Neal Shusterman - Bruiser

If he dies, I swear I’ll never forgive him. I’ll never forgive myself.

He’s heavy as granite at the bottom of the pool, his mass so dense he doesn’t float. Brontë and I struggle with every ounce of our strength to raise him to the surface.

My choice to follow him from our house wasn’t out of the purest of motives. I was too much of a wimp to face the emotional wreckage that was sure to come once Brew left and the effect of his presence wore off. I wanted to stay in range—even if only at the edge of it, trailing a block behind him as he searched for my sister. Tonight I was his personal stalker.

When I got to the pool, Brontë was just climbing out. She was dazed, unsure of what had happened. I climbed the fence. I would have moved faster if I’d known. We didn’t see him for at least another ten seconds. Ten seconds can make the difference between living and dying.

Our first attempt to bring him up fails. We come to the surface, gasp a breath of air, and go down again. I get beneath him, pushing him up, while Brontë grabs him in a cross-chest carry, kicking for all she’s worth.

We pull him to the surface at last, somehow getting him over to the side. Standing at the edge, it takes both Brontë and me pulling on his lifeless hands to get him out of the pool.

“You learned CPR in lifesaving, right?” I ask her.

Brontë nods and begins CPR right away, frantically working on him.

“You’re going too fast!”

“I never had to do it for real!”

She slows down. Two rescue breaths, thirty chest compressions.

“I’ll call for help!” But when I pull out my phone, its screen is a jumble of flickering garbage. It traveled with me to the bottom of the pool, and now it’s useless.

Two breaths, thirty compressions, over and over. Brontë’s tears are explosive without Brew to take them away, and I’m terrified that it might mean he’s already gone.

“Get out the heart paddles!” Brontë shouts. “There’s a defibrillation kit somewhere in the storeroom. I saw it once, but I don’t know where.”

I race to the storeroom while Brontë keeps counting out chest compressions. “…nine, ten, eleven—damn it, Brew, breathe!”

I ransack the room—hurling things to the ground, dumping out cabinets until I find the kit—and race back to the pool deck.

“…twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven…”

I kneel beside her and get the thing open. The lid is filled with too many instructions to read. “What do I do?”

“They never showed us!” But then she reaches over and flips the On switch. Simple enough so far. A red light comes on. I can hear it charging up as I grab the heart paddles. Then a green ready light comes on. I press the metallic surface of the paddles to his chest. Brontë leaps back an instant before I press the red buttons on the paddles, and Brew’s back stiffens in a violent arch.

“You’re supposed to yell ‘CLEAR!’” she shouts.

“I forgot!”

I wait for it to recharge, watching for the green light, trying to relive every medical TV show I’ve ever seen to make sure I do this right. Brontë puts two fingers against his neck and shakes her head: no pulse.

Brew has got to fight his way back—but he won’t. He can’t. He’s not a fighter; it’s not in his nature.

But it is in mine! If Brewster won’t fight, then I’ll have to fight for him.

“CLEAR!”

A second jolt. His back arches. Still no pulse.

“It’s not working,” wails Brontë. “It’s no use.”

But today failure is not an option.

As I wait for the machine to recharge, I look into his half open, unseeing eyes, and I realize that CPR and heart paddles are not enough. He needs something more from us.

“We have to take it back!” I tell Brontë. I don’t even know what I mean yet. It’s not a thought; it’s a feeling —something I’m trying to put into words, knowing I don’t have much time to do it.

“Take what back?” Brontë asks

Then the understanding hits me. What Brew needs —what WE need. The only way to save him. It’s simple, and yet it’s impossible. But no more impossible than the things Brew has already done. “We have to take all of it back! Everything we let him take away! We have to steal it back from him.”

I see in her eyes the moment she gets it. “How?”

And suddenly I flash to Uncle Hoyt. “How did his uncle stay angry? Because he wanted to. The things we gave to Brew—we have to want them. We have to OWN them!”

Brontë nods. The light turns green. “One last time,” she says.

I press the paddles to his chest, but my thoughts aren’t on those paddles. Instead they’re on the body bruises I gave away, the head trips I refused to take, the pangs of sorrow I so easily handed over. Against my own self-preservation instinct, I fight to feel those things I refused to feel before.

“CLEAR!”

I pump him full of electricity while trying to steal back a fraction of what I never should have given him in the first place. The battering he stole for me on the field. The heartache he spared me at home. Once I started to give just a little bit of it to him, it was easy to give it all away. But no matter how hard it is, I’m ready to take it all back if it will save him. All of it and more. So I silently pray that I might feel the hurt again somewhere, anywhere, everywhere.

Brontë checks his pulse again. “Nothing.”

But I feel something. There’s a tiny ache on my upper arm. It’s the spot where Brontë had punched me so angrily that day of my lacrosse game. When I raise my arm, I see the faintest bit of a yellow bruise that wasn’t there a moment ago. All I was able to reclaim from Brewster was a single bruise…

…and that’s all it takes.

“Wait!” says Brontë. “I think I have a pulse!”

Suddenly he coughs, water gushing out of his mouth. Brontë and I both scream in grateful surprise. We roll him to one side, water still spilling out of him. He coughs again. His eyes flutter open, and then they close.

We saved you, Brew! We saved you! And right now at this moment nothing else in the world matters to Brontë, or to me. We saved you!

But he’s not waking up.

With no phone, my feet are the only means of communication with the outside world. Brontë holds his head in her lap as I race to the nearest house, pounding on the door, refusing to leave until they let me in. Brew still hasn’t woken when I come back with help. He’s still unconscious when the ambulance comes to take him away—and the sense of urgency on the faces of the paramedics says everything they won’t say out loud. Something isn’t right.

We saved you, Brew We brought you back. So, why won’t you wake up?

Cody sits on a bench, his face twisted in disgust as he watches all the other kids at Roosevelt Children’s Home play on a ridiculously elaborate jungle gym.