Bruiser

by Neal Shusterman

  He doesn’t even wait for the count; he starts swinging right away—the same odd, roundhouse punches but much more powerful than they were in second grade. I’m caught off guard, and he lands one right on my mouth, then backs away to let it sink in.

  Part of me welcomes this chance to put Ozzy in his place—but suddenly I realize something. Brew is holding his mouth. It’s bleeding. It’s swelling. He’s taken the punch Ozzy landed on me! I’m pretty sure I can beat Ozzy in a fight but not without taking substantial damage of my own. But any damage I take will bounce right to Brew…and everyone will see! Everyone will know, and his life will become the living hell he’s feared for so long.

  I can’t let that happen.

  The only way to prevent outing him as an empath is to end this quickly and decisively. I can’t just take Ozzy down…I have to take him out. And fast.

  I fend off Ozzy’s next round of swings, and he backs off for a moment of taunting.

  “You think you’re so smart, so cool,” Ozzy says, “like the world owes you something because of it.”

  “I don’t want to fight you, Ozzy.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet you don’t!” And he comes at me again.

  There’s a set of unspoken rules we live by when it comes to fighting. We can’t help it. It comes from living in a civilized world. Even when you’re fighting your hardest, somewhere deep down, you know how far you can go. But today the rules are gone. Today I fight not to win, but to destroy.

  I start in on Ozzy with perfectly controlled methodology.

  A sharp sock to the eye: He’s slightly dazed.

  An upper cut to the chin: His head snaps back.

  A powerful piston-punch to the gut: He doubles over, his face jutting toward me.

  Then the fourth and final punch. Holding nothing back, I put the full force of my will behind my fist and send it on a decimating collision course with his nose.

  I feel bone breaking against my knuckles. He stumbles back, and blood immediately begins to gush from his face, spilling onto the ground. He collapses to his knees, screaming and bringing his hands to his face. He’s forgotten the fight; he’s forgotten me; all that’s left for Ozzy in this moment is the blood, the pain, and the pavement.

  The crowd around us that was so quick to cheer and jeer now falls silent behind Ozzy’s wet, nasal wails.

  Crippendorf looks at me and shakes his head. “Dude, that was so…uncalled for.”

  All I can do is stand there and stare at Ozzy as he bleeds on the sidewalk until Brew grabs me and pulls me away.

  48) FALLOUT

  “Thanks for taking out the team’s star sprinter,” Brontë says when Brewster and I get home. Somehow the news got home even before we did. “Do you realize you’ve just turned Ozzy from a standard school ass into a sympathetic victim? Was that your intent?”

  “It was self-defense!” I tell her. “There are witnesses to prove it!”

  “Witnesses enough to keep you out of juvie?”

  The thought hadn’t even occurred to me. “Yes,” I tell her, then Brew chimes in.

  “Ozzy started it—everyone heard Tennyson say he didn’t want to fight, but Ozzy came after him.” He gives her the details—how I had stood up for him. She is both horrified and impressed by the smoothie backwash, which I suspect will go down in local history.

  “Someday, Tennyson,” she says, “I’m convinced there’ll be bulletproof glass and armed guards between our conversations.”

  “Ozzy has lots of friends,” says Brew. “What if his friends lie and say you started it?”

  “Relax,” I tell Brew, impressed by my own calmness.

  Even my parents, whose reaction-factor could usually rattle the house off its foundations, are unexpectedly rational. Dad sits me down calmly for the obligatory “What were you thinking?” speech and talks about putting me in an anger management program.

  “I wasn’t angry when I hit him,” I tell him—which is true. I probably should have been, but I wasn’t. I was just taking care of a problem.

  He and Mom call the O’Dells and offer to pay all of Ozzy’s medical expenses; but the O’Dells—who are disgusted both with me and with their own son—refuse, and want to have absolutely nothing to do with us. The threat of a lawsuit looms like a storm cell.

  And yet, in spite of all that, things seem as normal as normal can be. Mom and Dad sit in the family room together—in separate chairs, but still in the same room—sharing communal laughter as they watch a dumb sitcom.

  I spend most of the night sitting at my desk trying to do homework while fielding calls from my friends—since everyone who wasn’t there wants to know how it went down.

  When I hang up from one of the calls, I see Cody standing right beside me. I jump a little, not expecting him to be there.

  “Is it true you killed a kid?” he asks.

  “No!” I tell him. “I broke his nose.”

  “Oh.” Cody seems both relieved and disappointed. “Well, ninjas know how to break your nose so the bone goes right into your brain and you die.”

  “I’m not a ninja,” I remind him. He seems both relieved and disappointed by that, too. Then he thinks about it some more. “Are you gonna get like Uncle Hoyt?” he asks, then he looks at me, waiting for an answer. It makes me shiver, because I know he’s looking for something in my eyes—maybe something he saw in his uncle’s eyes—and I hope to God he hasn’t found it in mine.

  “I’ll never hit you or your brother, Cody.”

  “That’s not what I mean….” And still he’s looking. A little kid’s gaze can be innocent; but sometimes their eyes are so wide, they catch all kinds of things older eyes don’t. Kind of like those radio telescopes that stare at empty space so hard and so long they find thousands of galaxies in the darkness. Cody’s gaze reaches a little too deep, and I have to look away.

  “Just don’t be like him, okay?” he says, then he leaves, and I’m glad for it—because once he’s gone I start to feel pretty good about things. Not just good, but great. In fact, I fall asleep that night feeling a bizarre bliss that flies in the face of everything going on in my life. I know I should probably wonder why, but who questions a good feeling? Better to just enjoy it. The fight with Ozzy seems too small and too far away to matter. So do the old fights between my parents. Ancient history. And all the fallout is little more than stardust settling on my shoulders.

  Contentment. I could get used to this feeling.

  CODY

  49) STUFF

  I didn’t mean to do it. I just wasn’t thinking. Well, that’s not true; I was thinking, just not the way I needed to be. Uncle Hoyt woulda taught me a lesson if he was here to see it. We were out at the park playing basketball again. That is, Tenny, Brew, and Mr. Sternberger were playing. Me, I don’t play because I don’t care much for things I’m not already good at, like handball and running, and most other stuff. But Tenny, he gave me a brand-new kite, then he put me with it out in the empty soccer field next to the basketball court and said, “Knock yourself out.”

  The problem with kites is they got a mind of their own. This one was painted like a hawk, which I guess was right for it, because it sure was a birdbrain the way it kept diving into the ground.

  I went over to see if maybe Tenny or Brew or Mr. Sternberger could give me some help, but they were already in a game with a bunch of other people. Brew was playing like one of them. Real good. Maybe not good like me at running, but good enough to score a couple of baskets while I watched.

  Uncle Hoyt woulda never let him do that. He’d never let Brew out with a whole bunch of people like that. He’d come out here if he saw it and drag Brew’s butt home.

  “You weren’t meant to be part of things, boy,” he’d tell Brew. “You know it as well as I do.” And Brew would put his head down and follow Uncle Hoyt home, because he’d know Uncle Hoyt was only looking out for him.

  But there’s no one to protect Brew now, because there he was, playin’ up a storm and havin’ a good time
with a bunch of people who are strangers now but might not be strangers for long. Uncle Hoyt wouldn’t be happy; and thinking about Uncle Hoyt makes me sad, because I miss him, or at least I miss the part of him that didn’t go foul. I think about how he’d like to see me finally get a kite up in the air, and so it makes me want to do it even more.

  I go back to the field with the kite—that dumb old hawk that don’t know up from down—and I’m startin’ to feel good about it, because the wind, which at first couldn’t decide which way to blow, is now blowing straight; and I know if I run into the wind, I might teach that bird to fly.

  I start running, letting out some string behind me, and sure enough I get it in the air. It’s trying to dip and twirl, but I won’t let it dive. The wind’s ripping at its wings, but not tearing them, like it did to my old kite. I give the kite more line, and I keep on running, because if I don’t, it’ll fall down and I’ll have to start over. The thing is, the field doesn’t go on forever. In a minute I’m at the edge of it—but even though I’m out of grass, I’m not about to stop. So I let out some more line and keep on running right into the street. It’s not a big busy street, but there’s cars, though, and maybe they’re moving a little too fast. But what am I supposed to do? Let the kite fall down after all that work?

  So I’m in the street, and one car hits the brakes, and another car swerves around me; but it’s okay, because people around here are good drivers, and I’m sure when they see a kid running with a kite in the street they understand the situation, so they’re extra careful. I only almost got hit, and almost don’t count.

  By the time I get across the street, that hawk is real high, and starting to stay up by itself; and since there’s nothing in front of me but a big, bushy hillside that probably has snakes and stuff, I turn right and run along the sidewalk.

  I didn’t see that stupid old electrical tower until it came out of nowhere and grabbed the kite with its ugly gray arms. In a second the kite’s just dangling there, whipping back and forth in the wind, all helpless. And that electrical tower, it’s looking down on me, and I can almost hear it go “Ha ha,” because sometimes I think things that ain’t alive know exactly what they’re doing.

  Well, I’m not about to let it get away with that. It’s a brand-new kite! Then I get to thinking how an electrical tower is almost like a tree, except that its branches are metal and more regular. So I put down the kite string and start climbing with my eye on that dangling bird, because Uncle Hoyt always said “Keep your eye on the prize,” although I think he should have also said “Go after the prize,” too; and maybe that’s why prizes never came his way, because all he ever did was look at them. But I’m doing both, keeping my eye on it and going after it at the same time.

  I climb and climb, and for the longest time the kite doesn’t seem to get any closer. Finally I get just as high as the kite; but it’s still out of reach, dangling on one of those stubby skeleton arms of the tower. Its tail’s all wrapped around one of the electric wires that looks much thicker up here than it did from the ground, and the wires are all buzzing like crazy—not just buzzing, but humming, like they all got a voice and are trying to be an electric choir.

  I know enough not to touch those wires since I might get electrocuted—but I also know that birds sometimes sit on electric wires and are fine, so maybe it’s not as dangerous as they say. Either way, though, I have to get my kite down, so I work my way toward it. In a minute I’m out on the arm, and I can feel all the electricity making my arm hairs stand on end even in the wind. The kite’s still just out of reach, dangling and twisting and teasing me, so I reach for it with one hand.

  Then I look down.

  Maybe if I had looked down sooner I would have chickened out and gone back down, because there’s no tree I’ve ever climbed that’s this high. It’s like I’ve suddenly forgotten how to climb, because there I am, clinging to the metal bar with both my arms and both my legs and my whole body as well, and now I notice for the first time how cold the wind is, and the kite, which just a second ago looked like it was teasing me, now just looks trapped and kind of sad.

  From way up there I can see everything. The field seems bigger than it did from the ground, but the basketball court looks smaller. No one’s on the court anymore. Instead they’re all running toward me across the soccer field. Even the people I don’t know. I hear a whole lot of “There he is!” and “Oh, my God!” and “Hold on!”

  Brew gets to the tower first, with Tenny right behind. They talk for a split second, and Tenny runs off, I guess to get help, although I can’t see why since a whole lot of help is running toward the tower already. Then Brew starts to climb. He was never much of a climber, but I guess he is when it’s important, because he climbs the tower pretty good. Down below there’s like a million people looking up at me, their eyes on the prize.

  Halfway up the tower, Brew slips and catches himself, banging against a bar, and the metal rings out like a bell.

  “Go that way!” I yell, pointing to a place where the metal’s all rusted and rough, because that’s easier for sneakers to grip onto.

  The closer he gets, the less scared I am, because I know that my brother’s going to save me. When he’s almost as high as me, I tell him I’m sorry for getting stuck up here.

  “Stay absolutely still!” he tells me. Then he comes a little closer. Down beneath us, Tennyson runs back with what looks like a bundle of flowers; but when he gets to Mr. Sternberger, he takes a part of it and the bundle gets bigger. Mr. Sternberger starts giving orders to the people around him, and they grab on to it, too. That’s when I realize that it’s not flowers at all—it’s a flowery sheet, and Mr. Sternberger’s getting everyone to stretch it out beneath us until it’s pulled tight, like a trampoline made of roses and daisies. It takes maybe ten people to stretch it out, but from up in the tower it still looks small.

  Finally Brew’s right next to me, but I’m still just out of reach to him. He’s scared—real scared, but I’m not anymore, because he won’t let me be. Brew never lets me be scared.

  “I’m almost there! Don’t move!”

  “How’m I gonna get offa here if I don’t move?”

  Then, holding tight to the tower, he looks at me in that deep kind of way, like teachers before they send you to the principal.

  “You have to stop doing these things,” he says.

  “The kite got stuck; I had to get it down. I was just being responsible.”

  “Be responsible on the ground!”

  He tries to get closer but can’t. Still, he’s not giving up. “You’re gonna be okay,” he tells me.

  “I know I am.” And it’s true. I know it for sure, because Brew’s there.

  I hear sirens getting closer, and before long a police car comes in from one direction and a fire truck from another. I start looking around because if there’s a fire, I’m sure to see it from up here. Then they both stop right in front of the electrical tower and I get it. Fire trucks don’t always come because of fires. Sometimes they come to get cats out of trees. Or people out of towers.

  Maybe it’s because I’m thinking about the fire truck, or maybe it’s because my fingers have gotten so cold, but I start to slip.

  “No!” yells Brew. I grab onto the bar and my legs slip off, but I get them wrapped around again, losing a sneaker that somehow got untied along the way. It tumbles down and down, totally missing the flowery sheet. Instead it hits some lady in the head, and I hear her go “Ooof!” I want to laugh, but I don’t, because laughing might make me slip again.

  The fire truck is the kind with a big ladder; but it takes time to get it working, and I don’t have a whole lot of time, because there’s no more grip left in my fingers at all. I know if I fall I’ll hit that lady in the head, too. Brew will take the fall away from me even before I feel it, so it won’t hurt me; but it would definitely hurt Brew. Then he’d be all mad at me like he was the time I broke his arm.

  I slip again, and this time I know there’s no s
topping it, so rather than falling straight, I stretch out both my hands toward Brew.

  “Cody!”

  He catches me by one wrist, and we hold on to each other. I swing and twist from his arm like the kite swinging and twisting on its string.

  Brew holds on to me with all his strength.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell him. “I’ll be okay.”

  “But I won’t!” he says through his teeth.

  “You’ll get better,” I remind him.

  But he doesn’t answer me.

  “You always get better….”

  He still doesn’t say anything, because every last bit of him is holding on to me, even his voice.

  That’s the first time I realize that maybe there are things he won’t get better from. What if there are some things that will make him dead like Uncle Hoyt, and he’ll get burned down to dust, and put in a cardboard box, too? The thought of it scares me. It scares me more than being up in the tower, more than falling, more than anything.

  I can feel all that scaredness trying to sneak out of me and into Brew, but I won’t let it. I hold on to my scared, because I know it’s making my hand stronger. Without that scaredness I’ll fall. It’s the only thing giving my fingers strength enough to hold on to his.

  And I know I’ve just done the impossible, because holding on to anything bad when I’m with Brew has always been impossible—not just the ouches, but the bad feelings, too. But maybe it’s not impossible…. Maybe I just have to want to hold it…because as I hang here, I’m scared as anything, and I stay that way because I want to.

  The fear in my fingers makes them squeeze tighter until my knuckles turn white. Until it feels like my hand’ll fall off. Until I hear a voice behind me say “I’ve got you!” and an arm grabs me from behind, pulling me onto the ladder that has finally gotten up to us.

  “You’re safe, son,” the firefighter says.

  Even before he takes me down that ladder, I know I’ll be okay, and Brew will be okay, too. Because Brew can do his big impossible; but today, by holding on to my scaredness, I did my own little impossible, too.