Half Brother (18 page)

“Knock it off, Mike,” I said.

“I’m just playing with him,” Mike said. And he picked up another stick.

Zan hooted excitedly.

I lifted Zan into my arms and started carrying him back to the house.

“See you, Tim,” I said.

I was halfway across the yard when I saw a rock skitter across the grass near my feet. Then one hit me in the back. I whirled around. Mike was standing there, whipping rocks through the fence at me.

“Don’t be a goof, Mike,” Tim was saying to him.

“I want to play with the killer chimp!” said Mike.

“Get lost, you idiot!” I said, and he threw another rock.

It hit Zan in the shoulder and he gave a shriek. On his fur was a tiny bead of blood. I’d never felt such fury. It had a sound and a colour and it tasted like blood in my mouth. I slid open the patio doors and got Zan safely inside. Then I ran for the gate in the fence, flung it open, and bolted towards Mike, shouting at him.

“Hey,” he said, kind of smirking, “hey, bad shot, okay?”

He was way more solid than me, but I had a lot of momentum and I put my hands up and shoved him hard, sending him staggering backwards.

“If. You. Ever. Hurt. Him. Again—you’re
dead!”
I shouted.

Then he hit me in the face and I was punching him back, but it seemed like I was mostly just getting clobbered. I didn’t care. I was so mad, it felt good just to be lashing out at Mike and hurting him as best I could. Dimly I was aware of Tim telling Mike to stop, and saw him trying to push Mike away. But Mike just kept at it, his scary, calm eyes fixed on me. We were both down on the ground now, kicking and punching—and suddenly I was pulled up and Dad was there.

“Stop it!” he shouted.

Mike scrambled up, and the look on his face was so scary I thought he was going to have a go at Dad. Then he just turned and started walking away.

“If I see you boys here again, I’ll call the police,” Dad told them. “Your parents’ll be hearing from me.”

“Tim didn’t do anything,” I panted, wiping blood from my nose. I was only now starting to realize where I’d been hit. My face and chest really hurt.

“Come on inside,” Dad said to me, taking me by the arm.

He’d stopped the fight, saved me from getting totally pulverized, but the weird thing was, I barely felt grateful.

It was pretty great showing up at school on Monday with a big bruise on my face.

“Oh my God!” Jennifer exclaimed when she saw me in homeroom. “What happened to you?”

I shrugged nonchalantly. “Got in a fight,” and told her
the story, which I’d carefully written down and revised many times in my logbook.

Shannon, and even Jane, looked genuinely shocked.

“That guy’s a psycho,” said Shannon. “Does it still hurt, your face?”

Jane said sarcastically, “Yeah, Shannon, I think it probably hurts.”

“It’s not so bad,” I said to Shannon with a smile. “I’m just glad Zan wasn’t hurt any worse.”

“Poor you,” said Jennifer, and she touched my cheek gently.

It was a very good day. I felt my status as dominant male couldn’t get much higher. I was a fighter. Project Jennifer was in excellent shape. If there was a grant I could apply for, I was pretty sure I’d nail it.

When I got home from school, I went to the kitchen for a drink. In the backyard, Peter saw me and hurried inside, leaving Zan with the other student. He was grinning ear to ear.

“Take a look,” he said, leading me into Zan’s suite.

I walked into the playroom.

The learning chair was gone.

“Hey!” I exclaimed. “All right! What happened?”

Maybe I’d been too hard on Dad. Or maybe Mom had convinced him the chair had to go.

Peter grinned. “Your dad decided it was counterproductive.”

I snorted.
Counterproductive.
That was so like Dad.

“He was right,” said Peter. “Zan’s daily signing was way down. His behaviour was terrible. Also, I told your dad I’d quit if he didn’t get rid of it.”

“Wow! Did you really?”

Peter nodded. “Yup. I told him I just couldn’t keep going with the project. I said I’d be leaving at the end of the week. I don’t know if it made any difference.”

“I bet it did,” I said. “You’re the best with Zan. He wouldn’t want to lose you.”

“Well, he already lost Ryan, so maybe he was worried about someone else taking off. Anyway, the main thing is, that freaking chair’s gone!”

“Thanks, Peter,” I said, and then frowned. “Would you really have quit?”

He shook his head. “No way. And not because of the money,” he added quickly. “Not entirely, anyway.”

“So why?”

“I just think Zan needs as many allies as possible. People who care about him—as more than just a specimen.”

T
here was no way we would’ve been invited to the party if it weren’t for David’s brother, Cal. He was on the 1
^st
XV rugby team, and they’d just won the Howard Rees Cup this afternoon, which was a huge deal. The school always won. The main hall was filled with trophies. I think they might have lost once, back in the 1950s, but only because three of their best players had polio or something.

It was Saturday night, second week of June, and there was a bonfire going on the beach, and lots of beer, and people with painted faces bellowing rugby chants and jumping into the lake. Most of the kids were seniors, so I hardly knew anyone. I was sitting on the sand with Jennifer, Jane, and Shannon.

“I think we’re the only grade eights here,” I said.

“It’s pretty cool,” said Jennifer. “This is, like,
the
party of the year.”

“Some beverages?” said David and Hugh, grinning. Dripping bottles of beer dangled from their fingers.

“My parents made me promise I wouldn’t,” said Shannon.

“Mine too,” said Jane, and took a beer.

“I’ll share yours,” Jennifer said to me, when I took one.

Beer was disgusting, even worse than wine, but David and Hugh were drinking it, so I figured I had to, also.

The shadows got deeper and more jagged. Kelly Browne appeared suddenly from the darkness and then she and Hugh disappeared together, hand in hand.

“She’s like a vampire,” said Jane. “It’s like she wants to suck out every last ounce of his blood.”

“Ugh,” said Jennifer.

Then, a few minutes later, Shannon said she needed to go to the bathroom, grabbed Jane and Jennifer by the hand, and they all went off together.

“We won’t be seeing them for several hours,” said David, slouched against a tree. “So, Tarzan. Good year for you?”

One of the best things about private school was that it finished earlier than public school. Classes had ended yesterday. Next week was exams, then it was summer.

“Great year,” I said. “As long as I don’t flunk finals.”

He snorted. “You’ll be fine. But how’re you going to cope this summer without us?”

I laughed. “What do you mean?”

“The entire Godwin family is going to Europe, my friend.” “Are you serious? How long for?”

He held up all five fingers of his free hand, then put down his beer and held up his thumb. “Six weeks?” I exclaimed. “Yep. They’re calling it the trip of a lifetime.”

“Are you seeing every country or something?”

“One every two days, I think, yeah.”

I took a big gulp of beer. In my Project Jennifer logbook, I’d already written down a list of all the fun things we could do this summer. And I had a whole schedule drawn up of how I was going to get to second base with her. Third base wasn’t even under consideration yet. I thought it was important to set reasonable goals.

“So you get back when?” I asked.

“Early August.”

“Oh man!” I said.

“Yeah, I know.” He smirked. “Watching
The Flintstones
alone isn’t much fun.”

I looked at him, wondering how much he knew. Everything, probably.

“I need another beer,” he said, and ambled off.

I waited for him a while, and then felt like a goof sitting all alone. Empty beer bottle clutched in my hand, I wandered along the beach, looking for Jennifer. The bonfire had burned down and the only light came from the occasional blinding flare of car headlights up in the parking lot. I nearly tripped over a couple making out. I thought I caught a glimpse of Hugh and Kelly Browne all tangled up, groping furiously. A group of people with their faces painted blue ran past me, screaming, towards the water. I kept walking until there was no one around.

Six weeks in Europe. Jennifer hadn’t mentioned anything. Maybe she’d just found out.

“Ben?” said someone, walking towards me.

I squinted. It was Shannon. “Hey,” I said.

“Oh, thank God!” She actually grabbed me and leaned her head against my shoulder. “I thought I was lost. The bathroom is a million miles away.”

“Where’re the others?”

“They took off. Jane said she saw a black widow outside.”

“Hilarious.” I could see Jane doing something like that.

As we kept walking, I realized this was the first time I’d ever talked to Shannon alone. She hardly ever talked when she was around Jane and Jennifer. Maybe Shannon was afraid of being mocked too.

“I hope I get to meet Zan one day,” she said.

I looked at her and smiled. “Yeah, he’s great. He’s turning one next week.”

“It must be amazing, what you guys are doing.”

“It’s pretty neat, yeah.”

“This sounds stupid, but I loved those Curious George books when I was little—you know those books?” “Sure. I loved them too.”

“I thought having a monkey as a pet would be the best thing in the world. I mean, I know Zan isn’t a monkey. Is he as naughty as George?”

“Much naughtier sometimes.” I laughed. I always liked talking about Zan, so I told her a bit about him as we headed back towards the party.

Jane and Jennifer were there at our old spot with David. Hugh had returned with Kelly, both of them looking pretty rumpled.

“You guys are
such
good friends,” Shannon said sarcastically to Jane and Jennifer.

“She said there was a black widow spider!” Jennifer protested. “Someone got bitten last month—didn’t you hear about that?”

Jane snickered into her beer bottle.

I sat down beside Jennifer, and waited until the others were talking about something. I leaned in closer. “I can’t believe you’re going away,” I whispered.

“Dad kind of sprang it on us,” she said.

“Six weeks!” I said.

She looked at me gravely. “Yes. But I will return, Tarzan, I promise.”

And she kissed me in front of everyone.

On June twentieth we celebrated Zan’s first birthday in the backyard. Peter was there, and lots of the other students. I’d wanted to invite David and Jennifer—it was my last chance to see them before they left for Europe—but Dad said it should just be people Zan was very familiar with; he didn’t want Zan to get overexcited. As it was, he was pretty darn excited.

I didn’t know if he understood what was going on, but he wolfed down three huge pieces of Mom’s banana cake, had more glasses of ginger ale than was good for him, and ripped the wrapping paper off his presents with lots of hoots and shrieks.

Mom and Dad got him a new ball, and I got him another birdfeeder that we could hang up in the backyard to attract
even more birds.
(Listen bird,
he signed to me when he opened the box.)

Peter got him a pair of his own sneakers, because Zan was fascinated by people’s shoes and was always pulling them off and trying them on himself.

Dad invited the local paper, and they sent a photographer to take some pictures of Zan surrounded by all of us, singing “Happy Birthday to You” before we cut the cake. Dad figured it might undo some of the bad publicity we got after the biting incident.
See, he’s adorable and no one lost a finger!

My own birthday, ten days later, was pretty good too—much better than last year’s. This time we actually made it to Beaver Lake, leaving Zan at home with Peter. I really liked it just being the three of us. When Zan was around, all eyes, including my own, were on him. He was the star of the family, the celebrity. I wondered if I was still a bit jealous of him sometimes.

But it was strange being without him. When he was little, we’d sometimes taken him with us shopping and even to restaurants, but now that he was so active, we couldn’t take him out in public. He wasn’t used to cars or big crowds. He might get freaked out and bite someone or—and this was scariest to me—he might run off into the forest and decide he didn’t want to live with us any more. Dad had once said that if we ever took him out in public we’d have to put him in a collar and leash, but I’d hate to see that—even if it was for his own safety.

I stretched out on my beach towel. School was all over now. My final marks weren’t the greatest, but I’d improved a bit,
and that seemed enough to satisfy Dad. He wasn’t going to pull me out of Windermere. I closed my eyes and thought of Jennifer, somewhere in Europe. I thought of smoothing suntan lotion on her perfect back.

When we got home, Mom and Dad gave me a great new photo enlarger as my main present. And in the evening, instead of going out to a restaurant, we just ordered in Chinese food, because that way, Zan could be with us. It wouldn’t have felt right without him.

Just knowing Jennifer was on the other side of the world made everything feel less like summer.

I thought about her all the time, wrote about her in my bulging logbook, and re-read the old bits. It wasn’t only notes and observations. It was also a diary. Our after school make-out session took up about ten pages—I hadn’t wanted to leave anything out. Sometimes I just described how I felt about her. Or I’d imagine things we might say to each other, and do together. I wouldn’t say it ever got dirty exactly, but there was some pretty personal stuff in there.

The only picture I had of her was our class photo. But in my head she got more fabulous and luscious with every day, until she was so overwhelmingly beautiful, I could barely stand it.

So I wouldn’t go crazy with boredom, Mom and Dad signed me up for these summer day camps at the university. I wasn’t wild about them, but Mom said she wasn’t having
me loafing around the house all July. So I’d go in with Dad in the mornings, and while he worked in his office, I swam and did team-building stuff and made tie-dyed T-shirts with a bunch of other thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds. Probably I should’ve seen it as an opportunity to make some friends and meet cute girls. But there was only one girl I was interested in.