth is, and a half-truth is worse than a lie cuz it’s harder to figure out.

  I could tell she knew something, but she didn’t know what she knew. I could also tell that Brew wanted her all lost and confused about it, which meant they weren’t inside each other’s brains as much as I thought, which made me feel good.

  That day at the pool was fine and sunny and cold, just like the day I’d jumped off the roof. That was back in first grade before I had any sense. See, I was tryin’ to work my way up to it bit by bit. First I jumped from a chair, then I jumped from the porch, then I practiced jumping from the kitchen window over and over till I could do it and land on my feet easy.

  The next step was the roof. That’s what you call logic.

  So I got the ladder out of the shed and climbed up there, and I guess when I was climbin’ that’s when Brew got home from Saturday school—which he goes to a lot since he’s always getting tardies because of the times Uncle Hoyt gets odd and won’t let him leave the house in the morning.

  The thing is, that day I took the ladder and climbed up on the roof, I didn’t even know Brew was home. Wasn’t like I did it on purpose. Wasn’t like I knew we’d get hurt.

  So there I was up on the roof doin’ a countdown like they do for the space shuttle, and I was thinkin’ that it was funny, cuz the space shuttle goes up and I’d be going down.

  I had to do the countdown three times since I wasn’t ready to jump the first two times, and once you scrub the mission you gotta start the countdown all over again. Finally, at the end of the third countdown, I jumped.

  It felt like a thousand times higher than the kitchen window, and even though I landed on my feet, they slid out from under me because the ground was muddy. I put out my arms to catch myself and felt my right arm hit a big rock that was stickin’ out of the ground, and I felt the bone snap—I think I even heard it, too.

  I knew it was bad right away, and I was getting ready to feel the hurt that I knew would be coming, but it didn’t come. Instead when I lifted my arm from the ground, the snap undid itself; and I heard Brewster screamin’ bloodymurder in his bedroom, which woke Uncle Hoyt out of a deep sleep, and that’s never a good thing.

  “Cody!” my brother screams. “What did you do? What did you do?” And he comes out holding his arm, and I stand there and I explain how I had logically worked my way up to jumpin’ off the roof, and I see how his arm’s hangin’ all wrong, and I know that I’ve done something bad.

  Uncle Hoyt comes out, sees the arm, and now it’s his turn to scream bloodymurder, cuz the last thing he wants is to drive Brewster to the hospital, but he does, because in the end Uncle Hoyt always does the stuff he’s got to do even if he screams about havin’ to do it.

  Brew got a cast that went clear up to his elbow. Then he made me a cast, too, out of plaster and newspaper strips. He told me I was gonna wear it just like him because it would be the only way that I would ever learn. Only that didn’t work out cuz my teacher found out that I was wearing a cast but didn’t actually have a broken arm, and she called home and we all got called into the school, and Brew had to explain himself.

  He said I jumped off the roof and landed on him, which was a lie but only a half-lie, which is just as hard to figure out as a half-truth. But my principal said that making me wear a cast without havin’ no broken arm was child abuse. Since it was coming from another kid, though, they said that Brewster was just misguided. He said he was sorry, and he cut the cast off, and I swore up and down that I’d never jump off the roof again.

  If Brew hadn’t been there when I jumped, I would have owned that broken arm, all right—or at least I would have owned it until Brew got home and it became his. Either way it would have eventually been his broken arm, unless I runned away and stayed away months and months until my broken arm healed itself.

  It’s not like I don’t know what it feels like to be hurt, though. I do get hurt when Brew’s not around. A little bit, anyway. But Uncle Hoyt’s good about making sure Brew stays home when we’re not at school, so he’s almost always around.

  “Ain’t safe for you out there,” Uncle Hoyt’s always saying to Brew. “So you do what you have to at school and get right home.”

  I got some friends from school, but Brew don’t. “The kind of friends you get at school won’t do you no good,” Uncle Hoyt tells him. He don’t know about Brontë-saurus.

  Anyway, when Brew got his cast off, he put it on a shelf in our room as a reminder not to do dumb things. Most kids get their friends to write their names and stuff on their casts, but Brew said he didn’t care enough about anybody to have their names on it.

  Brewster’s been hurtin’ for me for as long as I can remember. There are times when he seems happy about it, but other times he’s quiet and don’t show no emotion at all. I keep being afraid he’s gonna get angry the way Uncle Hoyt does, but Brewster never gets that angry—or if he does, he holds it all in until it goes away.

  And it’s true that Uncle Hoyt’s afraid of him. He thinks Brewster must be an angel or the devil. Either way Brewster scares the heck out of Uncle Hoyt, and now that Brewster’s bigger than him, I guess Uncle Hoyt’s scared that one day Brewster will just haul off and knock him silly. Brewster’s never done that though. Never hit a soul. Won’t even kill a spider. I get spiders in my room all the time, and Brewster won’t kill ’em.

  “I care about nature,” he says, and I guess because he cares about it he can’t kill it, because if he cares about a spider and steps on it, he’d be killing a little bit of himself, too. He’d feel that spider dying under his feet. Maybe not as much as he feels the things that happen to the people he cares about, but still it’s enough to make him catch all those spiders in glasses and shoo them outside.

  I kill spiders though. Spiders and roaches and mosquitoes—it don’t bother me at all cuz I care about nature, but only when it’s outside.

  Brew says he can’t do violent stuff to crawly things or people, cuz his hand won’t hit and his foot won’t stomp, even when he wants them to. I think maybe he mighta been born that way. Or maybe he’s just busted.

  Once Brewster started spendin’ all that time with Brontë-saurus (Brontë for short), it scared me a little. First, because if Uncle Hoyt found out he’d be mad, and second because Brew doesn’t get home from school right away. “I’ve got mandatory math tutoring,” he told Uncle Hoyt, who believed it, and so Brew stays out with Brontë, and won’t get home till maybe five or six—but I want Brewster home when I’m home because, see, Uncle Hoyt, he goes foul quite a lot these days. So far he’s only gone foul when Brewster’s been home, though. But what if something bad happens at work and Uncle Hoyt brings all that madness home with him, and can’t sleep it off? Or what if he gets a letter from Aunt Debby’s lawyer and he goes drinking so as to get himself nice and mean. That’s why he drinks—he wants to get super-mean instead of just regular-mean, and he needs the alcohol to get there. It’s like his mean-fuel. And then what am I gonna do if he starts to go foul and Brewster ain’t here?

  I told Brew about it on the way to school one day, how I was scared and all.

  “Tell you what,” Brewster said, “why don’t you go to the library, and I’ll come by and pick you up on my way home.” So I started doing that, and it works real good. Sometimes he’ll even pick me up from the library early, and we’ll all go to the park, and Brontë will push me really high on the swing—higher than Brew does, because he’s all worried I’ll fly off and break his ribs or something.

  There was this one day Brewster, Brontë, and me were at the park and she was pushing me on the swing, and she says to me, “I know about your brother.”

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sp; I swing away, and when I swing back, I ask her, “Which part do you know?”

  She seemed surprised by that. “There’s more than one part?”

  I knew I had to pick my words real careful here. “Well,” I said, “do you mean the part about how he remembers everything, or the part about how he gets hurt for you?”

  “Oh,” she said, “both, I guess.”

  It didn’t surprise me that Brontë knew. It was easy to keep secret from people Brew didn’t like—but once he started liking you, you couldn’t help but know. “Did he take something away for you?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I hurt my ankle, and a gash on my hand.”

  “That was you? I wondered where he got those from—but Brew don’t like me to ask, on accounta I might tell Uncle Hoyt by accident.”

  She got a little stiff at the mention of Uncle Hoyt. “Does your uncle know what Brew can do?”

  “Yeah, he knows,” I told her. “He’s glad for it, I think,” then I changed the subject, because Uncle Hoyt don’t like to be talked about when he’s not there. “Did Brew take other stuff from you?”

  She seemed funny about answering that. “Not that I know of,” she said, and I had to remind her to push me harder on the swing cuz her head was thinking about it.

  “Sometimes,” I told her, “he takes stuff away and you don’t even know. You never felt it so you don’t know what you missed. But that only happens if he really cares about you. With me it’s all automatic—I don’t feel nothin’. Not even the time I fell into a beehive.” Then I put down my landing gear in the sand and stopped swinging, getting all quiet, cuz a little kid and his mother just took over the swing next to ours and I didn’t want them to hear. “We’re not supposed to tell people about it,” I told Brontë, “because people wouldn’t understand. They’d take Brew away and stick tubes in him, and turn him into a weapon against terrorists and stuff.”

  She laughed at that, but I was serious.

  “No one’s taking him away,” she said.

  “But they might,” I told her. “If they knew, they might. You didn’t tell anyone did you?”

  “No…but my brother knows,” she said. “I promise neither of us will tell.”

  When Brew and I got home from the park, it was almost dark. By now Uncle Hoyt would be awake and getting ready for work. He’d be making us dinner, and breakfast for himself. He can cook a buncha things fast and good. Meat loaf, spaghetti—sometimes he even makes his own sauce. Although lots of times we get breakfast for dinner instead, because making two meals at once is just too much work for someone who just woke up.

  When we went in, the house was mostly dark, and nothing was going on in the kitchen.

  “Uncle Hoyt?” Brew called.

  “Right here.” We turned toward his voice, but it took a second until we saw him. He was sitting in a chair in the dark living room. “About time you two got home.”

  Another second and I could see him a little bit better. His knee was bouncing up and down like it does sometimes. He says it’s coffee and stress that makes his knee bounce, but secretly I think it’s us. Both Brew and I stood still, wondering if Uncle Hoyt sitting in a dark room was the start of something.

  “Should I defrost some chicken for dinner?” Brew asked.

  “You do that.”

  Brew turned on the kitchen light, and I got a look at Uncle Hoyt’s eyes before he knew I was looking. He hadn’t gone foul. Not today. He just looked worried. He’d just gone odd. Relieved, I got a drink from the sink while Brew took out frozen chicken pieces. Uncle Hoyt came to the doorway.

  “I got an A on my spelling test,” I told him.

  “Good for you, Cody.” But I could tell he wasn’t really listening, so I put the test up on the fridge for him to see when he felt like noticing.

  He watched Brew as my brother plugged up the sink and turned on the hot water. “I’m wondering if maybe you don’t need all this tutoring,” he said.

  I could see Brew tense up just a little bit, and I sat at the kitchen table to get out of the line of fire.

  “Can’t do it by myself; math isn’t my subject.”

  “I’ll help you,” Uncle Hoyt said.

  “You know algebra?”

  Uncle Hoyt’s all insulted. “I’m not an idiot! I still remember it. And what I don’t remember I can study up on.”

  I started wondering why Uncle Hoyt would do that when Brew can get free help at school. And then I remembered that Brew wasn’t actually at math tutoring at all; he was with Brontë.

  “And why would you need tutoring anyway?” Uncle Hoyt said. “You can near about memorize that math book just by lookin’ at it.”

  “Words, not numbers,” Brew said. “Numbers are different.” Then he dropped the frozen chicken parts in the hot water to defrost. He didn’t say anything else for a while. Sometimes it’s best with Uncle Hoyt not to say much until you know exactly what he’s thinking, and why.

  “They shouldn’t be making you spend so much time at school,” he finally said. “It’s not right. You should be with your family.”

  “Do you want to homeschool us like Mom did?” Brew asked.

  “I didn’t say that either.”

  Now it was Brew’s leg that got the coffee-stress shake instead of Uncle Hoyt’s.

  “I’m worried about you, Brewski. That’s all. You’re never here anymore. How can we be a family if you’re never here?”

  Brew turned off the tap but didn’t look at Uncle Hoyt. “Sounds like you need a pet,” he said. “Something that’ll be waiting for you when you get up, and waiting for you to get home.”

  I liked the idea a lot. “Could we get a dog?” I asked. “I’ll take care of it better than I took care of Tri-tip. I promise.”

  Uncle Hoyt smiled, but it wasn’t a yes-smile. “You and Brew once had a dog back when your mom was alive,” he said. “You were too little to remember, Cody; but I’ll bet Brew does, don’t you? You remember what happened to that dog?”

  Brew put all of his thoughts on the chicken parts in the sink and didn’t answer. Then Uncle Hoyt laughed big. He was changed from the time we came in. At first he was all nervous and squirrelly, but now he was proud and strutting and funny, like I like him to be. He even looked taller.

  “Feeling better, Uncle Hoyt?” I asked.

  “Cody,” he said, “a million bucks ain’t got nothin’ on me.” Which must mean yes. “You leave that chicken in the sink, Brew,” he said. “I’ll fry it up for us. I’ll even save you the biggest piece.”

  Brew went to our room, practically knocking me over on his way out, and Uncle Hoyt went onto the porch to have a smoke. I brought my backpack into our room and saw Brew sitting on his bed, leaning against the wall like he’s holding it up.

  “You okay, Brew?”

  “He’s never gonna let me go, Cody.” He rubbed his arms like he was cold; he rubbed his shoulder like it hurt. “He’s gonna keep me here, taking his bursitis, his ulcers, and every one of his aches and pains.”

  “He’s just protecting you,” I reminded him.

  “From what? From the world? From Brontë?”

  I didn’t have the answer, but the thought of Brewster going anywhere scared me.

  “Why would you want to leave anyway?”

  “Forget it,” he said. “Go watch TV.”

  But I didn’t. Instead I went out to sit with Uncle Hoyt on the porch, because he’s nice to be around when he’s in a good mood.

  “This is how it should be,” he said. “Sunset on the porch, and dinner in the oven.”

  “It’s not in the oven yet.”

  He laughed, then got quiet for a second, taking a long puff on his cigarette. “Your brother doesn’t really go to math tutoring, does he?”

  Now I had to think up my own half-truth.

  “I’m at the library,” I told him. “I don’t know who he’s with.”

  “Ah! So he’s with somebody!”

  “No!” I told him, trying to back out of wha
t I said, but sometimes words are like quicksand. “I said I don’t know—I don’t even know her name!”

  He smiled the same smile as when he was talkin’ about the dog. Since I didn’t know what that smile meant, I slid just a little bit away from him in case my lying was reason to hit me, which it probably was.

  “So,” said Uncle Hoyt, “Brewski’s got a girlfriend.”

  This time I just kept quiet, since the quicksand was already over my head.

  “Bound to happen sooner or later,” he said. “Just as long as she doesn’t know about him and what he can do. Your brother’s not stupid enough to tell her that.”

  He took his cigarette out of his mouth and studied it for a second—then he slowly lowered the lit end toward his arm, just beneath his elbow. He pressed the cigarette to his own skin. I gasped. He grimaced and hurled the cigarette away, cursing. There was a red spot on his arm, but only for a couple of seconds and then was gone.

  And inside Brew screamed bloodymurder.

  Uncle Hoyt brushed away the ash from his arm, which showed no sign of what he’d done.

  “You see that, Cody?” he said. “It’s us that Brew cares about, and God bless him for it. That girl is nothing, nothing at all. Now be a good boy and go tend to your brother.”

  I went inside to get the Band-Aids, glad that Uncle Hoyt kept his temper and didn’t go foul.

  TENNYSON

  31) FORMIDABLE

  If he touches her, I swear I’m going to brain him with my lacrosse stick and send what little gray matter comes out of his ears to the Smithsonian exhibit on prehistoric man.

  What is my mother thinking? What’s she even doing sneaking around with this guy? He’s short, funny looking, and has no business eating meals in a public place with my mother—much less in an outdoor café where a person’s offspring might walk by and see her. From what I can see, the only thing he’s got going for him is hair, but so does a baboon. You can’t even see his face beneath that stupid beard—not that I’d want to. And why does he keep picking at that greasy facial hair anyway? What’s he looking for, lice?