Bruiser

He smiled. “Okay.”

He didn’t have to tell me that he felt the same, because I already knew. The evidence was there on the palm of his hand.

BREWSTER

24) INJURIOUS

I saw the weak hearts of my classmates shredded by
conformity, bloated and numb, as they iced the
wounds of acceptance in the primordial gym,
hoping to heal themselves into popularity,

Who have devolved into Play-Doh pumped through a
sleazy suburban press, stamped in identical
molds, all bearing chunks of bleak ice, comet-
cold in their chests,

Who look down their surgically set noses at me, the
boy most likely to die by lethal injection with no
crime beyond the refusal to permit their swollen,
shredded cardiac chill to fill my heart as well,

Yet out of this frigid pool of judgment stepped
Bronte, untainted by the cold, radiating warmth in
a rhythmic pulse through her veins, echoing now
in mine, just as the slice across her palm is now
my burden, taken by accident, yet held with
purposeful triumph,

As I now reach to double-check the unreliable lock
on my bathroom door, which gives no privacy,
least of all from Uncle Hoyt, who, in fits of
paranoia, must know everything,
everything that goes on beneath his termite-ridden,
shingle-shedding roof,

Where I now carefully peel the bandage from my
hand, revealing shades of brown and red, flesh
damaged and bruised, hoping to redress the
wound before my uncle can find out, the wound
that I have no idea how Bronte got, for in my fuzz-
brained love haze, I forgot to question,

Which will heal without mystery or magic at the
normal pace of life—in a week, two weeks, three
—like the raw-knuckle scabs of her brother, now
mine, too, like the bruises, breaks, and scrapes,
the scars of a lifelong battle that defines me,

Like the fresh wound that cannot be concealed as
my uncle swings open the maliciously disloyal
bathroom door, and getting a healthy look at the
fresh red line sliced across the heel of my hand,
knowing from my unmet gaze that I’m holding a
secret, which gives him permission to hold me
hostage.

“Get that cut today, did you?”
“Yes.”
“Didja take it from Cody?”
“No.”
“That boy’d cut his head off with safety scissors.”
“I didn’t take it from Cody; it happened at school.”

My uncle knows about the things I can do—the pain
that I take—and knowing makes him still crazier
and more protective, but of himself, not of me.
I muffle the screaming wound with a white gauze
square; but nervous, tense, I press too hard and
wince, a small twitch almost imperceptible, and
he’s looking at me with searing intensity, seeing
all.

“Hurt?”
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
“It’s nothing.”
“It don’t look like nothing.”
“It’ll heal.”
“You gonna tell me how you got it?”