My Brother's Keeper

by Patricia McCormick

  There’s only one word that comes close to describing the way the Stargell makes me feel. Rich. Not rich like the Food King or like Arthur, but like I have something that makes me special.

  After a while, our mom peeks in. Her hair is in some kind of weird upswept style like a bride’s and she’s wearing a clingy red top, a black skirt, and high heels.

  “Does this make me look fat?” she says, checking herself out in the mirror.

  To tell you the truth, the red top is sticking to her chest in a way that makes me feel shy just looking at her. But at least she doesn’t look like maybe she’s secretly dying of an incurable disease. “No,” I say. “You look good, Mom.”

  She smoothes her skirt across her hips, then shrugs. “Jake,” she says. “Put that thing on pause for a minute.”

  Jake and Eli keep playing, so she has to step over all the Mad magazines and tube socks and Beanie Babies which are all over the place again, and stand in front of the Nintendo, blocking their view. Eli groans. Jake elbows him to shut up.

  “Now,” she says. “You boys listen to Jake. Do whatever he tells you. I’ll be back soon. Okay?”

  Jake whistles. “You look foxy, Ma,” he says.

  “You think so?”

  I wonder what’s different about him telling her she looks good and me telling her, but decide not to say anything.

  She kisses us each good-bye, smelling all flowery and hopeful and leaving lipstick gunk on my cheek which I wait to wipe off till she’s gone, and then I go back to staring at the Stargell and feeling rich.

  After a while, Jake sets the controller on the rug, stands up, and leans over me.

  “How come you’re always staring at that card?” he says.

  I shut the binder.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean, aren’t kids your age supposed to be looking at pictures of Britney Spears or something?”

  Britney Spears is definitely okay and all but I don’t exactly see the point of a guy like me thinking about a girl like her. But I figure this is probably as good a time as any to ask Jake stuff about girls, in particular about how a person starts talking to one, like, for instance, Martha MacDowell. I want to tell him about how she smells like clean laundry and about how her hair looks like butterscotch syrup, but that sounds like I think she’s a pile of clothes or a maybe a dessert.

  “Hey, Jake,” I say. “What does a person do if he wants another person, like maybe someone in that person’s grade, to talk to him?”

  Jake frowns at me. “You just talk.”

  I decide to get more specific. “What if the person gives you a certain look?”

  He gives me a certain look—like I’m an idiot.

  “You know, not a normal look,” I say. “A look that might mean something.”

  “Tobe,” he says. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  The next thing I know he’s putting on his jean jacket. He opens his bottom dresser drawer, pulls out a small plastic bag, and kicks the drawer shut with his foot.

  He’s partway out the front door when I run to the top of the steps and yell out to him.

  “What do you want?” he says.

  I don’t know what I want, but I clear my throat like I’m about to deliver the State of the Union address. Then I stand there and say exactly nothing.

  Jake turns to leave.

  “Where’re you going?” I say.

  Jake scans the street. “Out.”

  “On a school night?” Somehow I’ve turned into our mom, except not even she says anything that lame.

  He opens the plastic bag, pulls out a tiny blue pill and sets it on his tongue.

  “What’s that?”

  Jake doesn’t say anything.

  “What did you just take?”

  He sticks out his tongue where the little blue pill is dissolving. “Acid.”

  Taking acid, I know from Mr. Fontaine’s videos, is a lot worse than getting stoned. People on acid walk out of thirty-six-story windows or dive into pools with no water or step in front of Mack trucks. The car alarm is blaring so loud I can hardly think but I make a grab for Jake’s arm, planning to put him in a headlock until he spits it out.

  Except that he sidesteps me and my hand just grabs thin air. Then he’s gone and I’m looking at him through the window as he steps over Tonto and crosses the parking lot.

  There’s nothing to do except go back upstairs and watch Eli watch TV.

  It’s quiet and creepy with just the two of us home. Eli turns around and looks at me. “Where is everybody?”

  I shrug.

  Eli wraps his blankie around his shoulders and starts to put his thumb in his mouth. He stops, though, when he realizes I’m looking at him.

  I don’t quite know what to do, but I know it should be some sort of big-brother-role-model-type thing. “You wanna play Nintendo?”

  “You’ll give me a head start?” he says. You can tell he’s sort of embarrassed to have to ask on account of him liking to think he’s just as good as me.

  “Sure.”

  He puts on his cowboy hat, which he says is for good luck, hands me the controller, and we start playing. Except that I’m only playing with the half of my brain that’s not wondering if Jake’s okay and where our mom is and what’s going on around here.

  So I forget to let Eli get ahead of me and I win.

  Eli gets up and switches off the game. Then he pulls his yellow blankie over his head. Which means he’s probably under there sucking his thumb. Which makes me feel like a complete jerk for making an eight-year-old so stressed out that he’s back to sucking his thumb under his blankie.

  “Eli,” I say, addressing the yellow blankie. “I’m sorry.”

  The blankie doesn’t respond.

  “I, uh, Jeez,” I say. “I forgot.”

  Still no answer.

  I lift up a corner of the blankie and put my head underneath. The world inside is dark and warm and soft and you can see why a person would go in there if someone who promised to let him win at Nintendo just clobbered him.

  “Really,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  He looks at me like he hopes I’m sorry but like he’s not quite sure.

  “I owe you a do-over,” I say. “Two laps head start.”

  Eli perks up. “Three?”

  “Okay,” I say. “Three.”

  “One hand behind your back?”

  I put my hand behind my back.

  Then we both come out from under the blankie and try to act like things are normal. Except you can tell Eli doesn’t really relax till he’s about 185 laps ahead of me.

  He pumps his skinny little arms in the air when he crosses the finish line. “Again?” he says. “Wanna do it again?”

  I don’t, but I do, just because he gets such a kick out of winning, even with a no-fail head start.

  After about 185 more races, he puts down the controller and looks at me. “Toby,” he says. “Can I ask you something?”

  I use a big-brotherly-sounding voice. “Sure.”

  “The Easter Bunny,” he says. “It’s really Mom, isn’t it?”

  I do the only thing a person can do at a time like this: I stall. “Who told you that?”

  “Jimmy Badowski.”

  Paul Badowski’s the one who told me back in first grade; the whole family is a bunch of holiday wreckers, if you ask me.

  “Well, who’s he?” I say. “Encyclopedia Britannica?” Which is not only not the kind of thing an older big-brotherly-role-model-type person would say, it’s more like the completely lame kind of thing someone Eli’s age would say.

  He looks sort of worried.

  Which makes two of us. This being one of those once-in-a-lifetime childhood moments that can easily become one of those once-in-a-lifetime childhood traumas, I try to think of some wise, mysterious, not-technically-truthful-but-not-technically-not-truthful things people say on the Hallmark Channel.

  “I believe in him,” I say.

  “You
do?”

  I nod. “Like I believe in electricity.” I get up and turn the light switch off, then on.

  You can tell Eli doesn’t get it.

  “The Easter Bunny is one of those things you can believe in even if you don’t see them.”

  Which isn’t exactly the profound, mysterious Yoda-type way Mr. D said it, but which seems to convince Eli, or which at least seems to make him feel better, since now he’s looking at me like I might actually be a sort of role model big brother for once. And for once, I actually feel like I am.

  I let Eli watch TV an hour past his bedtime, read him two stories, and scratch his back. After he’s asleep, I go downstairs and wander around the house. I stop by the Implosion picture in the den. As usual, it’s facedown so I turn it faceup. Then I go sit on the bottom step and look out the window next to the door and play a game with myself about who’ll get home first.

  I’ll know it’s my mom if a pair of headlights come straight toward the house then turn off, because that’ll mean she’s parking in ye olde parking space in front of our apartment. Which means I’ll have to tell her that some kid in Jake’s class who’s sick with pneumonia and whose mother can’t drive called and asked Jake to walk over the notes for the chemistry test tomorrow.

  And I’ll know it’s Jake if the headlights beam across the front yard, then stop sideways in front of our apartment, because that’ll mean someone’s dropping him off by ye olde curb. Which means I’m going to tell him I’m not going to keep coming up with bogus stories about why he’s throwing up or why he’s not home.

  Every time I see headlights I make a bet with myself. Ten points if it turns out to be Jake, negative ten if it’s my mom, one point if it’s nobody. By 11:32, the nobodies have 14 points. Finally, a pair of headlights beam across the yard, and a car stops at the curb and lets someone out. I run upstairs.

  “I know you’re not asleep,” Jake says when he comes into our room.

  I don’t move.

  “I saw you at the window, Dillweed.”

  I tell him to shut up or else he’ll wake Eli.

  “Where do you think Mom is?” It isn’t what I mean to say, it’s just what comes out.

  He doesn’t answer. It seems to take all his attention just to unbutton his shirt.

  “Where’s Mom?” I say.

  Jake leans into my bunk. His eyes are red like the wolves’eyes on the Nature Channel. He smacks his lips and rubs his belly. It’s an old joke from when I was little and I’d ask where our mom was and Jake would pretend he’d eaten her. I hated it then; I hate it worse now. I roll over to face the wall. A minute later, I roll back the other way.

  “Where’d you go?” I say.

  “Nowhere.” He’s finally gotten his shirt off and I notice that he has chest hair.

  “I’m telling,” I say.

  “Okay,” he says. “So tell.”

  Then he turns off the light and climbs up past me onto the top bunk. I reach up and tighten the bolt that attaches his bunk to the frame, which is something I always do before I go to sleep just to make sure his bunk doesn’t fall on me and crush me in the middle of the night. A few minutes later, the front door opens and our mother comes in, humming.

  The next day I get to Human Sexuality class ten minutes early so I can get a seat in the row closest to the door. This way when Nurse Wesley begins the safe sex banana demonstration and I get an emergency attack of dermatitis or whooping cough or something I can make a quick getaway. I slink down in my seat, get my baseball cap out of my backpack, pull it down over my eyes,” and pray that maybe there’ll be an emergency pep rally or a flood or something so we don’t have to watch Nurse Wesley get romantic with a piece of fruit.

  Someone taps me on the head. It’s Mr. Miller, the principal, who for the first time in my life I’m actually happy to see. Since wearing a hat in school is technically a violation of the dress code, maybe he’ll send me to the office or the guidance counselor. Then I won’t have to come down with dermatitis or whooping cough after all.

  “Malone?” he says.

  I nod.

  “Jake’s brother?”

  I nod again.

  “Take that hat off,” he says. He starts to walk to the front of the room, then he turns around and studies me. “You keep your nose clean,” he says.

  I wonder for a minute if this is a hygiene-type comment, but the way he says it, it seems more like one of those you re-skating-on-thin-ice comments that grownups make to kids that only make kids feel like they’re in trouble without knowing exactly what they did wrong.

  I agree to keep my nose clean and wait for him to send me to the office. Instead, he tells me to take a seat up front. As other people come in, he tells us the girls have gone next door to meet privately with Nurse Wesley so we can talk, “man to man.”

  Then he gets all groovy on us, saying it’s our time to “rap.” He makes flying quotation marks with his hands and pronounces the word rap like he’s in a spelling bee, very slowly and distinctly.

  “Not like Eminem,” he says, obviously very proud of himself for knowing a pop culture person. “This kind of ‘rapping,'” he says, “is something we did back in the ‘60s when I was your age and full of raging hormones.”

  I try not to get a mental picture of this.

  “A ‘rap’session,” he says, “is where you feel free to let it all hang out.'” I cringe and wait for him to break out the Lava lamp and the disco music.

  People squirm around in their seats. Someone in the back of the room coughs. But no one has anything they want to “rap” with Mr. Miller about, which, to tell you the truth, makes me feel sort of bad for him since that leaves him standing in front of a bunch of kids, straightening his tie over and over again and saying embarrassing things about how sex can be beautiful in a committed relationship like the one he has with Mrs. Miller. This is an even worse mental picture than Mr. Miller and his raging hormones.

  The only good thing is that he lets us go early. In the stampede out of class, Arthur grabs me by the back of my shirt.

  “I thought you said Miller was gonna put a condom on a banana,” he says in a not-very-quiet whisper.

  A couple people turn around and look at me. I consider trying to explain to Arthur that it wasn’t Mr. Miller who was going to put a condom on a banana, that it was Nurse Wesley and that it wasn’t me who said so, it was Jake. Instead, I tell him to shut up and go get his stuff for tryouts.

  We’re late since Arthur can’t find his glove, which means that we’re the last ones crossing the parking lot on the way to the field, which means we’re also too late to accidentally possibly see the girls’team and possibly Martha MacDowell and her ponytail also crossing the parking lot.

  What we see instead is Jake and Andy Timmons and his goatee leaning up against a car. Andy Timmons is wearing sunglasses and taking a drag on a cigarette that he’s got not-so-secretly cupped inside his hand. And Jake’s looking at the baseball team walking past right in front of him like it has nothing to do with him, like he didn’t single-handedly clinch the division championship last year, and like he isn’t the kind of player that new kid wannabes like me and Arthur and Badowski would do anything to be.

  From a couple feet behind me, Coach Gillis yells out, “Malone!”

  I turn around so fast I practically sprain my neck. Then, as he walks right past me like I don’t exist, I realize he means Jake.

  Coach Gillis shoots Andy Timmons a glance, then looks Jake up and down.

  “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Jake shrugs. “Nothing,” he says.

  “Did you forget that today’s the last day of tryouts?”

  “Not exactly.” For about a split second Jake looks like he’s nervous, like he suddenly remembered that Coach Gillis was the guy who stayed after practice a bunch of times last year to personally show him how to straighten out his swing, and who let him keep his uniform jersey to celebrate winning the division even though it was technical
ly against the rules. Jake looks down at the ground, then over at AndyTimmons, who’s grinding his cigarette out under his boot and not even pretending to be nervous. Then he looks back at Coach Gillis.

  “I’m done with baseball,” he says.

  Coach Gillis keeps staring at Jake. He swings his whistle around till the cord is wrapped all the way up his finger, then he swings it in the other direction. When it’s all the way unwrapped, he bites it between his teeth, shakes his head, and walks away.

  Which means I’m standing there in the middle of the parking lot feeling weird and embarrassed and wondering what a persons supposed to do in a situation like this.

  It’s sort of like the time Arthur and his dad and I were leaving the movies at the mall and I spotted my dad driving the trash sweeper—this giant yellow truck with big noisy brushes that you can’t help but notice. When I realized it was my dad driving, I made a big deal out of not noticing.

  So I pull the brim of my cap so far down I practically can’t see where I’m going and keep walking.

  When I get to the field, I can see the kid with the pulled hamstring, who is named Sean and who I now remember was sort of annoyed last year about Jake getting MVP instead of him, already putting on the catcher’s equipment in an obvious way. So I go join the other wannabes in the Outer Mongolia part of the field and wait for no one to watch us.

  Except that after about twenty minutes, Coach Gillis comes over and stands at the head of our line and watches us. Which means I start sucking. Arthur throws me a soft grounder, which somehow disappears right through my glove. Then, after I run out to Outer Outer Mongolia where it rolled off to, I throw it back to him except that I practically hit Badowski in the head.

  Coach Gillis comes up to me not looking exactly ecstatic. “Malone?” he says. “You gonna live up to your brother’s potential?”

  I’ve heard the legend about Coach Gillis picking some kid up by the jock strap and hanging him on a hook in the locker room, so I say yes, even though I have no idea how one person can live up to another person’s potential.

  “You keep your nose clean then,” he says.

  Behind the coach’s back, Arthur’s trying to make me laugh by shoving his finger up his nose. I ignore him and tell Coach Gillis I’ll try, while I wonder what it is about grown-ups and kids’noses being kept clean. I also wonder what Mr. Miller and Coach Gillis know about Jake and how they know it, and if that means other people know it, too.