we’re all connected.
By morning we knew that it was Mom who had left, and she hadn’t come home. Dad made us breakfast: credible pancakes, although the blackened evidence of his first batch was buried in the trash.
“She’ll be back when you get home,” Dad told us. He seemed way too confident about that, which made me think that he wasn’t confident about it at all.
As we walked to school, I couldn’t stop thinking about how furious I still was with Brew—how I wanted to make him feel everything I had felt last night: the helplessness of watching my family detonate and the soul-searing feeling of being abandoned in the midst of it, the way he had done to me. I wanted to take everything I was feeling, put it into a cannon, then aim it at him.
I knew I’d see Brew in school that day, and what bothered me most was that I didn’t know what I’d do when I saw him. It was terrifying not to have a perfect and clear-cut course of action. I knew exactly when I would see him, too. His locker was just outside of my second-period class. Usually we looked forward to seeing each other then, even if it was just to say hello. Now I dreaded it.
I suppose he could’ve made a point of avoiding his locker, but he didn’t. And I suppose I could have slipped in through the classroom’s back door, but I didn’t do that either—because as much as I was dreading it, I knew it had to happen.
He was standing right there as I approached the classroom. He didn’t look at me. He just stared into his locker, moving around books.
“Brewster?”
He turned to me and I found my arm swinging even before I was conscious of the motion. I guess swimming made me stronger than I realized, because I slapped him so hard, his head snapped to the side, hitting his locker, which rang out like a bell. It was all I could do to keep myself from pounding on his chest. All of that fury I was feeling needed a way out.
Around us, other kids saw what was going on. Some gave us a wide berth, others laughed, and that only made me angrier. And then Brewster said:
“Is that it? Because I have to get to class.”
“No!” I shouted, “that’s not it!” and I pushed him. I realized I was doing the bully thing that my brother was famous for, but at the moment I didn’t care. The push didn’t do much anyway—Brew had so much inertia, he didn’t even move when I pushed him. Instead, I ended up stumbling backward.
“There are things you don’t know,” he said.
“You think you can hide behind that?” I shouted. “That’s no excuse! What you did last night…what you said —”
“I lied.”
That caught me off guard and I hesitated, trying to figure out just what he had lied about. He’d said he didn’t care about me, or about any of us. Was he lying about that? Did he care after all? Did I want him to?
The tardy bell rang. We were alone in the hallway now. I was about to turn and storm into class when I felt something warm and wet on my hand. It was blood.
“Oh no!” It didn’t take a genius to figure out I had opened the gash on my hand again. The Band-Aid, which was already loose, was now too wet to hold its grip. It slipped off; and when I brushed away the blood, I had trouble relocating the exact spot of the wound. As it turns out, the blood wasn’t coming from my cut at all.
“It’s not you; it’s me,” Brew said, which is one of the lines guys use when they break up with you; but that wasn’t the case here. It was him. He was the one bleeding.
He pursed his lips. “Not good,” he said. “Not good at all.”
My anger didn’t exactly go away at that instant, but it did hop into the backseat. “I must have cut you with my watch,” I said, although I couldn’t imagine anything sharp enough on my watch to draw that much blood. “We’ve got to get you to the nurse.”
As Brew pressed on the wound to staunch the bleeding at the base of his thumb, I reached into my backpack and found a little pocket-pack of tissues. I pressed the whole pack to his hand and hurried with him down the hall.
“I can do it myself,” he said.
“I don’t care,” I told him.
We pushed through the door of the nurse’s office, where some boy I didn’t know looked up at me with feverish eyes and a God-help-me expression, like he thought he might die at any moment.
“Get in line,” he said.
“I don’t think so.” I shoved past him toward the nurse. By now the whole tissue pack on Brew’s hand was soaked through with blood, and the moment the nurse saw it, she went into triage mode. She quickly assessed the damage and began to clean the gash with gauze and antiseptic.
“What happened?”
“I got cut on my locker door,” Brew said.
Is that what happened? I thought. But he wasn’t even touching his locker.
“It looks worse than it is,” the nurse said once the wound had been cleaned. “You probably won’t even need stitches.” She talked about tetanus shots and gave him a thick piece of gauze. “Keep pressure on it.” Then she turned to me and my bloody fingers. “And you need to clean yourself up. There’s a sink over there. Wash all the way to your elbows. Do it twice.” She told Brew she’d be back to dress the wound, then went to deal with the plague- ridden boy by the door.
I went to the sink, crisis resolved, except, of course, for one minor thing:
The wound was gone from my hand.
It hadn’t healed—it was gone, like it had never been there at all. I kept washing my hands, certain I had just missed it and that it would reappear once I washed away the lather, but no. The cut was nowhere to be found.
I could feel something tugging on the edge of my awareness. Something both frightening and wonderful. I was at the barrier of some unknown place. Even as I stood there I could feel myself crossing over that line.
When I turned to Brew, he was watching me. “You didn’t cut yourself on a locker, did you?” I asked.
He shook his head. I sat beside him, not quite ready to believe what had happened.
“Let me see it.”
He raised the gauze. The wound had clotted; the blood had stopped flowing. I could see the wound clearly now. It was my wound. Same size, same place. Only now it was on his hand.
“Do you understand now?” he asked gently.
But how could I understand? This wasn’t an answer; it was a question—and one I didn’t even know how to ask. All I could say was “How?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It just happens.”
“Always? With everyone?”
“No,” he said. “Not everyone.” The wound had begun to ooze again, so he pressed the gauze to it. “But if I care about someone…”
He didn’t have to finish the thought, because it was there in his eyes. The reason why he ran—why he lied. People thought Brewster Rawlins was a dark unknown, a black hole best kept away from. Well, maybe he was, but what people don’t realize is that black holes generate an amazing amount of light. The problem is, their gravity is so great, the light can’t escape—it just gets pulled in along with everything else.
If he took away the sprains, cuts, and bruises of everyone he cared about, no wonder he’d rather be alone. How could I blame him for running last night as he tried to escape his own gravity?
I could feel my anger and turmoil draining away now that I had at least a part of the puzzle. The brooding expression on Brew’s face truly was inscrutable, so it was impossible to know what he was feeling; but I knew what I was feeling. It flowed in to fill the void once my anger was gone. As unexpected as the slap, I found myself kissing him; and although I heard the nurse protesting from across the room, her voice sounded miles away. I was caught in a gravity far greater than hers.
“I love you, Brew.”
“No you don’t,” he said.
“Just shut up and take it,” I told him.
