Neal Shusterman - Bruiser

“Now you sound like his uncle,” I told him. I just meant it as a tiny little poison-tipped barb, but somehow it hit deep. He couldn’t even answer me. He just turned and retreated to his room.

I could have gone after him and worked on him, ferreting out exactly what was going on, but I was too disgusted with Tennyson to pursue it. Instead I checked in on Mom and Dad. If they had been fighting, then there was some fresh hell we’d all have to deal with.

I found them both sitting up in bed, just inches away from each other, calmly reading.

“Was it a nice party, honey?” Mom asked once she saw me standing there. I saw no evidence of emotional battle scars on either of them: They hadn’t retreated to neutral corners of the house; neither one was pacing, or brooding, or scarfing down comfort food.

“It was fine,” I said; and without the patience to beat around the bush, I asked, “What were you guys arguing about?”

They looked at each other a bit perplexed by the question. For a moment I thought Tennyson must have been lying until Dad said, “Well, whatever it was, it must not have been too important.”

Mom concurred, and they both returned to their books.

I told them good night and retreated to my own room, feeling content with their answers, with the evening, with myself. I didn’t even harbor any ill feelings toward my brother, which was a definite indication that something was off—not just around me but inside me as well. Still, I chose to ignore it, subconsciously citing all those wonderful sayings that justify denial:

What you don’t know can’t hurt you.

Let sleeping dogs lie.

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

I keep telling myself that if I had questioned things sooner—if I had grasped the extent to which Brew had become intertwined in our lives—I would have behaved differently. I would have done the right thing. But who am I kidding? How can you do the right thing when you can’t figure out what that thing is? When all you have before you are choices in various shades of wrong?

Tennyson and I always made fun of people who blindly followed the crowd. Lemmings, we called them—poor, unfortunate creatures who, at the slightest sign of rain, relinquish their self-determination to the mob and join a mad, mindless stampede. Ultimately the stampede leads them off a cliff into the sea, where they all drown. It’s funny if you’re an observer. It’s tragic if you’re a lemming.

I understand lemmings now. I understand that, contrary to popular opinion, it takes only two to form a crowd. Perhaps a brother and a sister. I can’t say I was blindly following Tennyson, but I was so busy noticing what was wrong with him that I failed to see that I was charging toward the same cliff right beside him.

We had an unexpected guest the following evening.

I had the misfortune of being the one to answer the door. Standing there was a small man with lots of hair and a thick but well-groomed beard. I recognized him from various university functions as one of our parents’ colleagues.

“I’d like to speak with your mother,” he said with a slight accent that I couldn’t place. He was determined yet fidgety, his eyes intense and a little wild. All at once I realized who this was. This was the man Mom was seeing. Mr. Monday Night.

I felt a wave of panic rise in me, brimming into anger; but the feeling drained quickly. This was my house, I was in control of the doorway, and this interloper was not getting in.

“You’d better get out of here,” I told him, coldly staring him down, “before my father sees you.”

And then from behind me, I heard, “I already have.”

My father was standing halfway down the stairs, gripping the railing. He stood there for a long moment, and I saw the same rise and fall of anger that I had felt—although I’m sure his blossomed even more powerfully before it subsided. He came the rest of the way down the stairs, and when he spoke he was like a diplomat, with both power and poise in his voice; but his anger was reined in.

“Well, if it isn’t the proverbial barbarian at the gate,” Dad said. “Are you coming in, Bob, or are you going to stand in the doorway all night?” The man stepped in; and Dad approached him, looked him over, and grunted dismissively. “This is Dr. Thorlock, from the anthropology department. An expert in prehistoric man, and other small-minded things.”

I heard a guffaw behind me and turned to see Tennyson peering down from the top of the stairs; but the moment I saw him, he retreated.

“Are you here to bring us a little drama today, Bob?” Dad asked. “Are you going to challenge me to a duel?”

Thorlock seemed entirely unnerved by Dad’s flipness.

“I just want to talk to Lisa.”

“Brontë,” said Dad, “please go fetch your mother.”

I found Mom in the laundry room, and when I told her that Thorlock was here, she looked shocked; but that faded, too. “Well,” she said with a sigh far too light for the circumstance, “we knew it would come to this. No sense postponing the inevitable.”

“Which inevitable?” I dared to ask.

But all Mom said was “We’ll see.”

Then she strode down into the foyer.

I should have been dizzy with dread but instead was merely filled with car-wreck curiosity. At the time I assumed it was a protective layer of numbness. A shock-shell rather than shell shock. I would have eavesdropped on the three of them if I hadn’t suddenly heard a groan from the guest room. I went in to find Brew holding his gut, rocking back and forth as he sat on the bed. He was here alone tonight. Cody, who now had actually accumulated a friend or two, was at a sleepover.

“Are you okay?” I asked Brew.

“No,” he snapped. “I mean, yes. Just leave me alone, okay?”

He doubled over, moaning in pain through gritted teeth.

“Is it your stomach?” I asked.

“Yes, that’s it,” he blurted. “Stomach. It’s my stomach.”

I felt his forehead. He didn’t have a fever, but he was clammy. I touched his arm—the skin on his forearm had such goose-flesh, I felt like I was reading Braille. “I’ll get you something,” I told him, trying to remember what biological nightmare the school gave us for lunch that day. On the way to the medicine chest, I made a point of looking toward the foyer, where Mom spoke to Thorlock in hushed tones. Dad was now sitting on the stairs, observing. He looked somewhat relaxed as he sat there, and I remember thinking how off that was; but this particular kind of family drama was not anything I’d experienced before, so how was I to judge what behavior was appropriate when your mother’s boyfriend paid a visit? Rather than dwelling on it, I brought Brew some Maalox, which he guzzled straight from the bottle.

“Thank you,” he said with the same guttural voice. “I’m better now. You can go.”

Then he rolled to face the wall, pulling the covers over his head, ending any hope of conversation.

By the time I left the guest room, Thorlock was gone, and my parents were in the kitchen. Dad was scouring the fridge for some low-carb snack, and Mom was thumbing through a cookbook. I felt like I had suddenly time-warped into a different day.

“So… what happened?”

Neither of them answered right away; but when they saw I wasn’t leaving until someone said something, Dad chimed in with “Mom asked him to leave, and so he did.”

“That’s it?” I asked. “He’s gone for good?”

“We’ve set boundaries,” Mom said. “Boundaries and rules.”

“As in ‘Come here again and I’ll get a restraining order’?”

Dad laughed at that, and Mom tossed him a halfhearted scowl. “No,” said Mom. “Not exactly.” Mom turned a page in her cookbook, and I closed the book, practically catching her finger.