Neal Shusterman - Bruiser

I told him all about how Brewster bailed.

He told me about the times he’d picked up the phone only to be hung up on—and the time he’d overheard Mom talking to someone, saying things she should be saying to no one but Dad.

“Mom has a boyfriend,” Tennyson said. So there it was, out in the open. No hints, just the plain, raw fact.

“It’s because of what Dad did last year, isn’t it?”

“Maybe,” said Tennyson. “Maybe not. Maybe it would have happened anyway.”

Mom and Dad had tried to keep it hidden last year, but Tennyson and I knew what Dad had done. We had been furious about it, because fathers are not supposed to have girlfriends—even if it’s only for a short time. Even if it’s only one time. They’re not supposed to, but sometimes they do. Fact of life. I don’t know the statistics. Maybe I should look them up.

So it happened, and Dad had been left with a choice. He could give her up, whoever she was, and then move heaven and earth to make things right with Mom. Or he could end the marriage. He’d chosen Mom—and Tennyson and I saw how he tried to make it up, not just to Mom, but to all of us. I guess that had been enough for us to forgive him—at least in part. I had thought it was the same with Mom. I never understood the depth of the wound.

All at once, I found my thoughts ricocheting to Brewster. As much as it hurt to think of him, it was easier than thinking about my parents. It was easier to condemn him for what he had done; and the more I thought about it, the angrier I got. I had reached out to save him from whatever terrible things were going on in his world; but when something went seriously wrong in mine, he didn’t just walk away, he ran.

“He just washed his hands of us,” I mumbled. “He washed his hands of me.”

“Did you expect him to be a model of mental stability?” Tennyson asked. “You don’t get a reputation as the resident creepy dude for nothing.”

Still, that wasn’t an excuse. There was no excuse for the way he behaved. If I could be sure of nothing else that evening, I could be sure of that.

“I hate him,” I said, and at the moment I meant it with all my heart. “I hate him.”

Beyond the bathroom wall, we heard the garage door grind open and a car started. Someone drove away. I didn’t know whether it was Mom or Dad. I didn’t want to find out.

“So, what happens now?” Tennyson asked. It surprised me, because between the two of us, he was always the one who pretended to have the answer.

“It’ll get worse before it gets better,” I said.

“The D word?”

“The S word first,” I pointed out. I couldn’t imagine our parents separating. Who would move out, Mom or Dad? Who would we live with? Did we get to choose? How could we possibly choose?

Tennyson and I didn’t talk anymore, because there was nothing left to say; but we didn’t leave the bathroom either, because this was, at least for the time being, our only place of safety. So we sat there in silence, wishing there was some way to sleep through whatever was to come. Wishing there was someone who could come and magically take away all the pain.

It’s strange how we always want other people to feel what we feel. It must be a basic human drive. Misery loves company, right? Or when you see a movie that you love, don’t you want to drag all your friends to see it as well? Because it’s only good the second time if it’s the first time for somebody else—as if their experience somehow resonates inside of you. The power of shared experiences. Maybe it’s a way to remind ourselves that on some level we’re all connected.

By morning we knew that it was Mom who had left, and she hadn’t come home. Dad made us breakfast: credible pancakes, although the blackened evidence of his first batch was buried in the trash.

“She’ll be back when you get home,” Dad told us. He seemed way too confident about that, which made me think that he wasn’t confident about it at all.

As we walked to school, I couldn’t stop thinking about how furious I still was with Brew—how I wanted to make him feel everything I had felt last night: the helplessness of watching my family detonate and the soul-searing feeling of being abandoned in the midst of it, the way he had done to me. I wanted to take everything I was feeling, put it into a cannon, then aim it at him.

I knew I’d see Brew in school that day, and what bothered me most was that I didn’t know what I’d do when I saw him. It was terrifying not to have a perfect and clear-cut course of action. I knew exactly when I would see him, too. His locker was just outside of my second-period class. Usually we looked forward to seeing each other then, even if it was just to say hello. Now I dreaded it.

I suppose he could’ve made a point of avoiding his locker, but he didn’t. And I suppose I could have slipped in through the classroom’s back door, but I didn’t do that either—because as much as I was dreading it, I knew it had to happen.

He was standing right there as I approached the classroom. He didn’t look at me. He just stared into his locker, moving around books.

“Brewster?”

He turned to me and I found my arm swinging even before I was conscious of the motion. I guess swimming made me stronger than I realized, because I slapped him so hard, his head snapped to the side, hitting his locker, which rang out like a bell. It was all I could do to keep myself from pounding on his chest. All of that fury I was feeling needed a way out.

Around us, other kids saw what was going on. Some gave us a wide berth, others laughed, and that only made me angrier. And then Brewster said:

“Is that it? Because I have to get to class.”

“No!” I shouted, “that’s not it!” and I pushed him. I realized I was doing the bully thing that my brother was famous for, but at the moment I didn’t care. The push didn’t do much anyway—Brew had so much inertia, he didn’t even move when I pushed him. Instead, I ended up stumbling backward.

“There are things you don’t know,” he said.

“You think you can hide behind that?” I shouted. “That’s no excuse! What you did last night…what you said—”

“I lied.”

That caught me off guard and I hesitated, trying to figure out just what he had lied about. He’d said he didn’t care about me, or about any of us. Was he lying about that? Did he care after all? Did I want him to?

The tardy bell rang. We were alone in the hallway now. I was about to turn and storm into class when I felt something warm and wet on my hand. It was blood.

“Oh no!” It didn’t take a genius to figure out I had opened the gash on my hand again. The Band-Aid, which was already loose, was now too wet to hold its grip. It slipped off; and when I brushed away the blood, I had trouble relocating the exact spot of the wound. As it turns out, the blood wasn’t coming from my cut at all.

“It’s not you; it’s me,” Brew said, which is one of the lines guys use when they break up with you; but that wasn’t the case here. It was him. He was the one bleeding.

He pursed his lips. “Not good,” he said. “Not good at all.”

My anger didn’t exactly go away at that instant, but it did hop into the backseat. “I must have cut you with my watch,” I said, although I couldn’t imagine anything sharp enough on my watch to draw that much blood. “We’ve got to get you to the nurse.”

As Brew pressed on the wound to staunch the bleeding at the base of his thumb, I reached into my backpack and found a little pocket-pack of tissues. I pressed the whole pack to his hand and hurried with him down the hall.

“I can do it myself,” he said.

“I don’t care,” I told him.