The Brother Years

by Shannon Burke

  Mom turned to the sink like she’d wash dishes. Her back was shaking and I realized she was crying.

  I just stood there watching her back shake. Mom never cried. Mom lectured and gave us withering looks. I had a momentary feeling of uneasiness. I had broken her. But that uneasiness faded quickly into defiance.

  Look at her, crying, I thought. Not even hit and she’s losing it. Try getting beaten on five hundred times. See how you feel then.

  She stood there struggling to hold back tears, understanding the extent of the damage only then, long after it had become permanent. No easy assurances from her were going to melt the ice inside.

  I lingered a minute, watching dispassionately, then walked past her and went out. There was a blue medical glove near the porch, left from the ambulance the day before. I could see two compressed lines in the grass from the wheels of the stretcher. I decided I felt pretty good about what had happened. I had hit Coyle with a gun and maybe even tried to shoot him and I had more or less gotten away with it. I decided it was because they were afraid of me. I decided I wanted them to keep being afraid. I decided I was happy.

  * * *

  —

  A day later Coyle came back from the hospital. His head was bandaged and his face was purple and swollen on the side that I’d hit. I said I was sorry in a casual way that made it obvious that I wasn’t sorry at all. He didn’t expect anything less from me. He murmured that he was sorry, too, but I knew he didn’t mean it, either.

  The next day Coyle went away on a baseball trip, and while he was gone Dad forked out fifteen hundred dollars for a criminal lawyer. We plea-bargained my offense down to a misdemeanor and I was sentenced to a month in a halfway house for violent juveniles. I would have gotten supervision, but Mrs. Chambers, our neighbor, was friends with the police chief and the chief was friends with the judge and they wanted to show us that that sort of fighting would not be tolerated in Seneca.

  The juvenile house was in Wauconda, a town near the Wisconsin border. It was run by this hippie guy named Martin Blossom who had a blond beard and wore a friendship bracelet. He took only six kids at a time. I was the only white kid and the only kid from the suburbs, and on the first day Martin grabbed my shoulder and shook a finger in my face so no one would think he was showing preferences. Not that it mattered. It was an easy life, much easier than life at home. We had three or four hours of work on the “farm,” which was really an apple orchard with a large garden. The rest of the time the other kids watched TV. I decided they were total cows—illiterate, bored, and uninteresting. I never joined them in their discussions and was always reading books like Lord of the Flies and The Outsiders to show them that I was different. Martin, the director, thought I was a stuck-up little twit and swore he’d never take another kid from Seneca. I swore I’d never go back. That was my main lesson. I wouldn’t end up in that position again. At the end of the month I left without saying goodbye.

  When I got home Coyle was circling the backyard on his motorcycle. His reward for getting smacked with a gun was that he was allowed to ride his bike again. I’m sure he saw that as a fair trade. He was also allowed to move his mattress down to a musty storage room in the basement. That room was small, with concrete walls, and stayed about fifty-five degrees all year round, but it had a door with a lock, and that was a luxury in our house. Coyle put a desk and bookshelf down there and it became his bedroom, and after that it was understood that it was better if I stayed upstairs and he stayed downstairs. For a long time after that we pretty much ignored each other. I thought at first it was a temporary reprieve from our battles, but it was more than that. Our physical fights were over. We’d come to an impasse. I’d scared Coyle the way he scared me.

  It was the end of the first great struggle of my life.

  3

  Submission

  If animals such as crickets are kept together in a closed group for a time, a kind of dominance hierarchy develops. Individuals that are accustomed to winning their battles become even more likely to win, while individuals who are accustomed to losing become steadily more likely to lose. This is true of crickets and it is true of any species that has a memory of conflicts, including, and I would say, particularly humans, making the label loser, at times, not merely a pejorative term.

  —Richard Dawkins

  It was a week after I got out of juvie, a few days before I started at New Trier, and I was standing in the hallway of our little house with a torn envelope at my feet and a folded computer printout in my hands. I had just received my New Trier High School introductory packet. I tossed all the flyers and announcements aside. Those were unimportant. I was holding the one thing that really mattered—the dot matrix, perforated-edged, printed sheet with my level placements.

  The classes at New Trier were divided between 1 and 4 level, 4 being the best and 1 the worst. The placements were based on standardized tests, grades, and teacher recommendations. Coyle had been placed in the elevated 4 levels his freshman year and I just assumed I would be, too. I knew Coyle thought I was lazy and he was waiting for those level placements to prove that my methods were insufficient. In a vague way I thought my general intelligence would pull me through. It hadn’t.

  I ran down the list of classes and saw I had been placed in all 3 levels. Every class, just like Coyle had predicted. About three seconds after I saw my placements I walked into the kitchen carrying the printed sheet. My father was at the refrigerator with his paintbrushes, which he covered with tinfoil and froze between painting sessions so he didn’t have to waste time washing them. I said, “I just got my levels. I’ve been put in all 3 level. It’s a mistake.”

  “It’s not a mistake. If you wanted to be in the 4 levels you should have studied instead of spending your time fighting with Coyle and reading dragon books.”

  “I didn’t test well,” I said.

  “You also didn’t study.”

  “I did study. But I wake at three in the morning three days a week to work for you. We’re painting every weekend. Other kids have tutors and Ivy League students doing their homework for them. That’s why I didn’t get the best grades.”

  “Now you’re blaming me for your mediocre results? What a complainer.”

  “I’m not blaming you. But waking up at three in the morning during the school year does not help with my grades.”

  “Coyle didn’t have a problem with it. We’ll see how you do this year. If you do well, you can move up.”

  “If I wait it’s too late. Then a quarter of my transcript is on the lower levels. Are you trying to screw me to make Coyle seem better?”

  Whenever I really wanted something I accused Dad of favoritism to Coyle, which struck a chord with him, because he did admire Coyle more than the rest of us. Despite dressing like a hoodlum and spending all his free time on his motorcycle, Coyle had been valedictorian of the junior high. He made the varsity baseball team as a freshman while working adult jobs with my father. Coyle’s achievements were always held up to us to show us what was possible. But I knew Dad felt guilty about admiring Coyle, and accusing Dad of favoritism was a trump card that could be used in decisive moments.

  “Talk to your mother,” Dad said. “See what she says.”

  “And if she says it’s ok, then I can move up?”

  He pried the tinfoil from the frozen brush.

  “Yeah, if you can get her to agree to sign the form, fine. But I doubt she’ll agree.”

  Mom was out in the vegetable garden, jabbing at the ground with a hoe. I told her I wanted her to sign the petition to move up.

  “If you go into 4 level you’ll have to work harder,” Mom said. “And if you move up and fail it will be worse than if you never went up.”

  “I don’t care about that, because I know I won’t fail,” I said. “Coyle’s in the 4 level. I want to be, too. You can either help me or make it so I go to a worse co
llege.”

  She leaned the muddy hoe against the fence.

  “I’ll sign it,” she said. “But you still have to get Dean Wilkins to agree.”

  “Ok,” I said. “I’ll get him to agree.”

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  She signed the form.

  Ten minutes later I was on my bike, pedaling to New Trier.

  I arrived at school. I parked my bike, locked it, and walked in the front door and wandered around until I found the dean’s office. The notifications for level placement had gone out that week and there were a lot of other people doing the same thing as me, trying to get into higher levels. There was a line out the door of the dean’s office.

  I stood at the end of the line and heard the dean in his office, saying, “These are your scores. I’m sorry, but we have to maintain our regulations. Superior students are given the chance to move up after a year. But be warned, the classes in the higher levels are more competitive. Often, it’s better to stay in the original level.”

  I noticed all the other students were with their parents, and by their manners, by their jewelry, by their clothing, and particularly by their voices, I could tell they were in a different social class than our family. That was to be expected. Everyone at New Trier was in a different class than us. They spoke in complete sentences. They ate with their mouths closed. They didn’t yell at one another in public. An air of certainty and complacency oozed from them.

  A few of the parents glanced at me and then turned away. I was wearing my paint-spattered cutoffs and an Adidas T-shirt. My hair was not cut by a barber and hung into my eyes. I knew I looked different from the other kids. I didn’t care. I’d even started to feel a defiant pride in looking like a blue-collar misfit.

  I waited an hour. Three different petitioners were rejected over that hour. Then it was my turn.

  “Come in. Shut the door,” I heard Dean Wilkins say.

  Dean Wilkins was a big guy, a weight lifter, with rippled muscles beneath his suit. He carried keys on his belt loop with a carabiner. He had a straightforward gruffness that reminded me of my father. I told him who I was.

  “Are your parents with you?”

  “No. But I have the signed form.”

  I handed the form over. He glanced at it.

  “So you want to move into the 4 level?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know these levels are calibrated based on your ability and achievement?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I think my ability has been underrated.”

  “You and everyone else,” he said under his breath.

  I figured I might as well tell him the truth.

  “I need to be in the 4 level,” I said. “My brother’s in the 4 level. I should be, too.”

  “Your brother’s Coyle Brennan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, your brother is an exceptional case,” he said.

  Dean Wilkins looked at my application.

  “You’re working for Lucious Ward this year?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I start in a week.”

  Mr. Ward was the building manager at New Trier. I’d figured it was easier to work for the school and get paid than work for my father for free.

  “Working for the school won’t interfere with my homework,” I said. “I’ll just work during my free periods.”

  “Working through school is admirable,” Dean Wilkins said. “It can be difficult, but it can also teach time management, and you learn about the real world, something I wish more of these students here understood. Like I said, admirable.”

  “I hope it isn’t held against me,” I said.

  For a moment I thought I’d gone too far, but then Wilkins tossed his keys on the desk with a clatter.

  “All right. Four level it is. You do well, you stay up. But if you don’t, you move back down. And no favoritism because you’re an employee.”

  “Definitely not. I’ll do well. Thank you,” I said.

  Wilkins signed his part of the form. And that was it. I was in the 4 level.

  As I walked out I understood that it was in my favor that I’d come alone. It was in my favor that I was Coyle’s brother. It was hugely in my favor that Dean Wilkins did not know what had happened to me that summer.

  I walked over to the admin offices and got my schedule changed and that was that. Later I realized that the classes in 3 and 4 level really weren’t that different from each other. The classes were segregated based on talent, but also on ambition and connections. And once I was in the 4 level no one questioned why I was there. They just thought I was a smart kid. Even the teachers thought this. And it taught me something. You had to fight your way to the top, but once you were there it didn’t matter how you’d gotten there. Everyone just assumed you belonged.

  I came home with my new schedule. Coyle was at the dining room table pretending he didn’t care what happened, but I knew he did.

  I sat down. He said nothing at first. But he couldn’t help himself. He wanted to know.

  “So what levels?” he asked.

  “Fourth. I got moved up.”

  He nodded, mouth a tight slit.

  It had taken Coyle three years of consistent work to be put in the 4 levels. It took me an afternoon of wheedling.

  * * *

  —

  New Trier was more like a small college than a high school. There were almost five thousand students in the school at the time and it had a reputation as being one of the best and hardest schools in the country. I think most freshmen were intimidated by the school. I wasn’t. Whatever my father’s initial intentions when he implemented his “methods” of childrearing—waking us up before dawn, working adult jobs at a young age, using every free moment for self-improvement—the result for me, after my battles with Coyle, was that I became fanatically focused on surpassing Coyle, and that blinded me to everything else, including intimidation.

  On that first day of high school I walked into the cafeteria to see long aisles of jabbering, gesticulating students. Coyle sat at the far end with a contingent of scruffy, defiant guys from the baseball team who all wore their New Trier baseball caps backward and sat hunched over, talking to one another in low voices. On the other end of the cafeteria, midway down the aisle, I saw Robert Dainty and his blithe, preppy crowd. These were the kids who belonged to country clubs and were forced to take ballroom dancing classes so they’d know what to do at their cotillions. They wore untucked oxford shirts, wrinkled khakis, and red Converse high-tops. An air of utter satisfaction hung over these kids, like mist over a swamp.

  Robert’s preppy crowd and Coyle’s burnout crowd were the extremes of the social world at New Trier. There were about twenty other groups that fell somewhere between them—theater kids, band members, swimmers, math-clubbers, jocks, the radio-station crowd—but Coyle and Robert were the two ends of the spectrum, and right away I thought that if Coyle was at one end of the social scale, I wanted to be at the other. As I walked up the aisle that day I slowed as I neared Robert’s table.

  “Hey, Little Brennan,” Robert said. Then, to the others at the table, “This is Coyle Brennan’s younger brother.”

  “Is it true you shot your brother?” Liam called out.

  He was the kid who’d been at the fight on the playfield. He knew Coyle.

  “I was provoked,” I said.

  That started all of them jeering.

  “I was provoked the same way last summer,” Robert said. “You remember how he provoked me?”

  “You wanted to touch his motorcycle and he went crazy,” Liam said.

  “That’s what happened to me, too,” I said. “I just touched his front tire with a rake and he kicked me three times.”

  “What’d I tell you?” Robert said to the others at the table. “Brennan’s wild about that
bike. You just look at it and he loses his mind. His brother here had to shoot him.”

  Liam glanced down the aisle at Coyle.

  “Doesn’t look hurt to me,” Liam said.

  “I missed,” I said, laughing.

  We bantered back and forth for about a minute, and then I said, “Later,” and some of the other guys said, “Later,” and that was it. I went on to the table where my three friends Jimmy, Bennie, and Roscoe were waiting.

  I tried to pretend it was no big deal, me standing there at Robert Dainty’s table, but I was brimming with satisfaction. Robert was like royalty in the school. Everyone knew him. And everyone, including my brother, had seen me talking with him.

  * * *

  —

  Robert Dainty lived in the biggest house in our neighborhood and was one of these overscheduled, competitive, high-achieving rich kids who are trained and coached by professionals from a young age. Robert was all-state soccer. He was ranked in tennis. He spoke French fluently. And he had a domineering personality, not that much different from Coyle. If Robert was walking to a car with his friends he would just naturally get in the front seat. If there was one cookie left Robert took it and felt it was his right to take it. If there was a video game, Robert always played first. And unlike Coyle, he was socially savvy. Robert could make or break your social life in school and everyone knew it. I once saw Robert say to a girl named Lizzie Denton, “That sweater’s hideous, Lizzie. Take it off. I’m sick of looking at it.” And she did take it off. He had that kind of power.