My Brother's Keeper

by Patricia McCormick

  I plan to hold it the way Jake did, pinching it between his thumb and index finger, but somehow I end up holding it between my first two fingers, the way little kids do when they fake-smoke with pretzels. It weighs practically nothing. Still, I keep picturing myself accidentally dropping it and setting the car on fire and killing everyone, which would be just the kind of tragic surprise ending that always happens in Mr. Fontaine’s videos.

  But nothing happens. They smoke the joint down to nothing. Then Andy Timmons pulls back onto the road, driving a little fast but mainly normally, and not showing any signs of impaired reflexes or hand-eye coordination. Vince puts in a new CD, which the girl with the movie-star teeth and the spiky-haired girl sing along to. And Jake doesn’t look any different than he does when we watch TV alone together after school.

  All of this strikes me as sort of weird but I still don’t relax. Not until we get home and I can see that my mom’s car isn’t in the lot.

  I jump out of the car, thank Andy Timmons for the ride—even if he did just about get me killed by a bread truck—and run inside and grab the Citrus Magic and spray it all over myself.

  After I’m done, I bring the Citrus Magic into the den for Jake, who’s sitting on the floor playing with Mr. Furry. Some hip-hop song is on MTV, and Jake has Mr. Furry standing up on her hind legs, holding on to her front paws, making her dance in time with the music.

  “Mr. Furry,” he says. “The J.Lo of cats.”

  He pulls her paws back and forth and makes her hips swivel, which I have to admit actually makes her look like a short, hairy Jennifer Lopez with a tail.

  When he sees me watching, he makes Mr. Furry take a bow.

  I smile, sort of, even though I don’t want him to think I’ve forgotten about him and his friends practically getting me imprisoned for life. But it also cracks me up seeing Mr. Furry, who’s so stuck-up, looking so miserable.

  Then the front door opens and our mom and Eli walk in carrying bags of groceries. I jump up, shove the Citrus Magic under the couch, and go to help my mom put the food away.

  I’m stacking up the cans of tuna next to the boxes of Tuna Helper, when my mom wrinkles her nose. “It smells in here,” she says.

  I don’t move.

  She sniffs. She looks around the kitchen, her eyebrows all scrunched up.

  “It smells like oranges,” she says, looking at me. “Toby, were you two drinking Sunkist before dinner?”

  I pretend I don’t hear her.

  “Toby?” she says.

  I swallow.

  Then Jake calls out to her from the den. “Hey, Ma!” he says. “C’mere. Watch this.”

  “Mommy,” yells Eli. “Come look.”

  She gives up on being Sherlock Holmes and goes into the den. I follow her. Jake’s on the floor making Mr. Furry do a ghetto move where you wag your fingers in time with music and Eli’s trying to make rap sounds but is mainly just spitting.

  I look over at my mom, who isn’t a big rap fan, but she’s smiling.

  I edge up next to her. “Mr. Furry,” I say. “The J.Lo of cats.” She rolls her eyes, but you can tell it cracks her up. She shakes her head and goes back into the kitchen.

  When she’s gone, I walk across the room and turn the Implosion picture faceup. Then I flop down onto the couch, even though what I really want to do is lie down in my bunk and curl up into a fetal position and go to sleep for the rest of my life.

  That night, I figure, is as good a time as any. Eli’s asleep, and Jake and I are lying in the dark after our mom came in and made us turn off the light.

  “Can I ask you something, Jake?”

  He doesn’t say no. So I ask.

  “What’s it like?”

  “What’s what like?”

  “You know.” I exhale. “Pot.”

  He doesn’t say anything right away.

  “It’s amazing.” He sounds like he used to when he talked about people like Mark McGwire or Cal Ripken or Derek Jeter. “Totally amazing.”

  That’s not what Mr. Fontaine’s videos say. “Really?” I try hard to sound casual.

  “Really,” Jake says. “I mean, everything’s different. Everything’s okay when you’re stoned. Things that aren’t funny are funny. Things that suck don’t suck. Everything’s better. Everything.”

  Up till now it hadn’t occurred to me that anything sucked for Jake.

  “But it’s nothing compared to acid,” he says. “You can see things, really see things, on acid.”

  I wonder why people on acid can’t see Mack trucks coming at them or see that they’re stepping out of thirty-six-story windows. “But it’s really bad for you, isn’t it?”

  Jake snorts. “Big Macs are bad for you. Listening to the headphones with the volume all the way is up is bad for you. According to Mom, everything’s bad for you.”

  I kick the covers off and flip my pillow over to the other side where it’s still cool. “But what if you get caught?” I say. “Mom’ll lose it.”

  “I’m not gonna get caught. I never get caught.”

  “But it’s against the law.” All of a sudden I’m Judge Judy.

  “Jeez, Toby, don’t be such a narc.”

  I reach up and tighten the bolt on the board under Jake’s mattress.

  “It’s just, you know …” I don’t know how to finish. “I just don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

  “Toby.” He sighs. “You’re such a dillweed.” He says dillweed the old way, not the way he said it in front of Andy Timmons the other day. “Nothing’s gonna happen.”

  In PE the next day, Nurse Wesley, who’s somehow subbing for Coach Gillis, announces that we’re going to play this Colonial America game where the girls have to take off one of their shoes and put it in a pile in the middle of the gym floor, and the boys have to pick a shoe out of the pile and go around and match it up with the right girl, then hold her hand while we do a Colonial American—type square dance.

  I decide then that I will definitely not live till the end of PE, let alone live long enough to go through puberty.

  So while Nurse Wesley’s spelling out the rules of the game, I memorize what kind of shoes Chrissy Russo’s wearing. Not because I want to have physical contact with Chrissy Russo or anything, but because if I’m going to have to have physical contact with a girl, I want it to be a girl who at least likes people who are alive.

  So as soon as Nurse Wesley blows the whistle for us to run to the shoe pile, I elbow the people next to me out of the way, which isn’t too hard since none of the boys are too hot to play, and make a grab for the first shoe that isn’t Chrissy’s.

  Which turns out to be Martha MacDowell’s.

  Who walks up to me, smiles, takes her shoe, and puts it on. Then, she actually, physically holds my hand. After which I wait to die.

  “So,” she says all casual, like having actual physical contact is completely normal, and not something that only happens to the people in our Human Sexuality videos, “you play catcher, right?”

  I nod and mentally congratulate myself for at least being able to work my head even if the rest of my body has already gone into rigor mortis.

  “So who do you think’s better? Jason Kendall or Josh Fogg?”

  “Definitely Jason Kendall,” I say.

  The answer just comes out, since everyone knows Jason Kendall is better than Josh Fogg. And I wonder if this is what people are talking about when they say they’re having an out-of-body experience right before they die. Because even though my body is there in the gym listening to Nurse Wesley yelling out Colonial American dance commands, my mind is somewhere in the top row of the bleachers, watching the person who’s me down on the gym floor talking to Martha MacDowell, and actually having physical contact with her and not dying.

  At which point I realize that I’m not only not dying, I’m actually sort of liking it. Because Martha MacDowell turns out to be a girl who actually wants to talk baseball, and whose hand is smaller than mine and sort of soft and not sw
eaty at all.

  And I’m not sure, but I think it’s possible that she doesn’t mind holding hands with me either since she doesn’t try to run away the minute Nurse Wesley says we have to change partners.

  The next night, to celebrate making the team, Arthur invites me over for dinner. Which is cool because his mom makes really good things like meat loaf and meatballs and other real-mom foods, but which is not something I do very often since his whole family is really out there with their feelings, which is fun but which tires me out by the time we get to dessert.

  Mrs. Lucarelli kisses me hello. She always does this even though she always says she knows she’s not supposed to, but which she says can’t help.

  “I don’t mind,” I say, which is true. I don’t. I like how she smells like a real kitchen and how she laughs at stuff that isn’t even funny.

  Then Mr. Lucarelli, who talks to me like I’m a real person and not some dweeb friend of his son, says Arthur told him about me getting the Stargell.

  And instead of getting an attack of mental retardation like I normally do, I get brainiac’s disease. I tell him all about the '79 World Series clutch homer and about Stargell still holding the team record for home runs (475) and grand slams (II) and about Mr. D being sort of like Yoda in a Mister Rogers sweater. Until I finally realize that I’ve been talking for about 185 hours.

  Mr. Lucarelli just smiles. “You …” he says, pausing for dramatic effect, “are one lucky son of a gun.”

  He puts his hand out for me to shake.

  It’s not the manly man’s no-shake handshake; it’s more like a business handshake. It’s probably the handshake he uses at his office job all the time but not something he generally uses with kids, except maybe when they have a once-in-a-lifetime thing happen to them. Which makes me feel kind of embarrassed but also definitely kind of proud.

  Mrs. Lucarelli comes out of the kitchen with the lasagna.

  “I know it’s your favorite,” she says.

  I wonder how she knows it’s my favorite without me even knowing it’s my favorite. She probably just figured it out from all the times I’ve eaten there. And come to think of it, it probably is my favorite.

  So I say thanks. Then we all sit down and I make a big deal out of liking her lasagna.

  Mr. and Mrs. Lucarelli ask typical parental questions like which kid in our class do we think could end up being president some day, and which teachers do we like best. Arthur and I do our best to dodge their questions without actually looking like we’re dodging them.

  “So…” Mr. Lucarelli says when we’re done. “How about a little karaoke?”

  For a half second I think this is some kind of foreign food that Mrs. Lucarelli made for dessert. Then I realize that he’s talking about this highly embarrassing thing where people pretend to be rock stars by singing into a microphone while a machine plays backup music.

  Mrs. Lucarelli claps her hands like a little kid. Mr. Lucarelli gets out of his chair and does a not-too-bad-for-someone’s-dad moon walk. And Arthur looks at me the way Harriet the Horrible used to look at me when she wanted to play ball.

  And I just sit there and wonder what you can possibly say to people who make your favorite dinner and give you a once-in-a-lifetime handshake and share their Little Debbies with you, when the last thing in the world you want to do is sing karaoke.

  I hate karaoke. Not only is it way too out-there emotionally for someone like me, it’s sort of cheesy, especially if you do it in your basement after dinner and not on a reality TV show or something.

  I swallow. “I can’t,” I say, which is true since I’d probably hyperventilate to death if I did by some miracle even try it. “We have a math test tomorrow.”

  Mrs. Lucarelli says she understands, and Mr. Lucarelli says it’s okay, that I need to put my school-work first, and Arthur rolls his eyes. You can tell they’re disappointed but are trying not to make me feel bad about them being disappointed.

  I leave feeling pretty rotten. But not as rotten as I do when I get on my skateboard and hear them singing “Disco Inferno” from partway down the block. It makes me wish that, even though we live in a condo, that we did some kind of normal family-type thing, even if it was karaoke.

  By the time I get home it’s dark, and my mom’s waiting at the front door, wearing her Law & Order dress. I call it that because she bought it to wear to court to ask the judge to make my dad send us money, which he never does. Every time she wears it I get this sort-of-nervous, sort-of-excited feeling, because I think it means my dad might show up.

  “How come you’re wearing that?” I say.

  “Why? What’s wrong with it?” She looks down at her front, like maybe she spilled something on herself and doesn’t know it.

  “Nothing,” I say. “It’s fine.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  She walks over to the steps, yells up to Jake and Eli to turn the TV down. Then she smoothes the dress over her stomach, puts on more lipstick, and goes back to staring out the window. “Oh no,” she says. “He’s here.”

  “He’s here?” I practically knock her unconscious trying to open the door. But the man coming up the walkway isn’t my dad. He’s shorter than my dad, shorter and pudgy, and he’s holding out a bouquet of flowers and looking like he thinks maybe he’s at the wrong house.

  “Well,” my mom says, peeking out from behind me. “Right on time.”

  “Right on time,” the man says. He holds the flowers out in my direction, until my mom not-so-gently pushes me out of the way.

  “Oh, how sweet,” she says, taking the bouquet.

  “This must be your son,” the man says, looking at me.

  “Roses,” she says, her nose stuck in the bouquet. “My favorite.”

  “Jake?” the man says, extending his hand.

  I shake my head.

  My mom elbows me in the ribs. “This is Toby,” she says. “Toby, say hello to Stanley.”

  I take my hand out of my pocket, wave hello, then fold my arms across my chest. Stanley takes his handshake hand and runs it through his hair, his face sort of stalled in mid-smile. “Nice to meet you,” he says.

  “Here,” she says, shoving the roses at me. “Find something to put these in, will you? We won’t be late.” She turns to leave, then calls back over her shoulder and yells upstairs, “Bye, Jake. Bye, Eli.” I let her kiss me, but I don’t wait till she’s gone to wipe off the lipstick like I usually do.

  And then they’re gone, and I’m standing at the front door holding Stanley’s bouquet. I walk into the kitchen, stick the flowers in an old Pirates mug, and go upstairs to find out what’s going on.

  Jake and Eli are playing Nintendo as usual.

  “Who was that?” I say.

  Jake wraps Eli’s blankie around his shoulders and waves it like a cape.

  “His Heinie!” Eli shrieks. “Mom went on a date with His Heinie.”

  “That guy?” I say. “That guy’s the Food King?”

  Jake grins. “Yup. Master of the Mini Quiche. King of Crab Cakes.”

  “Mom went on an actual date?” I sit down at the desk.

  They don’t answer.

  “Mom says he might take us to a Pirates game sometime,” Eli says.

  “She said he has season tickets,” Jake says.

  “So?” I say.

  “So, I thought you liked the Pirates,” Eli says.

  I shrug.

  I get up, then sit down again and open my card collection and stare at the Stargell. Which is the only thing a person can do at a time like this.

  A couple minutes later, Jake punches Eli in the shoulder and gets up. “Ya got me again, Killer.”

  Eli gloats, and I wonder if he really thinks he beat Jake. He begs for another match.

  But Jake goes straight for his bottom drawer and pulls out a little plastic bag. He stuffs it in his pocket and walks out. I sit there for a minute, not knowing what to do, then I hop up like a human jack-in-the-box and follow
him.

  When I get downstairs to the kitchen, Jake’s screwing the lid back on our mom’s tip jar. I feel embarrassed for him, the way you feel when you accidentally walk in on someone in the bathroom, but also mad at him for taking her tip money.

  Jake turns around.

  “What do you want?” he says.

  “Nothing.”

  Jake starts to go past me.

  “Where re you going?” I say.

  “Nowhere,” he says. “Wanna come?”

  It’s another old joke that isn’t funny anymore.

  “Seriously,” he says. “You wanna come?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m just going for a walk around the block.” He pinches his fingers together and I get it; he’s doing an imitation of smoking a joint.

  “Nah.” I back up a step. “That’s okay.”

  “Whatever,” Jake says, brushing past me, and opens the front door.

  We both see that it’s started raining. Jake looks annoyed, then he shuts the door, shrugs his jean jacket off onto the floor, and heads back toward the kitchen. I trot along behind him, feeling like Harriet the Horrible, not knowing exactly what else to do. He goes into the downstairs bathroom, the one my mom calls the powder room, and opens the window. He takes out a little blue pipe, which he fills with pot, and lights it. He pulls the smoke into his lungs, holds it, then sticks his head out the window and blows it out into the rain.

  I reach up and turn on the fan. Then I go get the Citrus Magic.

  I’m upstairs lying in my bunk, looking at the Stargell, when Eli comes and taps me on the shoulder. “Can I ask you something?” he says.

  Whatever it is, I hope it’s not about the Easter Bunny.

  He looks worried. “It’s about Mr. Furry,” he says.

  He waits for me to say something like I usually do about Mr. Furry being lame and stuck-up compared to Harriet the Horrible. Under the circumstances, I decide not to.

  “Have you seen her lately?”

  I shake my head. bnes missing.

  “So?”

  “So.” He pulls his blankie up around his neck. “So I’m scared.”

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “She has to be around here somewhere.”