Hurt People Read online

  My brother tore out the article and put it in his pocket. Later it would sleep beneath his bunk bed, hidden with the rest. “The Stranger,” he said.

  “The Stranger,” I said, to hear how it sounded from my mouth.

  “The Stranger,” my brother said. “The Stranger … is coming to get you.”

  He turned his hands into claws and jumped at me, like Rick grabbed my mom. I tried to fight him off but he was bigger and quicker.

  “Don’t fight it,” he said, squeezing me into a suffocating bear hug. “You’ll only make it worse.”

  Let me go, I told him, please let me go. But when I heard my words they weren’t my own. They were softer, more desperate, the words of Morgan Wells.

  “Relax,” my brother said. “Honey, relax.” He put his finger to my head in the shape of a gun. “It’ll all be over soon.”

  I closed my eyes. It would be easier to let him do what he wanted, to let him play out his plot. This I knew from suffering before. So I let my body sink into his—Don’t do it, baby, please don’t do it—and wondered what it felt like to die. I imagined my brain shutting off like a television, the picture of the world beaming large and colorful, then, in an instant, shrinking to a single dot of white. I closed my eyes and felt my brother drag his finger up and down the length of my cheek. I felt his breath in my ear. This is what you get, he said. For talking to strangers. For sharing our secrets. He cocked the gun with a click of his tongue. Now smile for the camera, brother.

  “Stop!” I yelled, as much in my own voice as I knew how.

  “Sorry,” the Stranger said. “I can’t.”

  “I’m not playing!

  “Good, because this isn’t a game.”

  “I mean it! Stop!”

  The woods echoed with the alarm of my voice, loud enough for the whole course to hear. I felt my brother’s grip tighten, then loosen. “What?” he said. “OK, fine.” He let me go, but with a hard shove that nearly sent me into the creek. “I was just playing.”

  “That wasn’t funny,” I said. “Why’d you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Why’d you say that, about secrets? I didn’t tell Mom about Chris.”

  “I know,” he said. “You told Dad.”

  He pushed me aside and washed his hands in the creek.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did. You did and I know you did.”

  “I didn’t mean to. How did you know?”

  “Because you’re my brother. And I would have done the same thing if I was your age.”

  “Stop acting like you’re that much older than me.”

  “I am.”

  “We’re only two grades apart.”

  “Yeah, but I’m smarter.”

  “I’ll be just as smart when I’m your age,” I said. “No, I’ll be smarter. So I told Dad. It was at night. He was asleep. He doesn’t remember.”

  “Good.”

  “So you should have already known that. If you’re so smart.”

  My brother shrugged. “When a secret is shared, people get hurt. That’s what we said.” He kicked a rock into the creek. “And Dad wasn’t asleep. He was drunk.” He walked away, leaving me by the water. I saw my wet reflection and thought of my dad. How he looked that night. The crooked shape his mouth took when I said he smelled like strawberries.

  “I hate you,” I said to my brother.

  “No, you don’t,” he said, examining the woods, looking for the right way to go. “I’m not what you hate.”

  “Yes you are. And I’m going to tell Mom what you did.”

  “No, you won’t,” my brother said. “You don’t know your way back. Or who’s out there.”

  He crooked his hands into hooks, the same shapes he made a moment ago, playing the Stranger. I turned away and looked into the woods, the sea of trees before me. Nothing was familiar. But I told my brother I knew where I was going, and so what if I didn’t. What did he care? I brushed past him and stepped into the woods, thinking of the scene where I told my mother what my brother did, the terrible things he said to me, and how he wouldn’t let me go. My mother would stop helping whatever dumb customer was at the counter and storm after my brother. She would catch him under the arm and drag him to a dark corner. She would have hooks of her own. How does it feel? I would say as my mother slapped him, or hit him with her shoe. She would scold him and ask what kind of brother are you anyway? What kind of brother does this? And my brother would cry, but I wouldn’t. I’d be sitting next to Sandy, Rick out of the picture. I’d be drinking a soda all by myself. I’d have the last sip. I’d have the last word. I’d say, Who’s laughing now?

  I smiled to myself and took five steps into the woods before my brother stopped me. “Hey, dummy,” he said. “This way.”

  I turned around and followed.

  four

  OUR MOTHER HAD TO WORK the following morning. We reminded her that it was her birthday, her special day, but she said we needed the money, so she picked up an extra shift. Before she left, she pulled my brother and me out of bed and gave us our orders for the day. We were to ready the apartment for her party. This meant we had to clean the place up, make it presentable for others. I asked what about decorations, and she said we didn’t have the time or resources to worry about that.

  “And don’t even think about going to the pool,” she said. “We’re supposed to be under a tornado watch all day.” She threw her keys in her purse and her purse over her shoulder. “Remember, if you hear the siren, you know what to do.”

  Yes, we told her. Go downstairs to our building’s bottom level, where the washers and dryers lived. Crouch down and cover our heads until the siren is silent, the danger is gone. We had practiced this many times.

  “And just in case,” our mother said, “I’ve asked our neighbor to check in on you. So you better be here when she comes by. Got it?” We nodded. “Think of the neighbor as your guard,” our mother said. “And I’m the warden. I don’t want any pool activity in the guard’s report.”

  She kissed us on our cheeks, and a moment later we heard the van come to life, whine out of the parking lot, and sputter down Limit Street.

  “OK, she’s gone,” my brother said. “Time for the pool.”

  He disappeared from the kitchen and came back with two towels and my trunks. He was already wearing his.

  “What about the guard?” I said.

  “If you believe that, you really are as dumb as Rick says,” my brother said. “When’s the last time you saw Mom talk to anyone around here besides us?” He threw my trunks at my face. “She doesn’t know anybody. The only friends she’s got are at work, and who knows how much she even likes those people.” He paused, perhaps thinking about what we’d seen yesterday, the way our mother and Rick looked at each other. “Now go change.”

  * * *

  We locked the door on the way out and my brother put the key in his fanny pack. We didn’t keep the key under our doormat anymore because of the prison break. The mat was left over from our family life. It read, “Wipe Your Paws,” and there were dog prints on it.

  As we stepped out into the hallway so did a neighbor lady I’d never seen before. She had long greasy hair, and her body was drowned in baggy sweatpants and an oversized T-shirt. I looked away. Later, my brother said the mistake we made was we didn’t make eye contact. He said if you want to get away with something you have to act like the thing you’re doing is something you do every day.

  “Hey there,” the lady said. “What are you two up to?” She fished for a pack of cigarettes in her sweatpants and waited for our answer. On the hallway walls were poorly framed pictures of painted flowers. “Well? Do they speak?”

  “We were just going to wait outside,” my brother said, “for our mother.”

  The lady exhaled her smoke, a wispy cloud that reminded me of the tornado watch. “Well, here’s an idea. Wait inside.”

  She smiled at her response. We couldn’t think of anything smart to say back
, and the lady didn’t wait for us to say OK or sorry. She snuffed out her cigarette in a Coke can cut in half, and went into her apartment. My brother pushed me back inside. We leaned against the door and slid down on our butts. I asked my brother what do we do now.

  “We’re trapped,” he said. “We wait.”

  * * *

  We spent the rest of the morning prisoners of the smoking lady. My brother took turns bad-mouthing her, our mom. That’s the lady she gets to watch us? Gross. We thought of different ways we, or some higher power, might rid us of the smoking lady. Next time our mother took us on a trip I would “accidentally” leave a toy at the top of the stairs by the smoking lady’s door, and then let’s see what happens. Or she would go into the hospital for a typical physical and find out she had cancer all around her lungs and bones. That was how our mom’s dad died.

  While my brother made a list of all the ways the smoking lady could die, I started cleaning the apartment. The first thing I had to do was pick up all our toys. There were fighting men everywhere, all left behind by my brother, all players in his never-ending plots. I had wanted to pick up many of these toys before, but knew if I did, my brother would yell at me. That guy needs to be there, he would say. No, don’t move him. You’ll ruin the ending.

  Once all the men were put away in our room, I wiped everything down. I dusted the bookcase with the encyclopedias, not peeking in the book with the naked lady, the one who looked like my mother. I moved quickly to the TV, writing my name in the dust blanketing the screen, before wiping it all away. When I was done, I reported to my brother, who was up now, doing push-ups in his room. He told me great, good job; now do the floors.

  We didn’t have a vacuum, not anymore. Before we moved into the apartment, our parents sat down in our old house’s empty living room and divided their things. My brother and I were supposed to be outside playing, but we’d gotten too hot and come in early, plopping ourselves tiredly on the floor. After little discussion, it was decided that my mother, the cleaner of the two, would keep the vacuum, and my dad would get the grill. Other items—the microwave, the record player, the VCR—were not as easily agreed upon. But they never really fought over anything either, like I imagined my brother and I would have if we had to split up the Christmas gifts addressed to both of us. In the end, my mother sat comfortably next to her pile of stuff, and my dad his, while my brother and I sat strangely in the middle, under the cool of the ceiling fan, unsure what pile our things belonged to.

  But that vacuum had broken, had gotten clogged with too much dog hair. Now all we had was the carpet sweeper my mother borrowed from work. There wasn’t any fur to worry about anymore, but there were a few roaches. Dead and alive alike. I found one under the couch, another behind the end table, and two in the box fan. I piled the dead on a paper towel and threw them away. The two live ones I kept in an old, lidless coffee can, which already had a roach in it to begin with.

  I took the can to our room and asked my brother what should I do with it. He was on the floor resting from his routine, and it would have been easy to simply turn the coffee can over and watch the roaches fall on his face, dart in all directions over his squirming body.

  My brother peered into the can. “Jesus,” he said, and put his hand over his mouth. “Get that thing away from me.”

  “What do I do with them?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, backing farther and farther away. “Take them outside or something…” My brother’s words trailed off and his face suddenly changed. He had an idea. I could tell by the way his eyes shifted upward, moved far away, and his eyebrows curled into thinking mode. When it came to my brother’s faces, I thought of myself as something of an expert.

  “Quick,” he said. “Grab your trunks.”

  “I’m wearing them.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  “What about the neighbor?”

  “It’s fine,” my brother said. He pointed at the coffee can. “Now we have a reason.”

  * * *

  My brother made me cover up the can with my pool towel. When we left the apartment this time, the smoking lady wasn’t waiting, though the hallway still smelled like smoke. I told my brother I didn’t think we should be gone long, in case she came back. He agreed. He just wanted to check something.

  First, we released the roaches into the woods and watched them stumble around, confused by their new surroundings.

  “I’m starting to hate this place,” my brother said. “Gross roaches.”

  On our way back in we saw someone by the pool’s front gate. It was Chris. He was lounging in a desk chair, wearing a T-shirt with the sleeves torn off, so we could see his armpit hair dangle like a sweaty vine. The chair he sat in had wheels, and to stop from rolling away Chris had tied a neon rope from an arm of the chair to a chink in the fence.

  “Uh-oh,” Chris said. “Here comes trouble.”

  I turned around expecting to see someone bad behind us, but saw no one. When I faced front, my brother and Chris were shaking hands, sharing a smile. The two talked about the weather, how clear the sky was, how it was the perfect day for the pool. Chris said he wished every day was like this, that they would last forever. Wouldn’t that be great? he said. Just the two of us, catching some rays and hanging by the water? My brother agreed. That would be the best. Both of them seemed to forget that I was there.

  A woman walked by with a dog and a kid. She was wearing cut-off shorts and a loose tank top. I didn’t remember seeing her around the complex before, but the kid was too young to be a friend, so maybe I just never noticed. He ran around in circles, holding a fat piece of pink chalk. I wanted it.

  “Hey, I’ve got a question for you two,” Chris said.

  The woman stopped. “I’m sorry?” she said.

  Chris sat up straighter. “Oh, not you, ma’am. I was talking to these two gentlemen. But don’t worry, I’ll let you know if I want your ear.”

  He pushed his sunglasses back up, and the woman smiled with her eyes down. She returned to pretending her kid was very interesting. The two walked a few steps until the kid crouched down to draw on the sidewalk, a large shape that didn’t make any sense to me. The woman waited. Chris folded his arms behind his head and stared at the woman, watching her kid make art. He leaned over to my brother and spoke quietly.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  “About what?”

  “The kid. Should we recruit him? Think he’s old enough to learn you know what?”

  My brother shook his head, returned Chris’s hushed voice. Too young. Practically a baby. Babies can’t swim.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Chris said. “He looks like a bit of a mama’s boy. Probably a blabbermouth, too.”

  The kid finished shading in his odd shape and stood up proud. Chris’s eyes followed them until they disappeared around a building. My brother and I stood there waiting for Chris to come up from his thoughts.

  “Chris,” my brother said.

  “Yes.”

  “Can we go in the pool now?”

  “Hmm,” Chris said. “Oh, sorry, of course we can. Just had to wait until that lady left. Never know who she might know.” He stood up and pulled off his shirt. His body looked tanner than last time, and there were mosquito bites where there weren’t bites before, nestled into the blond hair below his belly button. The hair that ran into his shorts.

  “Hey,” Chris said. He had caught me looking at his hair. He put his hand under my chin and lifted my head until my eyes met his. I thought he was going to be mad, but all he did was smile. “Remember,” he said, “we don’t want any word getting out about this, do we? About the Gainer?”

  I shook my head, but Chris didn’t let me go.

  “No,” my brother said. “That’s how you ruin a secret.”

  * * *

  The water looked warm in the June sun. But before I could swim, my brother and Chris said I had to run inside and grab them popsicle strips. My brother didn’t care what color, but Chris
wanted a blue. When he finished his strip, Chris leaned over and without warning licked my brother on the face, leaving a long streak of blue across his cheek. My brother looked at Chris with shock.

  “Gross,” he said, and wiped off Chris’s spit with the back of his hand. He stood up and backed away. “What was that for?”

  “That was for your own good,” Chris said, and laughed a little. “For your protection.” He drank the rest of his strip and gargled the blue like mouthwash, swishing it around with fat cheeks before swallowing. “Did you know,” he said, “that a giraffe’s tongue is completely blue? Top to bottom.” My brother asked a quiet why, his hand still touching his sticky face. “Well, they’re out in the sun every day, aren’t they? Licking leaves off trees and stuff, their tongues just hanging out. The blue prevents them from getting burned. It’s like their sunscreen.”

  Chris stuck out his tongue, which was coated a deep blue, darker than the pool, and extended farther than any tongue I’d seen before. I bet he could lick his own nose if he wanted, but instead he pretended he was stripping an invisible tree of its leaves, taking each leaf into his mouth and saying yum after.

  My brother dipped his hand in the water and wiped off the rest of his face. “Giraffes don’t do that,” he said. “That’s not true.”

  “Oh, it’s not?” Chris said. “You don’t think so?” He stood up and started toward my brother. “You know, your face is starting to look a bit pink, big man. I think you could use another coat!” He grabbed my brother and my brother squirmed, but only half trying to get away, his face open with laughter as Chris tickled his ribs and wagged his long blue tongue next to my brother’s ear. Don’t fight it, Chris kept saying. It’s for your own good!

  “All right, all right,” Chris finally said. “Enough of that. No more messing around. We’re here for serious business, right?” My brother dunked his head to get rid of the Chris spit. “Well, are we?”

  “Yes,” my brother said.

  “That’s right, the Gainer isn’t some silly game. It’s the real deal, so let’s get ready.”