Bruiser (18 page)

Brew and I have an understanding. Brew and I are a team on the field. So what if the coach doesn't know he has a secret player? I start the game feeling like I can take on the world, but today we're just taking on the Billington Bullets. They're highly ranked, and a tough team to beat—but I make it clear what kind of game this is going to be right away. I score in the first minute of play. From the first face-off, I rule the field with unprecedented speed and agility—rising from hard falls, disregarding the hardest of stick checks, and never losing an ounce of energy. I'm golden.

And Katrina is there to see it. I made her promise to come.

“I need you there,” I had told her. “Please…you inspire me.”

I hated to beg, but she has to see me. It will all be for nothing if she doesn't see.

I keep glancing over at Brew, just to check in and see how he's holding up. He paces off by himself at the edge of the field, a little worn, a little out of breath. He leans back against the fence and gives me a thumbs-up. I resolve that if I get MVP, I'll give him the trophy. I'll keep Katrina.

Halftime! It's 4 to 1—and I scored all four goals. The coach smiles and looks at me like I'm his own son. “That's what I'm talking about, Tennyson!” he says. “Show 'em what we're made of!”

“Can I stay in for the whole game?”

“Keep playing like that and you can stay in till New Year's!”

The rest of the game is a study in humiliation for the Bullets. With thirty seconds remaining, I seal the Bullets' fate by scoring my sixth goal of the game. I've scored six of our eight goals.

The whistle blows, and it's all over! My team races to me, and in a second I'm lifted up in the air—levitation by glory! But I don't bask for too long. As soon as I'm back down on the ground, I'm bounding over to Katrina.

“I'm glad you came!” I pull her in for a quick kiss. She doesn't resist, but she does try to pull away after a second, because, after all, I'm sweaty.

“Sorry,” I tell her. “I'll shower and we'll go out to celebrate.”

“You should celebrate with the team.”

“Plenty of time for that!”

“Listen, Tennyson…I'm happy for you and all, and you were great out there, you really were…but I'm meeting Ozzy.”

I'm listening, but I'm not really hearing, because I'm not over myself yet. “So ditch him,” I tell her. “I know you feel sorry for him and all, and I know I shouldn't have hit him so hard, and you're right about how all the stuff going on between my parents was driving me crazy—but I'm okay now.” I put my arm around her, and she pulls away again.

“It's not about feeling sorry for him…. I was seeing him even before you broke his nose.”

Suddenly it's like I've been smashed in the head with my own lacrosse stick. My million-dollar words get knocked out of my skull, and all I can say is:

“Huh?”

“Actually,” she says, “I kind of thought that might be why you were fighting him.”

“Whuh?”

“I was a little flattered, to tell you the truth.” Then she leans forward and kisses me, but on the forehead, the way you might kiss a small child, or an old dog before putting it to sleep. “You should call Katy Barnett—I know for a fact she's been dying to go out with you since, like, the Plasticine era.”

“Pleistocene,” I mumble vacantly.

“Right, that one. Well, toodles!”

And she's gone, strolling away with all the good feelings I thought were mine.

The crash inside me could shake the earth. It feels like a fever. It feels like the flu. And my team is still celebrating. We've won the game, and qualified for league finals. Why do I not care?

There's no rock large enough for me to crawl under right now, and all I want to do is get home—teleport if I could—straight to my bedroom.

In all the commotion I've totally forgotten about Brew. I look for him, but he's gone. He must have left the second the game was over—gone home to nurse my wounds, whatever they might be. Did I get hurt in this game? A little banged up maybe, but nothing major—nothing he didn't sign on for. I want to find him and talk to him. I need to have someone to commiserate with. Even if he doesn't talk back, that's okay.

I say my good-byes to the team as fast as I can, grab my lacrosse stick, and head home, feeling like I might use my stick to take out a few mailboxes along the way, and wonder how I got so psychotic.

Brontë catches me out in the street before I get to the front door and punches me in the arm with the strength of a prize-fighter.

“Ow!”

“That's for forcing him to go to your game!”

I guess Brew got home before me. I guess he told her. Or more likely she saw the way he looked, and she dragged it out of him.

“I didn't force him to do anything. He came because he wanted to.”

But she's not buying a word of it. “You're a self-centered, self-serving—”

“Oh, and when I chased him away from my game last time, that was wrong, too?”

She fumbles her thoughts a bit. “Yes, it was—but at least
then you were thinking of him, not yourself!”

I don't want to fight with her; I just want to get inside. The things I'm feeling right now are too venomous to put into words, and I don't want to take it out on her or on anyone—I just want to get past her and in through the door.

“Instead of complaining about me,” I tell her, “maybe you should think about what
you
just did to him!” She looks at me, not understanding. So I rub the fresh charley horse in my arm from her punch and say: “The second I walk inside, he's gonna have one nasty bruise thanks to you.”

I push past her and go into the house, leaving her to stew in her own juices.

Once inside, I drop my lacrosse stick on the family room floor and collapse onto the sofa. I curl up and close my eyes like I do when I have a bad stomachache. I feel my diaphragm begin to heave, and it makes me furious that I might actually burst into tears. Me. I don't
do
that! No one can ever see me do that. Is it wrong to feel this awful when you get dumped? Is this even about Katrina at all? I don't know. I don't care. I just want the feeling gone.

I hear the TV turn on, and I open my eyes to see that Cody has entered the room. He looks at the way I'm all curled up on the sofa and says, “Can I watch cartoons?”

“Do whatever you want,” I tell him.

He sits on the floor in front of me but leaves the volume a little too low to hear. “Are you just tired, or do you got bad
stuff?” he asks me.

“Don't worry about it,” I tell him. “It's not your problem.”

“If you got bad stuff, you should leave,” he says.

“What are you talking about? I just got home.”

“You should leave anyway.” Then he presses the remote, and the volume gets higher and higher until it's blasting.

I take the remote away from him and turn off the TV. “What's your problem?”

Then he turns on me with a vengeance. “It ain't fair! He's MY brother, and you got no right!”

I want to yell back at him, sink down to his level; but then something begins to change. I feel it building like a wave gathering strength just before it crashes on the shore.

Relief.
I draw a deep, fulfilling breath.
Comfort.
I slowly let it out.
Contentment.
I am pacified, just as I've been pacified each day when I get home. It usually doesn't arrive so powerfully, but then, I'm usually not feeling as beaten down as I am today. As I
was
today.

All the bad emotions I had just a few moments ago are gone. I'm a bit dizzy and almost weightless. It feels good.

Cody's shoulders slump, and he sits back down. “Too late.”

Now I can't deny that this is something more than the mere comfort of being in a place that's safe and familiar. “Cody…what just happened?”

“The bad stuff went away,” he said like it was perfectly
obvious, perfectly natural. “Cuts and stuff are easy—they go quicker; but the stuff inside is harder. It's like it has to find a way out first.”

I hear muffled sobs from the guest room, on the other side of the wall. The sobs are coming from Brew. They're deep; they're powerful; they're mine. But not anymore.

“He can take it,” Cody says, resigned. “He can take anything.”

By the time I get to the guest room, Brontë's already there, holding Brew, trying to wrap her slender arms around his hulking frame as he shudders with sobs of both fury and sorrow. There's a welt on his arm where Brontë punched me.

“What is it, Brew, what's wrong?” Brontë says, at a loss to comfort him. “Tell me, please; I want to help!”

The second he sees me, he looks up at me with pleading eyes—he knows this came from me. He knows! “What happened, Tennyson? You won the game; what happened?”

I can only stutter there in the doorway.

Brontë narrows her eyes at me. “Get out!” But I don't move, so she gets up and reaches for the door. “I said, get out!” Then she slams the door in my face. I wonder if she even knows what's going on. I wonder if he'll tell her. Brontë, the compassionate, Brontë, the observant. I'll bet she's totally in the dark when it comes to this secret side of Brewster's gift.

But now I know—and knowing the full truth propels me out the front door. I can't be a part of this. I can't willingly
bury him in all my baggage.

I make it as far as the front gate before my momentum fails me. There, just a few feet away from the street, I can feel the edge of Brewster's influence. I can feel myself slipping out of range. All the bad feelings—the hurt, the betrayal—it's all waiting there just on the other side of that gate. One more step and it will all come flooding back. And as much as I want to take that step, as much as I want to free Brew from the pain…I can't. I've always considered myself so strong, so willful; but here is the truth: I don't even have the strength of will to steal back my own misery.

Dejected, defeated, I go back inside; but in a few moments even that crushing sense of defeat is gone, evaporating into nothing as I sit in the family room with Cody, the two of us watching cartoons without a care in the world.

Tennyson began to act strange around the time he and Katrina broke up, and his behavior became odder and odder each day. It came to a peak the day Brew and I went to Amanda Milner's sweet sixteen. When we got home that night, he laid into us the second we walked in the door.

“Where were you? What were you doing? Do you know what time it is?”

He sounded like a parent on the rampage, and his eyes were disturbingly wild. Tennyson had always been unnecessarily protective of me, but this was ridiculous. Brew was getting all stressed out and went straight to the bathroom, just to get out of Tennyson's line of fire.

“What is wrong with you!” I demanded once Brew was gone.

“You shouldn't be taking him out like this!”

“What is he—a dog on a leash?”

“No, it's just that…it's just that you need to be careful.”

I pointed an accusing finger at him. “You're telling me to be careful? You, who treated yourself to a pain-free lacrosse victory at his expense?”

Just mentioning it deflated him. He looked at me pleadingly—a helpless look that, until recently, was never in my brother's arsenal of facial expressions. Lately, there'd been a whole lot of weird desperation in his eyes, and in his actions. If I didn't know better, I'd wonder if Tennyson was on drugs.

“Mom and Dad were fighting while you were gone.”

It surprised me, because they hadn't had an argument for a while. “Fighting how?”

“Like they used to.” He looked at me for a moment more with that abject expression, but then his face changed. It was as if every muscle in his face switched to a new preset. He took a deep breath and relaxed, his anxiety fading like a dark cloud dissipating. I'd noticed that before, too—how he'd be so anxious and then calm down so quickly. He took another deep breath and released it.

“It's okay now,” he said. “It's okay—but you shouldn't keep Brew out so long. He's not used to parties and all those people.”

“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?