Neal Shusterman - Bruiser

“Don’t touch it!”

“I’ll be careful.” He gingerly took off my shoe and then my sock. I held on to the hope he was right and that it wasn’t as bad as it felt. He held my foot and rotated it to the left.

“Ouch!”

“Sorry.”

Then he rotated it more gently to the right. “Better?”

“A little.”

“I know some acupressure points,” he said as he massaged my foot and ankle. “How does that feel?”

“I don’t know,” I said. But that was a lie. It felt good. Better than good. I watched as his fingers moved confidently across the bruising skin, caressing the bone beneath and stroking the tendons. A strange and powerful feeling of well-being radiated from my foot out to the rest of me.

“It’s called reflexology,” he said. “Some people believe the feet are the mirrors of the soul.”

I nodded. At that moment he could have said the earth was made of chocolate pudding and I would have believed it. I could swear I felt his heartbeat in the tips of his fingers, but maybe it was mine—and I realized that this was well beyond anything that should be attempted on a second date. Brew rotated my ankle again.

“How’s that?”

“Better.” It tingled, it felt a little bit numb, but it didn’t hurt. It was more like the feeling you get when you hit your funny bone. In a moment the sensation began to go away.

Then he let go. “Like I said, you just twisted it. You’ll be fine.”

I stood up and put some weight on it. He was right. I’d been lucky.

“But just in case,” he said as he stood up, “maybe we should have our picnic here instead of hiking anymore.”

“But… but what about the falls? And we haven’t even gotten up to the good views.”

“It’s okay,” he said, and offered a little grimace. “To be honest, I’ve outgrown these shoes—and they’re not exactly hiking shoes anyway. They really hurt.”

He took a couple of limping, grimacing steps, and I grinned. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing?” I said. “You’re just trying to make me feel better about not making it to the falls.”

He shook his head. “No, I’m serious.” He limped and grimaced a little bit more. I could see that he was sticking to his story, so I decided not to argue. I took the blanket and spread it out in a clearing, and we had our picnic.

We talked as we ate and drank, and had a truly wonderful time. It felt good, and I didn’t want it to end. I’m not going to be so stupidly sentimental as to say we were suddenly in love or anything, but something did happen that day. Somehow we had become linked. Entwined. It was out of the ordinary, and out of my control.

That’s when I realized that I had been wrong from the start: Brewster wasn’t a stray at all. If anyone was lost, it was me; and I could feel nothing but gratitude at having been found.

It took a day for that strange feeling to fade, although it never wore off entirely. Eventually I was able to hurl enough reason at it to camouflage it against a background of protective logic. It was hormones. It was adrenaline. It was the endorphins released by the acupressure. There was nothing out of the ordinary going on at all, and I was entirely in control of the situation. Right.

The following Sunday I invited Brew to join me swimming, and things took a troubling turn.

On weekends our school opens the pool to the public. It’s an outdoor pool, even though we live in a geographically iffy part of the country when it comes to weather. Why? Because some über-genius decided it was cheaper to heat an outdoor pool through the winter than to put a building around it. In early April few people come to the pool on Sundays, except the diehards. That was fine. I figured it would give Brew and me some space. The rumor mill was cheerfully rolling out reams about us; and I, for one, didn’t want to feed it more pulp by making a grand and glorious public showing among the masses. Knowing that Brew’s dictatorial uncle worked a night-shift kind of life, I planned it for morning, when he’d be asleep.

“I watch my brother on Sundays,” Brew told me when I suggested it. I told him to bring his brother along.

“I don’t have a bathing suit that fits,” he said. I told him shorts were fine.

“What if it rains?” he asked. I told him he didn’t have to come if he didn’t want to.

“No… no, I want to come.” And there was genuine enthusiasm in his voice when he said it. I was relieved, because the way he was trying to worm out of coming made me worried that he had changed his mind about going out with me. Maybe the ankle massage had been one step too close for him. Maybe he now saw me as the flytrap ready to spring closed around him. But he did want to come, and he meant it.

I had just finished swimming my laps when they arrived. Now, the only other person in the pool was one of the regulars—an old lady I call the Water Lily due to her flowery bathing suit and the way that when you look at her, she never seems to be moving forward, like she had somehow taken root in the pool tiles and all that dog paddling was for naught.

Brew was still favoring one foot as he walked, a whole week after the hike, and I remember thinking how one day in bad shoes can ruin you for a week.

I swam to the edge of the pool to greet Brew and his brother and peeled off my swim cap, because it’s not humanly possible to look good in a swim cap. Then I did a quick drop to the bottom and pushed off to the surface so that my hair became a shimmering waterfall instead of a tatty ball of nastiness.

“This is Cody,” Brew said. “Cody, this is Brontë.” I reached out of the pool to shake the boy’s hand. He looked up at the snarling dinosaur painted on the wall behind the pool—our school mascot—and read the team name beneath it. “Are you a raptor?” he asked.

“No,” I told him. “I’m a Brontë-saurus.”

He laughed at that. Then he removed several layers of mismatched clothes until he was down to his bathing suit and leaped wildly into the pool without even checking the water—which was cold, even by competitive swimming standards. Brew shivered with a sympathetic chill when his brother hit the water.

“Did you see me?” Cody asked excitedly when he resurfaced. “Was that a cannonball?” And although it was more like a mad leap from the Titanic, I said, “Wow, you made quite a splash,” which told him precisely what he needed to hear without lying to him. Then I turned to Brew, who still stood there with his hands in his pockets.

“Come on in; it’s not that cold once you get used to it.”

Cody, who had migrated down to the shallow end, called out to us. “Hey, watch me do a handstand!” He disappeared beneath the surface, produced some whitewater, then stood up again, arms spread in “ta-DA” position, seeking universal approval. “How was that?”

“Try it again,” I told him. “It’s easier if you keep your feet together.”

While Cody occupied himself with underwater handstands, Brew strolled along the edge of the pool toward the shallow end, and I kept pace with him in the water.

“Are you coming in?” I asked. “Maybe later,” he said. “I just ate.”

“Come on; it’s not like you’ll be swimming in a riptide,” I told him. “If you get a cramp, I promise I’ll save you.”

Reluctantly he went to the steps, took off his shoes and socks, then waded gingerly into the shallowest part of the pool. The water didn’t even come up to his waist. He wore a long-sleeved shirt, and it was already soaking up water at his waist and wrists.

“Aren’t you going to take off your shirt?” I asked. Even before he responded, a spasmodic brain cell sparked out something Tennyson had said: “Have you ever seen him with his shirt off?” I mentally pinched the brain cell like a gnat and extinguished Tennyson’s unwanted intrusion.