“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.
56) PACIFIED
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.