Neal Shusterman - Bruiser

Brewster said I should always be the rag doll, but I never liked that much. I told him I’d rather be Plastic Boy instead, cuz that’s a good name for a superhero.

“You’re no superhero,” Brew told me, “and don’t go thinking that you are. Think rag doll, not superhero.”

He says that cuza the time I jumped off the roof and broke his arm. Maybe he’s right, though, on accounta I can’t be Plastic Boy since I don’t stretch. Still, I wish I could have myself a cooler secret identity for the times when Uncle Hoyt goes foul.

I wanted to tell Brontë-saurus about all that stuff, but Brew said, “A secret identity’s gotta stay secret.”

“Even from her?” I asked.

“Especially from her,” he said—although I can’t see why cuz they had been talking so much, it’s like they’re inside each other’s brains.

Brontë-saurus swims good. I know this because of the time I taught her to do a cannonball, and then I beat her in a race across the pool. It was a great day, but it got a little scary because she saw all that stuff on Brew’s body—the stuff we’re not allowed to talk about, like my secret identity. She wanted to know how he got all the bruises—she thought it was Uncle Hoyt hitting him and stuff.

“Cody, does Uncle Hoyt beat me?” Brew asked me while looking in my eyes. “Tell the truth.”

And so I did just like he wanted. I told the truth.

“No,” I told Brontë-saurus, “Uncle Hoyt’s afraid of Brewster,” which is God’s honest truth. Uncle Hoyt never hits Brew…but that’s only a half of what the truth is, and a half-truth is worse than a lie cuz it’s harder to figure out.

I could tell she knew something, but she didn’t know what she knew. I could also tell that Brew wanted her all lost and confused about it, which meant they weren’t inside each other’s brains as much as I thought, which made me feel good.

That day at the pool was fine and sunny and cold, just like the day I’d jumped off the roof. That was back in first grade before I had any sense. See, I was tryin’ to work my way up to it bit by bit. First I jumped from a chair, then I jumped from the porch, then I practiced jumping from the kitchen window over and over till I could do it and land on my feet easy.

The next step was the roof. That’s what you call logic.

So I got the ladder out of the shed and climbed up there, and I guess when I was climbin’ that’s when Brew got home from Saturday school—which he goes to a lot since he’s always getting tardies because of the times Uncle Hoyt gets odd and won’t let him leave the house in the morning.

The thing is, that day I took the ladder and climbed up on the roof, I didn’t even know Brew was home. Wasn’t like I did it on purpose. Wasn’t like I knew we’d get hurt.

So there I was up on the roof doin’ a countdown like they do for the space shuttle, and I was thinkin’ that it was funny, cuz the space shuttle goes up and I’d be going down.

I had to do the countdown three times since I wasn’t ready to jump the first two times, and once you scrub the mission you gotta start the countdown all over again. Finally, at the end of the third countdown, I jumped.

It felt like a thousand times higher than the kitchen window, and even though I landed on my feet, they slid out from under me because the ground was muddy. I put out my arms to catch myself and felt my right arm hit a big rock that was stickin’ out of the ground, and I felt the bone snap—I think I even heard it, too.

I knew it was bad right away, and I was getting ready to feel the hurt that I knew would be coming, but it didn’t come. Instead when I lifted my arm from the ground, the snap undid itself; and I heard Brewster screamin’ bloodymurder in his bedroom, which woke Uncle Hoyt out of a deep sleep, and that’s never a good thing.

“Cody!” my brother screams. “What did you do? What did you do?” And he comes out holding his arm, and I stand there and I explain how I had logically worked my way up to jumpin’ off the roof, and I see how his arm’s hangin’ all wrong, and I know that I’ve done something bad.

Uncle Hoyt comes out, sees the arm, and now it’s his turn to scream bloodymurder, cuz the last thing he wants is to drive Brewster to the hospital, but he does, because in the end Uncle Hoyt always does the stuff he’s got to do even if he screams about havin’ to do it.

Brew got a cast that went clear up to his elbow. Then he made me a cast, too, out of plaster and newspaper strips. He told me I was gonna wear it just like him because it would be the only way that I would ever learn. Only that didn’t work out cuz my teacher found out that I was wearing a cast but didn’t actually have a broken arm, and she called home and we all got called into the school, and Brew had to explain himself.

He said I jumped off the roof and landed on him, which was a lie but only a half-lie, which is just as hard to figure out as a half-truth. But my principal said that making me wear a cast without havin’ no broken arm was child abuse. Since it was coming from another kid, though, they said that Brewster was just misguided. He said he was sorry, and he cut the cast off, and I swore up and down that I’d never jump off the roof again.

If Brew hadn’t been there when I jumped, I would have owned that broken arm, all right—or at least I would have owned it until Brew got home and it became his. Either way it would have eventually been his broken arm, unless I runned away and stayed away months and months until my broken arm healed itself.

It’s not like I don’t know what it feels like to be hurt, though. I do get hurt when Brew’s not around. A little bit, anyway. But Uncle Hoyt’s good about making sure Brew stays home when we’re not at school, so he’s almost always around.

“Ain’t safe for you out there,” Uncle Hoyt’s always saying to Brew. “So you do what you have to at school and get right home.”

I got some friends from school, but Brew don’t. “The kind of friends you get at school won’t do you no good,” Uncle Hoyt tells him. He don’t know about Brontë-saurus.

Anyway, when Brew got his cast off, he put it on a shelf in our room as a reminder not to do dumb things. Most kids get their friends to write their names and stuff on their casts, but Brew said he didn’t care enough about anybody to have their names on it.

Brewster’s been hurtin’ for me for as long as I can remember. There are times when he seems happy about it, but other times he’s quiet and don’t show no emotion at all. I keep being afraid he’s gonna get angry the way Uncle Hoyt does, but Brewster never gets that angry—or if he does, he holds it all in until it goes away.

And it’s true that Uncle Hoyt’s afraid of him. He thinks Brewster must be an angel or the devil. Either way Brewster scares the heck out of Uncle Hoyt, and now that Brewster’s bigger than him, I guess Uncle Hoyt’s scared that one day Brewster will just haul off and knock him silly. Brewster’s never done that though. Never hit a soul. Won’t even kill a spider. I get spiders in my room all the time, and Brewster won’t kill ’em.

“I care about nature,” he says, and I guess because he cares about it he can’t kill it, because if he cares about a spider and steps on it, he’d be killing a little bit of himself, too. He’d feel that spider dying under his feet. Maybe not as much as he feels the things that happen to the people he cares about, but still it’s enough to make him catch all those spiders in glasses and shoo them outside.

I kill spiders though. Spiders and roaches and mosquitoes—it don’t bother me at all cuz I care about nature, but only when it’s outside.