conditioned by circumstance to believe he is not worthy. We need an independent assessment.”
“Bronte! 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.
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 people—the ones who, like Hannah, would make Brew feel comfortable, even while making him feel uncomfortable. There were six of us all together—not 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.
39) SUBTERFUGE
Grandparents everywhere talk about how they walked five miles to school each day in the snow, barefoot, and chased by wolves; but it’s not like that anymore. Most everyone we know drives or gets driven. But Tennyson and I had recently taken to walking to school, even though it’s almost a mile. The thing is, if we walked we got out of the house earlier. If we walked we didn’t have to sit in a car with Mom and wonder whose awful cologne we were smelling. If we walked we didn’t have to sit in a car with Dad, who used to be talkative but now had adopted a code of silence while driving. At least Tennyson and I talked to each other as we walked— even if it was only to argue.
“Dad seemed okay last weekend,” Tennyson said as we made our way through a drizzly morning. It was Friday, the day after Brew’s big night out with my friends and me, so I was still riding a good mood.
“When?” I asked.
“We were playing basketball. Brew was there.”
I thought about it, and wished I could have been there to see Dad being his old self—and to see Brew play ball. His workouts with Tennyson have definitely been defining his body, and, okay, I’ll admit I had a primal kind of desire to see those muscles in motion.
“Dad was like his old self,” said Tennyson, “but there was something about it…”
I didn’t know where Tennyson was going with this, and I don’t think he knew either, because he never finished the thought.
Up ahead, when we were just a couple of blocks from school, we saw a tall, lumbering form in a leather bomber jacket. He had on a sweatshirt underneath and the hood was over his head, but I didn’t have to see his face to know who it was.
“Brew!” I called out.
He turned to look, but just for a second. Then, instead of waiting for us, he picked up his pace.
“Look, he’s running away from you!” said Tennyson. “I really like this guy.”
I ran to catch up with Brew, both annoyed and confused. For all those big strides, he wasn’t moving very fast; and I caught up with him in about a block. I grabbed his arm, and he turned his shoulder away, so I tugged on him harder, until I got a glimpse of his face beneath the hood. What I saw almost made me stumble into traffic.
His lips were swollen, and he had smudges of makeup on his face, clearly trying to conceal a black eye.
“Wh…what happened to you?”
He shrugged. “I was having a catch with Cody and missed the ball.”
“You’re lying!”
He didn’t deny it. “So?”
Now I could see that it wasn’t just his eye; it was also in the way he held himself, the way he walked—like there wasn’t a single part of his body that didn’t hurt. I wanted to hold him but was afraid holding him would hurt him, too. “Did your uncle do this to you?”
He stayed quiet for a second and looked toward the school. “No,” he said. And then he said, “Yes.”
He seemed even more surprised than me that the word yes had come out of his mouth. I could tell he had every intention of keeping it secret forever. Suddenly he became pale with very real terror. Fear of me. Fear of me knowing.
I wasn’t really prepared for the truth either—I was more stunned by it than anything else. Across the street a few kids laughed. They weren’t laughing at us, but still it bothered me. How dare they laugh within a hundred yards of this truth?
“What about Cody?” I asked.
“Cody’s fine. He’s better than fine.”
“You have to tell someone.”
“I just told you.”
“I mean someone important.”
“Who? The principal? The police?”
“Yes!”
By now Tennyson had caught up with us and was just staring, stupefied. The bell rang at school, but I didn’t care. Lateness was not a concern.
“If I tell anyone, then they’ll take us away from my uncle,” Brew said. “And things will get a whole lot worse.”
“What could possibly be worse than being beaten within an inch of your life?”
He didn’t answer me—not verbally—but there was an answer in his eyes that had such a high windchill factor, I actually shivered.
“I can handle it,” he said. “I’ve got it all worked out. In a few months I’ll turn sixteen, and I can become an emancipated minor. I’ll move out, take Cody with me, and Uncle Hoyt won’t be able to stop me.”
“That’s assuming you’re still alive!”
“I’ll be fine. But if we get taken away from my uncle now, Cody and I will get put in a home… we’ll probably get split up. And in a place like that there’s no way I can hide what I can do. People will know. And once they know…”
Again a blast of those windchill eyes. I wanted to argue him to the ground on this one, but that icy gaze shut me down.
“Who knows,” Brew said. “Maybe my uncle will change.”
