Neal Shusterman - Bruiser

Before Uncle Hoyt had his steamroller accident and Brew took on the worst beating of his life, I was busy enticing Brewster out of his shell. Tennyson had become his personal trainer; but my role was far more intimate, as well it should be. I was Brew’s muse extraordinaire, determined to caress him into a meaningful social life. Having read various books on psychology, I thought I had Brew figured out. All he needed was a little encouragement. Of course I couldn’t have been more wrong, but I’ve never been very good at abandoning theories.

“You need to reinvent yourself,” I announced to him at lunch one day, holding his hand across the table for everyone in the cafeteria to see.

“My current invention works just fine,” he said. “People stay away from me; I stay away from them.”

I shook my head. “Not anymore. You, my sad, poetic stud, are not a loser; and it’s time you stopped acting like one. The days of you skulking around the school are over.” He tried to eat, but I was holding his eating hand, so all he could do was clumsily stab at the food with a fork in his left fist.

“Maybe I like skulking.”

“You’ll like having friends more.” But he didn’t seem convinced, only concerned. “Are you going to look me in the eye and tell me that you don’t want friends?” I gave him back his hand, but he didn’t switch the fork, leaving his hand available for me to take again. I smiled, marveling at all the little things that mean so much, and wondered when I had become so cloyingly Hallmark.

“It’s not that I don’t want friends,” he said. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea.”

But good idea or not, I was going to make it happen. The next in a long line of Brewster-related missions. As I’ve said, I’m not the most popular girl in school, but I’m not unpopular either. That makes me socially balanced, which means my friends are balanced, too; and those are the types of people most likely to warm up to Brew. I called over my friend Hannah Garcia, because she can slide a turtle out of its shell without it even knowing.

“Hannah,” I said as she sat down with us, “Brewster is under the delusion that he’s socially inept.” Brew threw up his hands. “Brontë!”

“Oh, don’t get out the heart paddles!” I told him, then turned back to Hannah. “As I was saying, he’s been conditioned by circumstance to believe he is not worthy. We need an independent assessment.”

“Brontë! You’re embarrassing me!” he said.

Hannah waved a hand. “Get over it.” Then she studied him honestly and objectively. “Well,” she said. “First of all, he’s tall. Secondly, he’s cute. Third, he’s your boyfriend, and you have excellent taste in friends.”

“Thank you.”

“So,” concluded Hannah, “he receives a nine on the acceptability scale.”

“Just a nine?” I asked.

“If he was a ten, he’d be going out with me.” Then she winked at him and strode away.

Brew was completely red in the face, but he also had the biggest smile I’d ever seen. I took both of his hands across the table, because all eating had stopped anyway. “You know what I think?” I told him. “I think we need to go out one night with a bunch of my friends, introduce you to life as I know it, and have a fantastic time.”

“Okay, sure,” he said, still pink and as giddy as could be.

I planned the event like it was a major gala. A one- man cotillion, sans tuxedo. It was just a bunch of us going down to the mall for burgers after school on Thursday, but I made sure I invited just the right people—the ones who, like Hannah, would make Brew feel comfortable, even while making him feel uncomfortable. There were six of us all together—not too few, not too many.

“I can’t stay long,” he said when he arrived, which is what he always said whenever he went anywhere. I leaned forward and kissed him, then moved to whisper in his ear, pausing to steal a whiff of his coconut hair conditioner, which, for some reason I couldn’t quite fathom, drove me wild.

“Trust me,” I told him, “you won’t want to leave.”

But that just got him worried.

We all had a great time that night; and although Brew was mostly quiet, he was accepted in a way he’d never been before. Brew was embraced by my friends and was finally able to feel a part of a circle larger than just his immediate family.

As I predicted, he stayed longer than he’d intended to.

“I like your friends,” Brew told me as he left. “I didn’t think I would, but I like them. A lot.”

I went home thinking that I had accomplished something remarkable.

He went home to find his uncle taking out a life’s worth of frustrations on his brother.

Grandparents everywhere talk about how they walked five miles to school each day in the snow, barefoot, and chased by wolves; but it’s not like that anymore. Most everyone we know drives or gets driven. But Tennyson and I had recently taken to walking to school, even though it’s almost a mile. The thing is, if we walked we got out of the house earlier. If we walked we didn’t have to sit in a car with Mom and wonder whose awful cologne we were smelling. If we walked we didn’t have to sit in a car with Dad, who used to be talkative but now had adopted a code of silence while driving. At least Tennyson and I talked to each other as we walked— even if it was only to argue.

“Dad seemed okay last weekend,” Tennyson said as we made our way through a drizzly morning. It was Friday, the day after Brew’s big night out with my friends and me, so I was still riding a good mood.

“When?” I asked.

“We were playing basketball. Brew was there.”

I thought about it, and wished I could have been there to see Dad being his old self—and to see Brew play ball. His workouts with Tennyson have definitely been defining his body, and, okay, I’ll admit I had a primal kind of desire to see those muscles in motion.

“Dad was like his old self,” said Tennyson, “but there was something about it…”

I didn’t know where Tennyson was going with this, and I don’t think he knew either, because he never finished the thought.

Up ahead, when we were just a couple of blocks from school, we saw a tall, lumbering form in a leather bomber jacket. He had on a sweatshirt underneath and the hood was over his head, but I didn’t have to see his face to know who it was.

“Brew!” I called out.

He turned to look, but just for a second. Then, instead of waiting for us, he picked up his pace.

“Look, he’s running away from you!” said Tennyson. “I really like this guy.”

I ran to catch up with Brew, both annoyed and confused. For all those big strides, he wasn’t moving very fast; and I caught up with him in about a block. I grabbed his arm, and he turned his shoulder away, so I tugged on him harder, until I got a glimpse of his face beneath the hood. What I saw almost made me stumble into traffic.

His lips were swollen, and he had smudges of makeup on his face, clearly trying to conceal a black eye.

“Wh…what happened to you?”

He shrugged. “I was having a catch with Cody and missed the ball.”

“You’re lying!”

He didn’t deny it. “So?”

Now I could see that it wasn’t just his eye; it was also in the way he held himself, the way he walked—like there wasn’t a single part of his body that didn’t hurt. I wanted to hold him but was afraid holding him would hurt him, too. “Did your uncle do this to you?”

He stayed quiet for a second and looked toward the school. “No,” he said. And then he said, “Yes.”

He seemed even more surprised than me that the word yes had come out of his mouth. I could tell he had every intention of keeping it secret forever. Suddenly he became pale with very real terror. Fear of me. Fear of me knowing.