by Miguel Linan
“Bert’s mom got him the slim version,” Bobby says to our mother over a bowl of soggy Frosted Flakes—well, the off-brand kind, at least. It doesn’t taste as good as the brand name because it doesn’t have enough sugar. “He got Kingdom Hearts II and Ultimate Spider-Man for it,” he continues, “and he told me his parents said I can come over for dinner and watch him play.”
From the kitchen comes a reply barely audible over the sound of frozen meat cracking out of place. “Which one is Bert again? That’s the chubby one, right? From the orange house?”
“Yeah,” Bobby answers through a mouthful of milk and corn mush, his feet swinging under the table and his eyes fixed on the water stain on the ceiling. He’s wearing a ratty shirt that I grew out of years ago, the one I bought from the knock-off store on Chesney Ave. “Ant can take me to their house.”
“Hey, man, what I say about volunteering me to take you places?” I snap at him from the couch, sounding like a bark more than a response. He’s been incredibly irritating lately, always trying to follow me out of the house and get into my business. He makes it hard to breathe, to move. He’s been snitching on me, too—last week, he told mom I didn’t pick him up from his friend’s house and he had to walk home by himself after dark. I almost hit him in front of her. It wasn’t my damn fault, anyway—I did come to pick him up, but he wanted to stay an extra ten minutes to finish a Samurai Jack episode. I told him if he picked his ass up and walked home during the commercials, he wouldn’t miss anything, but he wouldn’t listen and just went back to playing with his friend like I wasn’t putting my plans on hold for him. I just told him to get home soon as the show ended because I had to be somewhere, but he just brushed me off like he didn’t care. So, I went to where I was going—doesn’t matter where—and left him there. Hell, he knows how to get home. He’s got a neck that can turn left and right—he doesn’t need me to hold his hand crossing the street. But mom wants him to be safe or whatever, so I have to take him places. When I was his age, I was doing groceries and picking him up from school. Anyway, he told her I just never came to get him, and she chewed me the hell out, so when she left for work, I smacked the back of his head. I only meant to scare him off from doing it again, but he started crying and swung back at me and I ended up slamming him into a wall again. I felt pretty bad about that, but he was asking for it. He knows not to test me.
“Come on, man,” Bobby says to me from across the room. I can hear the faucet turn on in the kitchen. “You got nothing better to do.”
“Shut up, Bobby.”
“Anthony,” my mom calls out from the kitchen. I can tell from her voice that she’s on his side because there’s no point in mixing things up every so often. “What did I say about telling people to shut up?” She peers out of the kitchen at me, her hair tied up with loose strands stuck by sweat to her forehead. It’s weird how I’m taller than her now.
“Ma, he doesn’t need to be there anyway.” I walk to her in the kitchen, my bare feet padding heavy on the bare concrete floor. “What’s he going to do? He’s just going to somebody’s house and sitting there watching somebody else playing a game. I don’t want to take him there just so he can look like he’s begging for scraps ‘cause we can’t buy one.”
Behind me, I hear Bobby’s spoon clink against the ceramic of his cereal bowl. I half-expect his protest, but it doesn’t ring. My mother cuts the faucet off, and I hear nothing but my own breath. She looks up at me and she has this look on her face. I see the lines of worry so clearly. I pretend I wasn’t the one who put them on her skin. Her eyes are sad and tired, and they tell me that she’s sorry. They tell me she’s embarrassed.
“Sige na, anak,” she says to me. Please, son. “Just take your brother. Ako na lang ang susundo sa kanya para maka-gala ka.” I’ll just pick him up so you can go do your own thing.
I close my eyes and palm the back of my head, squeezing my scalp with my fingertips. Mom asked me to stop shaving my head—she says I’ll go bald early if I keep doing it, but I like how I look with it. I think it says I take no shit from nobody. I turn to Bobby and he’s looking at me expectantly—he looks more like him than I do. I sigh out, “Okay, Ma. I’ll take him,” and I kiss the top of her head.
“Thanks, Ant!”
“Shut up and put your shoes on.”
-----
“So, this kid’s pretty much a saint to you, then?”
The way to this kid’s house has no sidewalks, so me and Bobby have to slog through the fresh mud of people’s lawns to get there. The street itself is cracked and unpainted with potholes varying in depth filled with fresh rainwater, gray with dirt. We took longer leaving than we should have but my mother insisted that we both dress nicely to go visit people’s houses even though I’m not staying—she said she doesn’t want people to look down on us and think we’re not being taken care of.
“Yeah, Bert’s nice to me,” Bobby answers. “He lets me play with his stuff.” He’s to my right, holding my hand because he doesn’t pay any attention to what’s happening around him. Because there aren’t any sidewalks, we have to walk on the very edge of the street. Some people’s bushes reach all the way out to where we are, and their branches are scratching Bobby’s arm. I do my best to warn him and steer him away from the branches, but cars are speeding past us and we’ve not much room to move. Underneath our feet, the ground squelches and oozes out thin sludge.
I look back at him. “You sure he’s a nice guy?”
“Yeah? Why?”
“Because last time you came home, you had a knot on the side of your head and a bruise on your shoulder.” I look back at him and his head hangs so low that I can see his bones sticking out the back of his neck. For a couple paces, his hand feels like a goad in mine and he can only move by my dragging. “You thought we didn’t notice, did you?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Bob?”
“It’s a deal we made. I can play if I beat him at wrestling.”
My face flushes with heat and a lump grows in my throat. My head snaps towards him faster than I know it’s turning. I stutter words like gunfire, “Bobby, that kid’s twice as big as you. What the hell do you mean you wrestle him to play his game? That’s insane, it isn’t worth that shit.”
He tries to yank his arm out of my grip. I don’t budge. “Don’t test me, Bob. I will bring you home. Don’t try me, boy,” I tell him sternly. He relents, but I see him clenching his other fist in anger. I don’t call him out on it.
We get to the kid’s house and I let Bobby’s arm go. There’s a mark where my hand was. I didn’t mean to leave one, but he made me—he knows better than to act a fool on this street with all these cars zooming past. Bobby doesn’t look back at me and just opens the gate and walks up to the front door. I want to follow him in there and kick this kid in the teeth for putting hands on Bobby, but oddly enough, I want to smack Bobby even more. It’s so stupid, getting his ass kicked to play on someone’s damn TV. If it were up to me, I’d jump in that kid’s window and kick his ribs in—he’s a big boy, he’ll heal—but Bobby’s got to grow a spine at some point.
“Mom’s picking you up,” I call after him. “Call the house phone when you want to go home. I’m not going to be around,” I remind Bobby as climbs the porch and walks inside the house. Bobby stops and turns back at me, the vast ocean of a front lawn between us. He asks me where I’m going but it sounds like an accusation.
“Mind your damn business, boy,” I tell him with a snarl. He frowns and heads inside. I watch him close the door behind him, listening for the click of the lock but hearing none. My brother disappears into this house out of wanting. It makes me feel like backpedaling until I’m in the middle of the street, free to be snatched by a car by the spine to be folded and bent in ways I wasn’t meant to, if only to give my mother a different reason to weep than her usual.
I turn to leave and look for open windows.
-----
The key turns in the latch and I open our apartment door. To let as little light in from outside as possible, I shinny myself in, almost dropping what I’m carrying. It’s impossible to see in the pitch black of our living room, but the glow-in-the-dark clock I bought to hang right next to the door tells me it’s one in the morning, which means it’s really three o’clock; I always set this clock two hours behind before I leave at night, so if my mother ever catches me coming home this late she’ll see the clock next to the door and think I’m two hours earlier than I actually am. I take my shoes off at the door, careful not to wake her up. She gets so worried when I come home this late.
I stop off at the TV and do what I need to do before I make my way to the room that Bobby and I share. I creak our door open as silently as I could, and I see his covers rising up and down with his breath. Creeping, I go to him and nudge him awake.
“Bob,” I say as I rock his body gently with my foot, “wake up and go to the living room. Hurry up. I’m not going to ask you twice.” I leave for the den, shaking off the pain in my feet from running.
After a while, he appears in the hallway, wearing my old shirt from earlier this morning. He’s rubbing his eye with an ashy knuckle, and he looks pissed off that I woke him up. In the faint blue light of the television screen, I can swear we’d pass for twins, if twins could come years apart. Hell, maybe we are twins, and I was just born earlier so I can scout the world ahead and let him have his innocence.
“Sit down, Bob.” I pat the floor next to me, as if to acknowledge a temporary truce between us. A cold spot on the floor, our very own Switzerland.
“Ant?”
“What?”
He’s just standing in the doorway, the blue light from the menu screen painting him to look like a nursery rhyme. He looks ridiculous in that hand-me-down—the one with the torn collar, two sizes too big for him from being worn out—and he’s looking at me like he knows what I did.
“Where’d you get the PlayStation?”
I shake my head. “You wanted one, didn’t you?”
“Well, yeah, but where’d it come from?”
Annoyed, I snap, “Does it matter?”
He walks to me, and I can hear the moisture of his soft feet padding on the smooth concrete floor. He sits down and grabs the second controller and hits the analog button, and just for a moment, his hands are lit in red. I hope they never become as red as mine.
“I guess not,” he says. His syllables drip doubt as they hang in the air between us.
“Yeah,” I say with a sigh. “It doesn’t.”