Neal Shusterman - Bruiser

I wasn’t really prepared for the truth either—I was more stunned by it than anything else. Across the street a few kids laughed. They weren’t laughing at us, but still it bothered me. How dare they laugh within a hundred yards of this truth?

“What about Cody?” I asked.

“Cody’s fine. He’s better than fine.”

“You have to tell someone.”

“I just told you.”

“I mean someone important.”

“Who? The principal? The police?”

“Yes!”

By now Tennyson had caught up with us and was just staring, stupefied. The bell rang at school, but I didn’t care. Lateness was not a concern.

“If I tell anyone, then they’ll take us away from my uncle,” Brew said. “And things will get a whole lot worse.”

“What could possibly be worse than being beaten within an inch of your life?”

He didn’t answer me—not verbally—but there was an answer in his eyes that had such a high windchill factor, I actually shivered.

“I can handle it,” he said. “I’ve got it all worked out. In a few months I’ll turn sixteen, and I can become an emancipated minor. I’ll move out, take Cody with me, and Uncle Hoyt won’t be able to stop me.”

“That’s assuming you’re still alive!”

“I’ll be fine. But if we get taken away from my uncle now, Cody and I will get put in a home… we’ll probably get split up. And in a place like that there’s no way I can hide what I can do. People will know. And once they know…”

Again a blast of those windchill eyes. I wanted to argue him to the ground on this one, but that icy gaze shut me down.

“Who knows,” Brew said. “Maybe my uncle will change.”

Then Tennyson, who I totally forgot about, chimed in. “Bullies don’t change unless they want to,” Tennyson said. “Trust me, I know.”

We had to go to the authorities. We had to. This was a textbook case of abuse, and turning the man in was the right thing to do—no question. Except that this was Brewster Rawlins. If this were anyone else but Brew, I’d have gone straight to the Powers That Be and ratted out his uncle in an instant; but all the rules of normalcy and right and wrong broke down around Brew. What do you do with a textbook case when no one’s written the textbook?

Suddenly I flashed to something I learned in biology. There are some animals that die without explanation if you take them out of their familiar environment. Even if they came from a horrible, hostile environment, they still die.

“You have to trust me,” Brew said. “Please…”

What could be worse than his uncle? Only Brewster knew the real answer to that. And even though it went against everything I knew to be right, I reluctantly entered into his conspiracy of silence.

And I guess I wasn’t the only one.

“You have to come up with a believable story or the teachers will be all over you,” Tennyson told him. “If anyone asks about your eye, tell them that I beat you up for dating Brontë—and if I have to back it up, I will.”

I gaped at Tennyson, unable to believe the suggestion. “No!”

“Well, do you have a better idea?” he snapped.

But I just looked away, because I had nothing but misgivings.

Brew, on the other hand, was genuinely moved by Tennyson’s offer. “You’d do that for me?”

And Tennyson said, with his typical smirk, “Sure. What’s a friend for if he can’t take credit for punching you out?”

Brew took Tennyson up on his offer; and before lunch, people were buzzing with the news that Tennyson had beaten him senseless. My friends came out to console and support me, calling Tennyson every name in the book; and in turn, Tennyson’s friends supported him, giving him kudos and high fives that he had to accept or else risk tainting the credibility of Brew’s story. Suddenly Tennyson and I were at war with each other in the eyes of our classmates, and no one but Brew knew that it was all fake—a tricky, nasty subterfuge designed at throwing everyone off the track.

I couldn’t help but feel I’d made a terrible, terrible mistake. There were so many times during that awful day when I held my phone with 911 dialed in, ready to hit Send, but in the end I didn’t do it.

I don’t know how things would have been different if I had made that call. Maybe it might have saved Brew from what happened next. On the other hand, it was going to happen one way or another, no matter what any of us did.