Bruiser

by Neal Shusterman

  I left my parents in their surreal stupor and took a moment to peer in on Brew. Stomachaches I could understand. They had easy solutions that came in bottles and tasted like chalk. Brew wasn’t moaning anymore, but he was breathing heavily and haltingly beneath the covers.

  “Can I do something for you?” I asked, feeling helpless but wanting desperately to somehow ease his pain.

  “No,” he said weakly. “My head’s better now. Thank you.”

  “You said it was your stomach.”

  “Did I?”

  And then I finally connected several of the many dots littering my head. Brew had acted this way after that lacrosse game—the one where Katrina broke up with Tennyson. I had the sudden sneaking suspicion that Tennyson knew something I didn’t.

  59) INCONGRUOUS

  I pushed my way into Tennyson’s room without knocking. He was sitting on his bed, a plate of veggies beside him, a textbook in his lap, and his TV playing a bad slasher film.

  “Yes?”

  He didn’t look surprised that I had burst into his room uninvited; he merely waited for me to say something, like he was expecting me to burst in all along.

  “Mom and Dad are acting weird, and something’s bothering Brew.”

  “What else is new?” he said. He picked up a carrot and started munching on it. “Is the fur ball gone?”

  “Yes, and no,” I told him. “But Thorlock’s beside the point. You know something, don’t you?”

  “I know lots of things—your inquiry needs to be more specific.”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “True/false, or multiple choice?” he asked.

  “How about an essay worth ninety percent of your grade.”

  He tapped his pen on his textbook. I waited. On screen a woman with bulbous, inorganic breasts was chased by a dwarf wielding an oversize carving knife. I reached over and turned off the TV.

  “Feeling ticked off?” Tennyson asked. “Feeling angry?”

  “No, not really,” I told him honestly.

  “Funny,” he said. “Neither am I.”

  “Can you please stop being enigmatic!”

  “Yes, and no.”

  I closed my eyes and sighed. Round and round we always went, my brother and I, always trying to see who was more clever. I folded my arms, content to be silent until Tennyson said something useful.

  “I can’t tell you what I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t comment on what I don’t understand.”

  “So tell me something you do understand.”

  He thought about it and finally said, “I think I might understand his uncle. I know why he wouldn’t let Brew have friends. And why he did his best to keep Brew housebound.”

  “Because he was a sick, sick man!” I reminded my brother.

  “Yes,” Tennyson agreed. “Sick, and twisted, and cruel. But keeping Brew lonely might have been the one act of kindness he ever did in his entire, miserable life.” Then Tennyson turned on the TV to a bloodcurdling scream from the silicon starlet. “Now if you’ll excuse me, a sizable body count awaits.”

  I wanted to be furious at Tennyson’s bewildering insensitivity, but I couldn’t be. I wanted to be neck-deep in frustration over our parents’ psychotically serene behavior, but I couldn’t feel that either. The flood of distress I so desperately wanted to hold on to was mercury in my hands: heavy, dense, yet impossible to hold. So I grabbed Tennyson’s plate from him and hurled it across the room—anything to shatter the numbness.

  The plate didn’t even break. It hit the wall and fell onto the bed, dumping carrots, celery, and ranch dressing all over the bedspread.

  Tennyson, who should have jumped up and yelled at me, just looked at it and said, “Now look what you’ve done.”

  “Push me!” I screamed at him. “Call me an idiot! Tell me I’m a waste of life! Fight with me!” I begged. “Please, Tennyson, fight with me! It’s what we do. It’s what we’ve always done!”

  He stood up but made no move to confront me. Instead he looked at me and shook his head, like he did when I didn’t get the punch line of a joke. “Things are good, Brontë,” he said. “Things are great. For all of us. Why do you want to mess with it?”

  I tried to answer him, but how can you find words for what you’re not feeling?

  “Fine,” he said. “If you want to fight, let’s fight.” Then he reached out his hand and gently nudged my shoulder. “Okay,” he said. “Your turn.”

  But instead of nudging him back, I found myself throwing my arms around him, hugging him tightly, suddenly needing the kind of closeness we must have once shared in the womb.

  “What’s that for?” he asked.

  “I don’t know…I don’t know….” All I knew is that I wanted to cry and I couldn’t, and it made me want to cry all the more.

  60) ILLUMINATION

  If your heart tells you something but your mind tells you something else, which do you believe? Both are just as apt to lie. In fact, they play at deceit all the time. Mostly they balance each other, giving us that crucial reality check. But what happens on the rare occasions when they conspire together?

  Things are good, Brontë.

  And Tennyson was right. My heart told me that life was better than ever, and my mind told me not to think too deeply or all might be lost. Between my heart and mind there was a strong argument to eat my mom’s first truly homemade meal in months, then slip beneath my comfortable quilt and dream peacefully till morning.

  But we all have a fail-safe, don’t we? When our heart and mind fails us, we have our gut. And my gut told me that if I didn’t question things tonight, I never would. So after dinner I quietly left the kitchen, counted the paces to the guest room, and pushed open the door into darkness.

  Brew was under his covers, but I knew he wasn’t asleep. I turned on the light.

  “I want to know what’s happening in this house. And God help you, Brew, if you lie to me.”

  He rolled over to face me, squinting in the sudden illumination. “Everything will be okay,” he said. “Whatever’s wrong, you’ll feel better by morning.”

  But I already knew that. That was the problem. Right now I could feel the turmoil inside me clearing out like smoke through an open window; but as long as I could keep generating it faster than it could escape, I had the upper hand.

  “Tell me!” I demanded.

  He sat up. “Are you sure you really want to know?”

  I nodded, even though I was feeling less sure by the second.

  He stood, went over to the door, and closed it. “Why don’t I show you?” Then he slowly began to unbutton his shirt.

  You think you want to know the secrets of the universe. You think you want to see the way things all fit together. You believe in your heart of hearts that enlightenment will save the world and set you free.

  Maybe it will.

  But the path to enlightenment is rarely a pleasant one.

  When the last button had been undone, Brew parted his shirt to reveal a battered torso that barely looked like flesh at all. Bruise upon bruise upon bruise. Purple and yellow, swollen red, bloodless white. His chest, his shoulders, his back. It looked like he had been thrashed by chains and bashed by bats, and pummeled by countless other blunt objects. This was worse than anything his uncle had ever done. I could see where he had masked the marks on his neck and face with covering makeup much more skillfully applied than the day he came to school with a black eye. This time you couldn’t even notice it. I’m sure there wasn’t an inch of his body that didn’t bear some kind of damage. All of it was fresh; all of it came long after his uncle had died.

  “Who did this to you?”

  He pointed to one discoloration on his shoulder. “This is your father’s. When he fell on the basketball court.” Then he pointed to another. “This is Tennyson’s from lacrosse.” And then another. “This is yours; I’m not sure from where.”

  But I knew.

  “Someone opened their car door into me…,” I
said numbly.

  He nodded and kept on going, pointing to the marks on his body like one might point out constellations in the sky. “This is Joe Crippendorf’s…. This is Hannah Garcia’s…. This is Andy Beaumont’s….” On and on he went, reciting a litany that I thought would never end. He seemed to know where every single injury had come from—maybe not how or when, but he always knew who; and I thought back to something he had said. “I like your friends,” he had told me. Until that moment it had never occurred to me that, for Brewster Rawlins, the cost of friendship was exacted in flesh.

  “…This is Amanda Milner’s…. This is Matt Goldman’s….”

  I wanted to shed all the tears in the world for him, but I couldn’t. My tears were already taken away from me. My tears were filling his eyes instead of mine—and that’s when I knew how much further this went than flesh and bone.

  Then he took my hand and pressed it firmly to the center of his chest until I could feel his heart beating against my palm.

  “And this…,” he said, “…this is your parents’ divorce.”

  I pulled my hand away as if he had thrust it in hot coals. “No! They’re not getting divorced! They worked things out! They’re happy!”

  He offered me a slim but satisfied smile, then said with absolute certainty:

  “I know.”

  61) IMPLOSION

  I ran from him.

  It was callous of me; it was cowardly; it was worse than the time he ran from me when I was most vulnerable. But, like Brew, I’m human. All I knew was that I had to get to a place far enough away for me to truly know my own feelings and grapple with them. I couldn’t let Brew make peace for me. I had to make peace for myself. With myself. Only after I was out in the street and off of our block did worry, doubt, and anger begin to filter back in. Not enough to overwhelm me, but certainly enough to give some depth of field to my vision.

  My feet were on autopilot—I didn’t even know where I was going until I got there.

  The pool.

  It was getting toward nine o’clock. The pool closed to the public at eight, but the underwater lights came on at dusk and didn’t turn off until sunrise. The gate was locked, but I knew the pool as well as I knew my own home. There were half a dozen ways to get in that didn’t involve the gate; and although I had no bathing suit, I knew the storeroom door was never locked. Neither was the lost-and-found bin, which was always full of suits.

  Diving into a pool as smooth as glass and creating the first ripples has always been magic to me. Like taking the first steps into virgin snow. This is what I needed—just me and my own liquid universe. I hit the water, feeling the chill. I set out to do twenty warm-up laps but quickly lost count as my head went into defragment mode, trying to put together the events of the past weeks in some meaningful way.

  I wanted my frustration and my anger to align in a single direction—like a beam I could aim at someone, fry them in blame, and be done with it. But who? Not Brew—he didn’t choose his gift. Not Tennyson—he didn’t start this. Not my parents—they were unwitting victims with no idea where their sunny, distorted dispositions had come from.

  And then there was me.

  Was I to blame for bringing Brew out of his shell and exposing him to all the toxic things the rest of us carry in our souls? And as our family rose out of our own gloom, how could I not have known the cause? Me! The girl who always prided herself on her ability to see to the heart of things—to pull the truth from the tiniest bit of emotional evidence.

  There could be only one answer.

  I did know.

  Maybe not consciously, but somewhere deep down I must have known that Brew was filtering out all those wounds we couldn’t see. I let it happen because I wanted it to happen. I wanted my world to be safe and whole at all costs. I used Brew—just as Tennyson used him, just as Cody used him, just as his uncle had used him. In the end, blame didn’t shine on an individual. It was a floodlight cast on all of us.

  And all because we longed for healing and happiness—as if happiness is a state of being. But it’s not. Happiness is a vector. It’s movement. Like my own momentum across the pool, joy can only be defined by the speed at which you’re moving away from pain.

  Certainly our family could reach a place of absolute, unchangeable bliss at Brew’s expense; but the moment we arrived, the moment we stopped moving, joy would become as stagnant and hopeless as perpetual despair. Happily ever after? What a curse to have to endure!

  Time doesn’t move at the same pace when I’m swimming, so there was no telling how long I swam. More than half an hour, less than two. Maybe. By the time I was done, I had found a sense of balance to all my emotions. I knew there had to be a way to hold on to them even in Brew’s presence. There had to be. Uncle Hoyt had done it. I’d never seen a man so angry, and he held his anger even with Brew around him every day.

  As I climbed out of the pool, my inner balance didn’t do much for my outer balance. All those laps had tired my legs and made me just a little bit dizzy. I found myself leaning a bit too far back; I overcompensated, and then my feet slipped off the ladder rungs.

  I fell into the pool, but never felt myself hit the water.

  Instead, I felt my head hit the concrete edge, knocking me unconscious. And in that instant, everything—happiness, sorrow, peace, and anger—were all snuffed silent in the implosion.

  BREWSTER

  62) SWORDSMANSHIP

  (I)

  I did not choose this gift.

  I cannot help what I am, what I do,

  I do not choose to rob others of their pain.

  At best I can mold it, and even direct it,

  Use it myself, before others use me.

  I have made that my secret aim,

  But confessing to Brontë,

  Scars me like acid rain,

  Leaving me to drown.

  In its rising waters,

  As she leaves.

  And in that moment,

  I see my own glaring truth,

  Her gift to me, there in her eyes.

  You brought us a new light,

  But that light is false.

  So is darkness better

  Than a heartfelt lie?

  There’s a rift,

  Deep in my soul,

  Between what I wish

  And what I’ve become,

  The anger begins to swell,

  All my own and no one else’s,

  At the stark, undeniable truth,

  That my brand of healing

  Brings only misery.

  I am defeated,

  I am lost.

  She leaves,

  The door slams,

  Mobilizing Tennyson.

  He comes down to my room,

  To find out what he has missed.

  He sees my ruined back, chest, and arms.

  “Put on your shirt,” he says, and tosses it to me.

  “Sorry,” I tell him, “I know I look horrible.”

  “No,” he says, “it’s cold, that’s all.”

  I slip the shirt back on.

  “Thanks.”

  I have to admit

  Tennyson has changed

  Since the first time I met him,

  For the better, but also for the worse.

  He’s much kinder, more honorable somehow,

  But humbled by an addiction to painkillers.

  We both know that painkiller is me.

  “She hates me now,” I tell him.

  “She’ll get over it,” he says,

  “I’ll go after her—”

  “No!” he says,

  And in his eyes

  A certain disquiet

  A distinct desperation

  At the thought of me leaving,

  Clear evidence of the addiction.

  And he looks away, hiding his shame,

  But I’m more ashamed than him,

  Because I made him this way.

  I am not what he needs.

  Not what they
need.

  “So,” he asks,

  “Will you stay?”

  Meaning much more

  Than just tonight or tomorrow,

  Or this week or next.

  “Should I?”

  He looks away again.

  “Yes…,” he says, then adds,

  “But I don’t know if it’s really me talking.”

  I nod, an understanding reached.

  “I’m going out to find her,

  To make things right,”

  Or at least

  Properly wrong.

  (II)

  Alone with my own thoughts,

  Searching through a chilly night,

  Full of memories….

  When I was five years old,

  I spent a week in the hospital

  For three broken ribs and internal bleeding,

  Because our dog was hit by a car,

  And I took his pain away.

  Mom had to lie and say I was the one hit,

  And as I lay there recovering, she told me a story

  About the world’s greatest warrior,

  Who could take on armies single-handedly.

  The gods feared his power,

  So they gave him a diamond sword,

  Which fused to his fighting hand.

  And every blow he struck

  Would come back upon him.

  Until he realized that the only way to win

  Was not to fight.

  When I came home from the hospital,

  Our dog went to a good family,

  And we never had a pet again.

  Where would Brontë go,

  To be alone with her thoughts?

  One more place to look…

  When I was eight, my teacher had pneumonia

  Only she never knew.

  My fever climbed so high, I hallucinated;

  My fingers were glittering diamond daggers

  That everyone wanted for themselves.

  Once my fever broke,

  My mother and I had a serious talk.

  “Guard your heart,” she told me.

  “That is your hero’s sword.”