My Brother's Keeper (15 page)
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.
J
ake 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.
W
hen 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.
O
ur 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.”
T
he 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.
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
