Neal Shusterman - Bruiser

Finally Brew’s right next to me, but I’m still just out of reach to him. He’s scared—real scared, but I’m not anymore, because he won’t let me be. Brew never lets me be scared.

“I’m almost there! Don’t move!”

“How’m I gonna get offa here if I don’t move?”

Then, holding tight to the tower, he looks at me in that deep kind of way, like teachers before they send you to the principal.

“You have to stop doing these things,” he says.

“The kite got stuck; I had to get it down. I was just being responsible.”

“Be responsible on the ground!”

He tries to get closer but can’t. Still, he’s not giving up. “You’re gonna be okay,” he tells me.

“I know I am.” And it’s true. I know it for sure, because Brew’s there.

I hear sirens getting closer, and before long a police car comes in from one direction and a fire truck from another. I start looking around because if there’s a fire, I’m sure to see it from up here. Then they both stop right in front of the electrical tower and I get it. Fire trucks don’t always come because of fires. Sometimes they come to get cats out of trees. Or people out of towers.

Maybe it’s because I’m thinking about the fire truck, or maybe it’s because my fingers have gotten so cold, but I start to slip.

“No!” yells Brew. I grab onto the bar and my legs slip off, but I get them wrapped around again, losing a sneaker that somehow got untied along the way. It tumbles down and down, totally missing the flowery sheet. Instead it hits some lady in the head, and I hear her go “Ooof!” I want to laugh, but I don’t, because laughing might make me slip again.

The fire truck is the kind with a big ladder; but it takes time to get it working, and I don’t have a whole lot of time, because there’s no more grip left in my fingers at all. I know if I fall I’ll hit that lady in the head, too. Brew will take the fall away from me even before I feel it, so it won’t hurt me; but it would definitely hurt Brew. Then he’d be all mad at me like he was the time I broke his arm.

I slip again, and this time I know there’s no stopping it, so rather than falling straight, I stretch out both my hands toward Brew.

“Cody!”

He catches me by one wrist, and we hold on to each other. I swing and twist from his arm like the kite swinging and twisting on its string.

Brew holds on to me with all his strength.

“Don’t worry,” I tell him. “I’ll be okay.”

“But I won’t!” he says through his teeth.

“You’ll get better,” I remind him. But he doesn’t answer me.

“You always get better….”

He still doesn’t say anything, because every last bit of him is holding on to me, even his voice.

That’s the first time I realize that maybe there are things he won’t get better from. What if there are some things that will make him dead like Uncle Hoyt, and he’ll get burned down to dust, and put in a cardboard box, too? The thought of it scares me. It scares me more than being up in the tower, more than falling, more than anything.

I can feel all that scaredness trying to sneak out of me and into Brew, but I won’t let it. I hold on to my scared, because I know it’s making my hand stronger. Without that scaredness I’ll fall. It’s the only thing giving my fingers strength enough to hold on to his.

And I know I’ve just done the impossible, because holding on to anything bad when I’m with Brew has always been impossible—not just the ouches, but the bad feelings, too. But maybe it’s not impossible…. Maybe I just have to want to hold it… because as I hang here, I’m scared as anything, and I stay that way because I want to. The fear in my fingers makes them squeeze tighter until my knuckles turn white. Until it feels like my hand’ll fall off. Until I hear a voice behind me say “I’ve got you!” and an arm grabs me from behind, pulling me onto the ladder that has finally gotten up to us.

“You’re safe, son,” the firefighter says.

Even before he takes me down that ladder, I know I’ll be okay, and Brew will be okay, too. Because Brew can do his big impossible; but today, by holding on to my scaredness, I did my own little impossible, too.

I can’t deny that things were changing in our family. It began at the very moment Brewster and Cody moved in; but it grew slowly, subtly enough for me to believe it was my own simple optimism. You see, when things are finally starting to go right after a whole lot of wrong, you can either focus on the good, or you can zero in on everything else that isn’t.

Most people go one way or the other: the glass half full or the glass half empty. It’s a rare skill to be able to see it both ways at the same time, and I, unfortunately, do not have that skill. All I could see was that Brew and his brother were saved, and my derailed family was back on sturdy tracks, thank you very much.

Yet as right as things were, Brew was having a harder and harder time. It was worse when he was home. He was constantly exhausted, like the walls themselves were draining life away from him. He was constantly on edge, like our house was teetering on a precipice that only he could see.

And then he saved Cody from the tower.

I wasn’t there when it happened, but half a dozen people captured it on video. It made the news, and turned Brew into an overnight hero—and although his fame lasted for the typical fifteen minutes, the shadow under which he had always lived was obliterated by the spotlight. That should have been a good thing.

“Hi, Brontë, mind if we sit by you?”

It was Amanda Milner and Joe Crippendorf, who may or may not have been an item—and enjoyed maintaining the mystery. This was the third visitation at our lunch table that day by unexpected apparitions.

“We were just leaving,” Brew said.

I put my hand over his, which was sufficient enough to keep him from bolting. “No we weren’t.” I slowly began eating some questionable Jell-O that I had originally planned to avoid. “Have a seat.”

They slid in with us. Amanda is what I would call a midrange friend. Not close enough to share deep secrets with but certainly close enough to choose each other as partners for the occasional class project. Joe is the easygoing kind of goofball you don’t mind having around, unless he’s surrounded by other such goofballs.

“We think what you did was great, Brewster!” Amanda said.

Everyone knew about it—if they hadn’t caught the news, they had heard it on morning announcements, when the principal lauded Brew’s feat and awarded him an honorary varsity letter.

“It was no big deal,” Brew said modestly, clearly wishing this would all go away.

Joe rapped him on the arm. “Man, I don’t know if I would’ve had the guts to do that. Way up there? All that electricity?”

Brew just shrugged. “I had to—he’s my brother.”

“Yeah,” said Joe. “I’ve got a brother, too. And if he was up there and it was up to me to save him, his name would probably be Splat right now.”

They asked us about how it happened, then talked a bit about the whole foster thing and how cool our parents are to let Brew and me live under the same roof.

“We have a strict rule that we’re just friends at home,” I told them. “We’re only dating when we’re out of the house.” And since we were currently out of the house, I rubbed his arm, taking advantage of the fact.

“I’d break that rule in five minutes,” said Joe. Amanda nudged him with her elbow, and he laughed. Brew laughed a little, too, before he caught himself.

“So listen,” said Amanda, pulling out two envelopes with heart stickers sealing them closed. “I know it’s corny and all, but my parents are throwing me a sweet sixteen, and I wanted to invite you two.” She handed Brew an invitation, and he just stared at it. “I hope you can make it.”