She closes the dishwasher. “Of course I am.”
“Then why don’t you act like it?”
“First of all, you don’t know what I’ve said to Jake privately.”
I consider this, but decide that she could still act mad instead of acting like he’s company.
“And secondly,” she says. “Being angry isn’t going to help right now.”
Which is something I definitely don’t agree with, since being mad is about the only way I’m going to get through the next 427 minutes.
I’m sitting on the couch watching the Saturday afternoon pregame show—having killed 218 minutes reading the sports section, oiling my glove, going online, actually doing my homework, even skipping lunch just to avoid being in the same room with Jake—when I hear Mr. Furry meowing her head off at the back door.
Jake and Eli are upstairs playing Nintendo and my mom is in her room on the phone, so I get up, grab the liver treats, and open the door. Mr. Furry gives me a suspicious look. I reach down to show her I have a liver treat in my hand, but she obviously thinks I’m going to ambush her again.
At which point I decide to use the Food King technique. I make a trail of liver treats, leading from the bush to the door, not making any eye contact with her, which I figure is important for her cat dignity. I extend the trail all the way to the couch, and then go in and sit there oiling my glove, until a few minutes later, when she comes in and jumps up on the couch.
She gives me one of her aloof cat looks, which I realize is her way of saying that I’m sitting in her spot. I move over and the next thing I know, she’s nudging her head into my palm for me to pet her. Which I do.
Her fur is surprisingly warm and soft. She stretches her neck out, clearly wanting me to scratch her. Which I do. At which point she starts to purr. And so I sit there, thinking that even though she’s no Harriet the Horrible, she’s at least someone who’s small and soft and needing human attention, and who may possibly not be so lame after all.
Which means I’m sitting on the couch telling Mr. Furry to watch how Brian Giles swings, when Jake comes in. It’s more like I feel him come in, since I don’t look up. Even when he sits down at the other end of the couch. Mr. Furry looks up and stretches, but then she just circles around in my lap, pushes her head up into my hand, and sits back down. After which I sit there trying not to move or not to even breathe, like the entire future of the free world depends on Mr. Furry not waking up and going over to sit with Jake.
Jake and I sit there watching the Pirates suck. We don’t say anything when Brian Giles grounds out to third. Or when Josh Fogg strikes out. Or when a commercial comes on where a bunch of guys drinking beer get their dog to get them a six-pack.
Then there’s a commercial for Just for Men. Jake puts his arm over the back of the couch and turns in my direction. Which makes me jump out of my seat, and means Mr. Furry practically gets dumped off the couch, which means she gives me a highly annoyed look and goes over and sits with Jake after all.
I consider going upstairs and reading National Geographic for Kids for the 185th time, but instead, I get up, go into the kitchen, and try to figure what to do. Which is when I see the ingredients for the orange meal sitting out on the counter, obviously for Jake’s special good-luck-at-rehab final dinner, which, at this point is only 138 minutes away.
So I grab the Cheetos and go back into the den and start openly eating them.
Finally, in the top of the fifth, Pokey Reese hits this amazing double, which turns into an amazing triple on account of the other team’s bad fielding, arid for however long it takes for the whole thing to happen, I sort of forget about how I’m not speaking to Jake. Although, technically we don’t exactly speak to each other, we just whoop the exact same whoop at the exact same time. Which totally annoys Mr. Furry, who jumps off the couch and waits for all the ruckus to end so she can go back to being petted.
After things quiet down, she blinks, looks at Jake, then at me. Then she jumps up on my lap.
I look sideways at Jake, who looks surprisingly bummed out. At which point, I decide that we can continue this stupid custody war over Mr. Furry for the next 133 minutes. Or that I can offer him some Cheetos.
Which I do, not actually saying anything, just holding the bag out in his direction. Which, if you think about it, is the kind of thing you can do without making it seem like you’re actually doing anything, at least not anything important or meaningful.
Jake doesn’t notice.
I clear my throat.
He won’t look my way.
Finally, I shake the bag to get his attention.
He looks over at me like he could care less.
Which means that I act like I could care less that he could care less. I put the bag back in my lap.
We sit there not moving until the bottom of the ninth, although I have no idea what’s actually happening in the game. All I do is count down the hits, strikes, and outs until it’s practically over, and when it is— when the sportscasters are making the kind of time-killing jokes they make when everybody knows the game is over even if it isn’t technically over—I pick up the bag of Cheetos and dump the whole thing over Jake’s head.
The next thing I know, Jake has hold of my shirt and I’m falling backward off the couch. Then we’re on the floor, kicking and grabbing at each other like crazy and taking wild swipes that don’t connect. Jake swings at my jaw. I duck and he misses. I grab for his arm and end up ripping his shirt.
Then, at some point, I’m on top. I lock my fist, cock my elbow just the way Jake taught me, and punch him, square in the stomach. He doubles up with a groan.
I sit back on my heels a second, then all of sudden, Jake rears up and throws me over on my back. He’s just about to land a punch to my jaw, when I roll away, grabbing his shirt at the same time, and throw him back on the rug. His head hits the edge of the coffee table and something falls on the floor with a bang.
Fights have a rhythm, a definite-but-not-spoken feeling that both people get that tells them when it’s over.
It was over.
We look at each other, both of us breathing hard. There’s a line of blood over Jake’s left eye and a bare, surprisingly white patch of skin that shows through where I ripped the neck of his shirt. My hand feels numb from where I banged it on the coffee table, but that’s about it.
We sit there on the rug in the middle of a bunch of pulverized Cheetos, panting, both knowing I won.
Jake goes through a bunch of bogus moves like tucking his shirt in and fixing his hair, to make it seem like it’s no big deal, which makes me feel sort of embarrassed but also sort of proud.
He dabs at the cut on his eyebrow. “Blood,” he says, actually sounding sort of satisfied.
I don’t know what to say.
“I’m gonna pay you back, you know,” Jake says.
Normally, when one person says “I’m gonna pay you back,” it means that he’s pretty much admitting that he lost but that he’s going to punch, headlock, or pinch the other one as soon as he gets the chance. Which means the other one pretty much always says “Oh, yeah?” Which means he’s also going to try to punch, head-lock, or pinch the other one before he gets the chance.
“Oh, yeah?” I say.
He reaches behind him and picks up the lampshade, which is the thing that got knocked on the floor while we were wrestling. “You know, for the Stargell.”
“Oh.”
Jake taps at the lampshade, trying to undent it. “Even though I know that’s not enough to make it up to you.”
I want to tell him I’m done collecting cards. Which is true.
But the other part, about it not being enough, is also true.
“You’ll come back?” I don’t plan on saying this. It just comes out.
“Of course,” Jake says. “Why wouldn’t I?”
I shrug. All I know is that when people in this family start coming home at 1:16, they end up coming home later and later until eventually they stop co
ming home at all.
“You promise?”
He nods.
“And you won’t, you know, be like that again?”
He shrugs.
He needs to promise.
Which he doesn’t do.
I look away and fold my arms across my chest.
We sit there for a long time, not saying anything. Then I look over at him. He’s pulling on a thread from where I ripped his shirt.
“I’ll try,” he says. “That’s all I can say.”
And something heavy and tight inside my chest opens up. Just a little.
Which is when Mr. Furry wanders in and starts nosing around in the Cheeto debris. Which gives me an idea.
“We can blame it on Mr. Furry,” I say.
Jake doesn’t get it, at first.
“The lamp. We can say she knocked it over.”
I look over at Mr. Furry, who’s shaking her head and licking her whiskers like mad, trying to get rid of Cheeto dust. She can take the blame for the lamp, I decide. She owes me.
Jake stands up and gets the Dustbuster. I straighten up the furniture and try to put the lamp back together while Jake cleans up the Cheetos. With both of us working, we’re done in time to watch the post-game interview with Pokey Reese. Which at least gives us something to talk about. Not something important or meaningful. Just something regular. Which feels surprisingly good. Because somehow talking about regular stuff actually feels like it is important and meaningful.
When our mom comes down and sees me and Jake sitting together on the couch like regular, she doesn’t say anything. Which is good, since the last thing you want when you’re doing something like acting regular with someone you haven’t been regular with, is to have someone else point it out. She also seems to fall for the Mr. Furry-as-lamp-wrecker story.
She looks at her watch. I look at mine. Which says there’s only 52 minutes left till dinner. Which all of a sudden makes me feel surprisingly bad. I look over at Jake, who is now looking scared and confused and a bunch of other things that I can’t quite figure out.
“I’m going to start dinner,” my mom says. “We’re having the orange meal.” She says this in a fake cheery voice but her eyes are full of tears.
I know what to do without even thinking. “Oh, Mom,” I say. “I’ve got some bad news.”
She looks sort of worried. “What?” she says. “What is it?”
She and Jake both look at me.
“Mr. Furry ate all the Cheetos.”
It isn’t the most hysterical joke anybody ever made, but Jake laughs, and then Mom laughs, and I think maybe Martha MacDowell’s right. Maybe I am funny.
Our mom makes us walk over to the Mini Mart and buy more Cheetos with our own money, which, if you think about it, is letting us off easy since she probably knows that Mr. Furry is just about as guilty of breaking the lamp as she is of eating the Cheetos.
“You’re pretty good at that,” Jake says on the way to the Mini Mart.
“Good at what?”
“Lying to Mom.”
I think maybe he means it as a compliment, but it doesn’t exactly feel like one. I don’t lie to Mom. I just say things to keep her from getting upset.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Jake says. “Okay?”
I shrug.
“The way you always made up stuff so that Mom wouldn’t know what was going on; the way you cleaned up after me and my friends and went around spraying the house with that orange stuff; it made me mad, you know.”
I didn’t know.
“At first I sort of liked it,” he says. “It was like you were on my side. But after a while, I felt like you thought you were better than me.”
“I was just trying to help,” I say.
“Really?” Jake looks like he doesn’t totally believe me.
I look away, over at the Mini Mart video camera, which shows Jake with his ripped shirt and his cut eyebrow looking like a juvenile delinquent. And which shows me walking just far enough ahead so it doesn’t look like we’re together.
I wasn’t just trying to help. I wanted to be the hero. I liked being the good one, the one who took care of everything, who cleaned up the messes and made sure our mom didn’t go back to smoking and crying and watching Lifetime TV all day. Jake was the bad one. For not missing the old house and the old days, and for turning into someone who called you Dillweed in front of his friends, and for almost getting us both killed by a bread truck.
Which I thought gave me the right to feel like killing him, and wishing he would go to jail, and even sometimes wishing he wasn’t even my brother.
Which, no matter what, he is.
I grab a bag of Cheetos off the shelf and rip it open, even though it’s technically illegal since we haven’t paid for it yet, and even though I’m being recorded on the Mini Mart’s video camera. I hand the bag to Jake.
“Go ahead,” I say.
“What?”
“Dump it on me.”
He just looks at me.
“Go ahead,” I say. “I deserve it.”
Jake looks like he’s considering the idea. “Nah,” he says. He starts walking toward the cash register, then turns around. “Besides, it would be a waste of Cheetos.”
The big-haired woman at the checkout doesn’t say anything about how the bag of Cheetos are already opened, and Jake and I don’t say anything, either. We just pay for it and leave. And we don’t say anything to each other on the way home, or even when we get home and sit back down in front of the TV again while our mom makes the orange meal.
Until Jake gets up during a commercial and turns the Implosion family photo facedown.
“You’re the one who does that?” I say.
“Does what?”
“The thing with the picture.”
“Yup.”
I wait for a while. “Why?” I said.
Jake doesn’t answer.
“You’ve been doing it ever since we moved here, haven’t you?”
Jake shrugs in a way that can mean yes or no, but which definitely means yes.
And I think then that I understand, really understand, what Mr. D meant about not caring about things in case they disappear on you.
I get up and turn the picture faceup.
Jake doesn’t move. He doesn’t call me a dillweed, or punch, headlock, or pinch me. Or get up and turn the picture over again. He doesn’t do anything. Which actually makes me feel surprisingly great. Because sometimes a person just knows when nothing is actually something.
Acknowledgments
My first thank-you goes to Alessandra Balzer, my editor at Hyperion, who was both gentle and strong in her stewardship of this book and whose skill and professionalism are exceeded only by her warmth. I also had the good fortune to work with Stephen Roxburgh at the book’s inception, and with David Levithan, who gave patient and wise counsel as a friend and colleague. I also want to extend particular thanks to my agent, Nina Collins, and to Angus Killick and the crack marketing staff at Hyperion.
I am also grateful to The Writers Room, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the New York Foundation on the Arts for their support.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to the friends who sustained me during the period in which the book was written—Bridget Taylor, Hallie Cohen, Annie and Steve Murphy, Cathy Bailey, Meg Drislane, Beth Robinson, Bill Ecenbarger, Paul Rankin, and Joan Gillis. I’m also grateful for the support of my colleagues at the Writers Room—especially A.M. Homes, Mark Millhone, and Mark Belair—and to Shelley Messing, Sue Novack, and my Tuesday-night sisters.
It is my family to whom I am most indebted—to my parents and sisters who put up with my early attempts at writing—and, most of all, to Brandon, Kelly, Meaghan, Matt, and Paul, who teach me daily about the power of love and forgiveness.
Patricia McCormick is the author of the best-selling novel, Cut, which was chosen as an ALA Best Book of the Year and a Teen People Book-of-the-Month Club selection. She is also the author of Sold
.
Visit her Web site at
www.pattymccormick.com
Patricia McCormick, My Brother's Keeper
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