Neal Shusterman - Bruiser

You think you want to know the secrets of the universe. You think you want to see the way things all fit together. You believe in your heart of hearts that enlightenment will save the world and set you free. Maybe it will.

But the path to enlightenment is rarely a pleasant one.

When the last button had been undone, Brew parted his shirt to reveal a battered torso that barely looked like flesh at all. Bruise upon bruise upon bruise. Purple and yellow, swollen red, bloodless white. His chest, his shoulders, his back. It looked like he had been thrashed by chains and bashed by bats, and pummeled by countless other blunt objects. This was worse than anything his uncle had ever done. I could see where he had masked the marks on his neck and face with covering makeup much more skillfully applied than the day he came to school with a black eye. This time you couldn’t even notice it. I’m sure there wasn’t an inch of his body that didn’t bear some kind of damage. All of it was fresh; all of it came long after his uncle had died.

“Who did this to you?”

He pointed to one discoloration on his shoulder. “This is your father’s. When he fell on the basketball court.” Then he pointed to another. “This is Tennyson’s from lacrosse.” And then another. “This is yours; I’m not sure from where.”

But I knew.

“Someone opened their car door into me…,” I said numbly.

He nodded and kept on going, pointing to the marks on his body like one might point out constellations in the sky. “This is Joe Crippendorf’s…. This is Hannah Garcia’s…. This is Andy Beaumont’s….” On and on he went, reciting a litany that I thought would never end. He seemed to know where every single injury had come from— maybe not how or when, but he always knew who; and I thought back to something he had said. “I like your friends,” he had told me. Until that moment it had never occurred to me that, for Brewster Rawlins, the cost of friendship was exacted in flesh.

“…This is Amanda Milner’s…. This is Matt Goldman’s….”

I wanted to shed all the tears in the world for him, but I couldn’t. My tears were already taken away from me. My tears were filling his eyes instead of mine— and that’s when I knew how much further this went than flesh and bone. Then he took my hand and pressed it firmly to the center of his chest until I could feel his heart beating against my palm.

“And this…,” he said, “…this is your parents’ divorce.”

I pulled my hand away as if he had thrust it in hot coals. “No! They’re not getting divorced! They worked things out! They’re happy!”

He offered me a slim but satisfied smile, then said with absolute certainty:

“I know.”

I ran from him.

It was callous of me; it was cowardly; it was worse than the time he ran from me when I was most vulnerable. But, like Brew, I’m human. All I knew was that I had to get to a place far enough away for me to truly know my own feelings and grapple with them. I couldn’t let Brew make peace for me. I had to make peace for myself. With myself. Only after I was out in the street and off of our block did worry, doubt, and anger begin to filter back in. Not enough to overwhelm me, but certainly enough to give some depth of field to my vision.

My feet were on autopilot—I didn’t even know where I was going until I got there.

The pool.

It was getting toward nine o’clock. The pool closed to the public at eight, but the underwater lights came on at dusk and didn’t turn off until sunrise. The gate was locked, but I knew the pool as well as I knew my own home. There were half a dozen ways to get in that didn’t involve the gate; and although I had no bathing suit, I knew the storeroom door was never locked. Neither was the lost-and-found bin, which was always full of suits.

Diving into a pool as smooth as glass and creating the first ripples has always been magic to me. Like taking the first steps into virgin snow. This is what I needed—just me and my own liquid universe. I hit the water, feeling the chill. I set out to do twenty warm-up laps but quickly lost count as my head went into defragment mode, trying to put together the events of the past weeks in some meaningful way.

I wanted my frustration and my anger to align in a single direction—like a beam I could aim at someone, fry them in blame, and be done with it. But who? Not Brew—he didn’t choose his gift. Not Tennyson—he didn’t start this. Not my parents—they were unwitting victims with no idea where their sunny, distorted dispositions had come from.

And then there was me.

Was I to blame for bringing Brew out of his shell and exposing him to all the toxic things the rest of us carry in our souls? And as our family rose out of our own gloom, how could I not have known the cause? Me! The girl who always prided herself on her ability to see to the heart of things—to pull the truth from the tiniest bit of emotional evidence.

There could be only one answer.

I did know.

Maybe not consciously, but somewhere deep down I must have known that Brew was filtering out all those wounds we couldn’t see. I let it happen because I wanted it to happen. I wanted my world to be safe and whole at all costs. I used Brew—just as Tennyson used him, just as Cody used him, just as his uncle had used him. In the end, blame didn’t shine on an individual. It was a floodlight cast on all of us.

And all because we longed for healing and happiness—as if happiness is a state of being. But it’s not. Happiness is a vector. It’s movement. Like my own momentum across the pool, joy can only be defined by the speed at which you’re moving away from pain.

Certainly our family could reach a place of absolute, unchangeable bliss at Brew’s expense; but the moment we arrived, the moment we stopped moving, joy would become as stagnant and hopeless as perpetual despair. Happily ever after? What a curse to have to endure!

Time doesn’t move at the same pace when I’m swimming, so there was no telling how long I swam. More than half an hour, less than two. Maybe. By the time I was done, I had found a sense of balance to all my emotions. I knew there had to be a way to hold on to them even in Brew’s presence. There had to be. Uncle Hoyt had done it. I’d never seen a man so angry, and he held his anger even with Brew around him every day.

As I climbed out of the pool, my inner balance didn’t do much for my outer balance. All those laps had tired my legs and made me just a little bit dizzy. I found myself leaning a bit too far back; I overcompensated, and then my feet slipped off the ladder rungs.

I fell into the pool, but never felt myself hit the water.

Instead, I felt my head hit the concrete edge, knocking me unconscious. And in that instant, everything—happiness, sorrow, peace, and anger— were all snuffed silent in the implosion.