Authors: Neal Shusterman
“Finally came back, did ya!” Uncle Hoyt growls like a bear if a bear could speak. “Well, you're too late! Let the boy take his own due.”
But Brew stands there, stone-faced, and won't say a word.
“Just as well. This is for both of you then.”
That's when Uncle Hoyt starts to use his fists, taking everything out on me, but it's nothing to me cuz I'm the rag doll.
I hear grunts from outside. Not screams, because Brew, he's good at holdin' it all in, keepin' it all to himself. I know how much it must hurt, and it just makes Uncle Hoyt angrier that I'm not getting his lesson. He screams and curses, wishing I was, but knowing I'm not.
I close my eyes and stay limp, bouncing and flopping around the shed, lettin' him kick, and hit, and pull, and tug. I even start smiling, like it's all just a whole lot of rocking in a crib.
You can't hurt me, Uncle Hoyt, no matter how foul you get, because I've got Brew to protect me. And he'll never let you hurt me. Never never never.
I stayed out till dark,
And my brother went home alone,
To face our worst nightmare.
Now I stand at the shed window
Until my legs give out.
My uncle is a weapon turned on my brother.
Now turned on me.
“Let the boy take his own due.”
But I won't allow it, and he knows it.
Is it me my uncle beats?
Is his foot so swift,
Are his hands so furious
Because he knows it's coming to me?
For being disloyal?
For wanting more than this?
Or is he furious at the futility,
Furious at knowing
He will never teach us to respect him?
The muddy ground,
All fours,
I roll to my side,
Ear in mud,
Knee to chest,
I swallow my screams.
Forcing them into my stomach.
Digest the pain.
Dissolve it,
Then sweat it out,
Piss it out,
Wetness spreading in my jeans,
As foul as my uncle,
Who I should hate,
But can't.
Who I should stop,
But can't.
This wiring inside me is all wrong.
I'm built to receive.
I can't kill an ant,
I can't salt a snail,
I can't raise a hand to my uncle,
My wiring won't let me.
So I lie in the mud,
In my pain,
In my weakness,
And my fury at him
Is nothing compared to my fury at myself.
I am the crumbling aftermath of the earthquake.
The dust settling over the ruins.
Three minutes and it's over.
I rise, battered but not broken.
Never broken.
It will take more than my uncle to do that.
I reach for the rusted knob,
Opening to find Cody,
His hair a wild mess,
Eyes frightened and lost,
But not a mark upon him.
And Uncle Hoyt
Has crumbled, too.
Ruined and rocking,
A baying, keening ball of misery,
Kneeling in the center of the shed,
Gripping himself as if he's the one in pain.
“I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!”
he wails.
“I didn't mean it! I didn't mean any of it.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!”
Always the same.
He means it, too.
He means it in the moment.
But that doesn't change what he's done.
To Cody.
To me.
I take my brother and close the door on Uncle Hoyt,
Escaping from the epicenter
Because I can feel my uncle's pain,
Like worms in my flesh.
But if I can get far enough away,
Fast enough away,
His agony will be his, and his alone.
Our bedroom is my sanctuary.
I take off my shirt.
I lie facedown on my bed.
We begin the ritual.
Cody and I.
We both know it well.
A warm, wet cloth begins it.
He mops it across my back.
Gently tracing reconnaissance of the wounds.
“Is there bleeding?”
“No,”
Cody says.
“A little.”
He wipes my face,
Around my swelling eyes,
And in his eyes I see how bad it is.
A second cloth,
This one with alcohol.
Cold and stinging.
I swallow this pain, too.
The next cloth is dry.
Cody carefully blots,
He assesses,
He's strategic with Band-Aids,
Familiar with the shapes and sizes.
“You want a shirt?”
“Not yet.”
He puts a towel across my back,
Maybe to keep me warm,
Maybe to hide the scars of battle.
“They should be mine.”
“Don't say that. Don't ever say that.”
He nods and begins to cry,
But it only lasts an instant,
Because before a single tear falls
His sorrow becomes mine,
A heaviness in my heart,
A salty sting in my eyes.
“I want to be sad,”
he says.
“Can't you let me feel sad?”
But I can't do that.
I'm not wired that way.
I dream of the morning,
And how it will unfold.
Uncle Hoyt never remembers;
It's very convenient.
He'll grasp just enough to know he did something wrong,
But not enough to take responsibility for it.
Cody will avoid his eyes at breakfast,
Studying his Alphabits like they're a spelling test;
But I'll hold my uncle's gaze,
Making him look away,
Because this time was worse than all the others, And he'll know,
And he'll have to remember,
“Let me see it,”
he'll say.
He'll reach for my shirt, but I'll pull away,
The wounds are my dignity; I will not share them.
And that's when he'll get scared.
“You won't tell no one, right?
If you do they'll ask questions,
You'll have to give answers,
They'll take you away,
Then you and your brother,
They'll split you both up,
That's what they do,
Is that what you want?
So you don't gotta tell,
'Cause who would believe it,
This thing you can do?
And what happened last night
Won't happen again,
See, I've learned my lesson,
I'm making amends,
We're a family here,
It's nobody's business,
A family, Brew,
Let's keep it that way.”
I'm ready to face him when morning comes,
Ready for all those things he'll say.
I rise with bold and righteous indignation,
The wounds on my body an accusation,
I'm ready!
But Uncle Hoyt cannot be roused,
His stupor extends into the day,
His snores shake the house,
And confronting a sleeping man
Is no confrontation at all,
So I get Cody breakfast
And gingerly slip my backpack
Over aching shoulders,
Then we head off to school,
Both of us knowing
That we won't tell a soul.
The way I see it, the impossible happens all the time; but we're so good at taking it for granted, we forget it was once impossible.
I mean, look at airplanesâcome on, how could they
not
be impossible? These gigantic metal things you'd need a massive hydraulic winch just to get off the ground? Please! They used to say,
“If man were meant to fly, he'd have wings”
; but it didn't stop poets from dreaming, did it? Then a few hundred years ago a man named Bernoulli came up with an elegant mathematical principle about pressure, air density, and velocityâand bingo! Poetry became poetry in motion, and now objects bigger than blue whales are filling the friendly skies, thank you very much.
I think small children are far more in tune with the wonder of it all, far better than the rest of us more “sensible” and
“mature” folk. They look at every little thing, from fireflies to lightning, and stand in awe that such things exist. Sometimes we need to be reminded that that's how we
should
feelâ¦but, on the other hand, if we felt that way all the time, we'd just marvel at the fireworks and never get anything done.
I will reluctantly admit that I am also a victim of species numbness. I, too, have taken the wondrous and have magically made it boring. Fireflies contain reactive phosphor; lightning is just static. Yawn.
I will also admit that Tennyson and I came to accept Brewster's mystical talent far too quickly. Even though I tried to hold on to the wonder, I couldn't. The fact that he could healâand
stealâ
the hurts of others became a commonplace fact. That was my first mistake. Because once you stop marveling at that firefly you caught in a jar, it sits on a shelf with no one to let it out.
Before Uncle Hoyt had his steamroller accident and Brew took on the worst beating of his life, I was busy enticing Brewster out of his shell. Tennyson had become his personal trainer; but my role was far more intimate, as well it should be. I was Brew's muse extraordinaire, determined to caress him into a meaningful social life. Having read various books on psychology, I thought I had Brew figured out. All he needed was a little encouragement. Of course I couldn't have been more wrong, but I've never been very good at abandoning theories.
“You need to reinvent yourself,” I announced to him at lunch one day, holding his hand across the table for everyone in the cafeteria to see.
“My current invention works just fine,” he said. “People stay away from me; I stay away from them.”
I shook my head. “Not anymore. You, my sad, poetic stud, are not a loser; and it's time you stopped acting like one. The days of you skulking around the school are over.” He tried to eat, but I was holding his eating hand, so all he could do was clumsily stab at the food with a fork in his left fist.
“Maybe I like skulking.”
“You'll like having friends more.” But he didn't seem convinced, only concerned. “Are you going to look me in the eye and tell me that you don't want friends?” I gave him back his hand, but he didn't switch the fork, leaving his hand available for me to take again. I smiled, marveling at all the little things that mean so much, and wondered when I had become so cloyingly Hallmark.
“It's not that I don't want friends,” he said. “I just don't think it's a good idea.”
But good idea or not, I was going to make it happen. The next in a long line of Brewster-related missions. As I've said, I'm not the most popular girl in school, but I'm not unpopular either. That makes me socially balanced, which means my friends are balanced, too; and those are the types of people most likely to warm up to Brew. I called over my friend Hannah Garcia, because she can slide a turtle out of its shell without it even knowing.
“Hannah,” I said as she sat down with us, “Brewster is under the delusion that he's socially inept.”
Brew threw up his hands. “Brontë!”
“Oh, don't get out the heart paddles!” I told him, then turned back to Hannah. “As I was saying, he's been conditioned by circumstance to believe he is not worthy. We need an independent assessment.”
“Brontë! You're embarrassing me!” he said.
Hannah waved a hand. “Get over it.” Then she studied him honestly and objectively. “Well,” she said. “First of all, he's tall. Secondly, he's cute. Third, he's your boyfriend, and you have excellent taste in friends.”
“Thank you.”
“So,” concluded Hannah, “he receives a nine on the acceptability scale.”
“Just a nine?” I asked.
“If he was a ten, he'd be going out with me.” Then she winked at him and strode away.
Brew was completely red in the face, but he also had the biggest smile I'd ever seen. I took both of his hands across the table, because all eating had stopped anyway. “You know what I think?” I told him. “I think we need to go out one night with a bunch of my friends, introduce you to life as I know it, and have a fantastic time.”
“Okay, sure,” he said, still pink and as giddy as could be.
Â
I planned the event like it was a major gala. A one-man cotillion, sans tuxedo. It was just a bunch of us going down to the
mall for burgers after school on Thursday, but I made sure I invited just the right peopleâthe ones who, like Hannah, would make Brew feel comfortable, even while making him feel uncomfortable. There were six of us all togetherânot too few, not too many.
“I can't stay long,” he said when he arrived, which is what he always said whenever he went anywhere. I leaned forward and kissed him, then moved to whisper in his ear, pausing to steal a whiff of his coconut hair conditioner, which, for some reason I couldn't quite fathom, drove me wild.
“Trust me,” I told him, “you won't want to leave.”
But that just got him worried.
We all had a great time that night; and although Brew was mostly quiet, he was accepted in a way he'd never been before. Brew was embraced by my friends and was finally able to feel a part of a circle larger than just his immediate family.
As I predicted, he stayed longer than he'd intended to.
“I like your friends,” Brew told me as he left. “I didn't think I would, but I like them. A lot.”
I went home thinking that I had accomplished something remarkable.
He went home to find his uncle taking out a life's worth of frustrations on his brother.