The Things a Brother Knows Read online

“What people like us?” Boaz asked.

  “People who have other opportunities. Who get into Ivy League schools. Who believe in … peace and diplomacy over bullying.”

  “No, Boaz,” Mom said. “No, honey. You aren’t thinking clearly. No.” Mom’s last no was tiny. Like she already knew she’d lost.

  Abba and Dov said little that night. It was pretty clear where they both stood. Joining up for a war without a clear mission, when it wasn’t part of the price of citizenship in the country we all called home, wasn’t a choice either of them would have made themselves. And they said this later, each in his own way.

  But they didn’t fight him the way Mom or Christina did, and I’m not sure Mom has ever been able to forgive Abba for that.

  Boaz started to get angry. “This was obviously not an easy decision, but it’s the right one, and it would be nice to know that I’ve got the support of my family.” He looked at Christina. “And my girlfriend.”

  “But Boaz. Why?” Christina asked. “Why throw away everything you’ve worked toward?”

  “Because I can, I’m able, and I’ll be good at it. And if I don’t go somebody else will. And because I’m not throwing anything away. I’m doing what’s right.”

  I’d been thinking about him leaving for college. Preparing for it. Wondering what that would mean for me. When you’re fourteen, like when you’re ten or five or two, you tend to see the world in terms of what everything means for you. But I’d only imagined him going to Boston. Or New York. Maybe all the way to northern California.

  Not some far-off desert country where he could go and get himself killed.

  There were so many things I couldn’t wrap my head around.

  What would lead somebody like Boaz to give up so much? He had everything, not the least of which was a girl I’d commit a crime for if I thought it might make her glance in my direction.

  That night, I was pretty sure he was ready to let her go. But even though Christina was angry, she stuck with him, and they graduated high school as boyfriend and girlfriend, the perfect couple. Whatever happened later, like most of what happened between them, remains a mystery to me.

  Nobody bothered to ask what I thought, but I spoke up. My voice was starting to change, and I always cleared my throat before saying anything, not wanting to leave the squeaking to chance.

  “Don’t do this,” I said.

  It wasn’t so much that I had an opinion about the war, or even any understanding of what Boaz was signing up for. It was more that I couldn’t comprehend a distance so far, a change so big, and I was already feeling the change start to happen right then, right there. That night.

  “Is he all right?” Christina asks me now.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Because I don’t know if you read the paper, but there are all sorts of horror stories about the way they come home. All these advances we’ve made in battlefield triage. We keep saving these soldiers with lost limbs or worse, but then we don’t know how to take care of them once we get them home.”

  “No, he’s fine. I mean, he hasn’t got a scratch on him.”

  She takes this in. I can see her relief. Then she says, “There’s all different sorts of hurt, Levi.”

  She gives my hand a squeeze and stands up. She kisses the top of my head. “If it seems like a good idea, please tell your brother I stopped by.”

  She turns to leave.

  “Christina.”

  “Yes?”

  All I know is that I don’t want her to walk away for good.

  “Keep trying, will you?”

  “Always.”

  Boaz had left her before. For one whole summer, after their junior year in high school. He went to live on Abba’s kibbutz in Israel. I went to sleepaway camp. Like Boaz, I’d gone at Abba’s insistence, but the only people I left behind were Pearl and Zim, and hard as that might have been for me, you just can’t compare Pearl and Zim to Christina.

  Boaz didn’t want to go, Christina didn’t want him to go, but Abba was hell-bent.

  “You should know a different way of life,” he’d barked.

  When I was little, Abba’s accent mortified me. Kids around me had trouble understanding what he was saying. They’d look at him funny, with cocked heads and wrinkled noses. And sometimes, they’d laugh at my father. In front of me.

  It was more than Abba’s accent that shamed me, really, it was the way he sounded sometimes, like he had no soft space inside him. Everything short and sharp. Adjectives were not his friends. Talking to Abba, no matter what the subject, I always had the vague feeling I was getting accused of something.

  Abba had become an American in so many ways. He’d married an American woman he met one summer when she was visiting Israel with some college friends. They’d moved together to Boston. Started a family. Raised American sons.

  He’d grown comfortable with the easy way in which things came to you in America. But still, every time he opened his mouth, he was the foreigner.

  Boaz argued, “But Abba, you left the kibbutz. You didn’t want to live there anymore. Why make me go?”

  “Because,” Abba said, putting a stress on each word like Boaz didn’t have the smarts to understand a simple sentence. “You. Should. Know. A. Different. Way. Of. Life.”

  They went around and around like that for weeks.

  We’d been to Israel twice already, in the psychotic heat of summer. We took the obligatory outings to the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall. We hiked to the top of Masada and floated in the Dead Sea. But mostly we stayed in a little apartment, drinking lemonade that tasted strange, playing cards with Mom while Abba caught up with old friends in Hebrew.

  A different sort of Abba took over on those visits. He bear-hugged men twice his size. Filled the tiny rooms of our apartment with his laughter. He was breathless, suddenly, with more to say than there was time to say it.

  I figure Boaz must have been drawn to the adventure in the idea of spending his summer on Abba’s kibbutz, because if he really didn’t want to go, he would have found some way out of it. Boaz was like that even then. He had convictions you couldn’t talk him down from.

  Off he went. He loved it, and Abba was pleased. Boaz had gone and learned another way of life. He’d come back tan and lean, more serious, with a Hebrew vocabulary that far surpassed anything either of us ever picked up at Temple Beth Torah.

  But he also came back with something else.

  Some inkling in him of what he needed to do to become the person he wanted to be, what his responsibilities to the world might involve, and even though this was part of Abba’s plan, Boaz took it further than Abba ever imagined.

  “Christina Crowley?” Pearl is finishing my French fries.

  “Yep.”

  “You had serious wood for her the better part of your preadolescence!”

  Jesus. Was I that obvious?

  I’d never said anything to Pearl about Christina. But Pearl is like that. She knows most things, even if she doesn’t always come out and say so.

  We’re sitting in the coffee shop in between our two schools. Sometimes we meet up here, when neither of us feels much like being home. It’s a place I go only with Pearl, and the fact that I’ve never been here with Zim pleases her to no end.

  The waitress likes us—the Chinese girl in her schoolgirl uniform and her long-haired boyfriend who’s finally starting to grow out of his skinny boy body—and she never seems to mind that we aren’t big spenders.

  “Don’t look all guilt-stricken, Levi,” Pearl says. “It’s totally normal to lust after your brother’s girlfriend. It’s textbook, really. And when she’s got a pair like Christina Crowley, who could blame you?”

  I eat a French fry. It’s soggy and cold.

  “You know,” she says, popping another one in her mouth, “you really shouldn’t eat this crap. You need to take better care of your body.”

  That’s a laugh. I’m running the equivalent of a marathon a week. Pearl still smokes. And she’s ea
ting more than her share of my fries.

  “So did Boaz come out of his lair to see her?”

  I just look at her: What do you think?

  “Right. Of course not.” She stirs some fake sweetener into her coffee and sighs. We sit like that. In silence awhile, but not an uncomfortable silence like the kind at my dinner table. There’s no such thing as uncomfortable when it comes to Pearl.

  She leans in closer. “So what was it like to see Christina again?”

  I look at her, just like before.

  “Right,” she says, nodding her head, and then she walks me home, her arm linked through mine.

  When I hand in my chemistry take-home final, Mr. Hopper shakes my hand with meaning. He tries to catch my darting eyes. I brush the hair off my forehead. Try staring back.

  Maybe if I look him in the eye, I think, he’ll decide he doesn’t need to say anything. Maybe if I look him in the eye he’ll decide to bump up my grade.

  “He’s a hero, Levi,” Mr. Hopper finally says. “I hope you’re proud.”

  He doesn’t leave his fucking room, Mr. Hopper.

  “Of course I’m proud,” I say. “We all are.”

  This sort of thing keeps happening to me. And it’s not just the teachers.

  Sophie Olsen crashes our do-nut power breakfast in the courtyard before the first bell. Zim’s a bit of a scammer, and he’s taken to selling packages of do-nuts in the courtyard at a 100 percent markup, so when Sophie comes up I figure she needs a morning sugar rush.

  “Hi, fellas,” she says.

  Zim just stands there with do-nut-filled cheeks, like some sort of deranged chipmunk. He holds out a pack of do-nuts. She looks at it like he’s offering her someone’s severed hand.

  “Hi, Sophie,” I say.

  “How are things going?” she asks.

  “Okay, I guess.”

  She takes her hand and puts it on my forearm. “Really?”

  It’s funny the way a face as pretty as hers can take on the same exact look as the face of a pockmarked old man like Mr. Hopper.

  “Really.”

  “Okay, then.” She strokes my arm a little. “See you around.”

  Zim finally swallows his do-nut. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “What?”

  “She’s practically begging you to ask her out.”

  “I don’t think so.” And anyway, there’s seriously limber, silky-haired Rebecca Walsh, otherwise known as Dylan Fredricks’s girlfriend. There’s Christina Crowley.

  I don’t say this last part out loud. Zim would have a total conniption if he thought I was blowing off Sophie Olsen because of my obsession with two girls I’m as likely to date as I am to win the Pillsbury Bake-Off.

  Anyway, if not a date with Sophie Olsen, I am hoping this bizarre attention might help me get the job at Videorama. Everyone wants the job at Videorama. I’m not used to getting whatever it is everyone else wants, but I figure if I ever had the chance, now is it.

  Problem is, Zim wants it too. I don’t feel so bad about using my status as Brother of Returning Soldier to bump another worthy soul out of line, unless that worthy soul is one of my two best friends.

  Bob, the store manager, used to rent movies to Boaz and Christina. They’d bring home three, sometimes four DVDs and spend their Saturday nights under blankets on the couch.

  “When’s your brother going to stop by?” he asked when I went to drop off my application.

  “I don’t know. Sometime soon.”

  “Well, you tell him this from me, you hear: Bob at Videorama says he’s a hero.”

  “Sure thing, Bob.”

  He slid my application to the top of his stack.

  So, I’m thinking about all this after leaving Zim in the courtyard—the new ways people are looking at and talking to me—when I pass Eddie Taylor in the hall.

  We were pretty decent friends in elementary school and I’ve forgotten why that isn’t the case anymore. Probably there’s no reason other than that this kind of thing happens when you’re younger. One day you’re friends with someone and the next day you’re not. It’s kind of a bitch, but what can you do? Anyway, Eddie’s an okay guy. He’s smart. And perpetually good-natured, which I figure we’d all be if we smoked as much dope as Eddie.

  He’s all student activisty. You know the type: bumper stickers on his car, buttons on his jacket and political slogans on his worn-out T-shirts. He spearheaded the antiwar rally held on a Saturday afternoon last fall that drew more students than when the varsity soccer team played the finals.

  “Hey.” He wheels around. We were just about to pass each other without saying a word, which we do every day. “Nice shirt,” he says.

  I look down at my chest. I’m wearing a T-shirt with a picture of John Lennon in round-framed sunglasses. “Thanks, man.”

  Eddie continues moving toward his first class, then flips back around again. “Listen, I’m really glad your brother made it home safe.”

  This time it catches me totally off guard.

  On the one hand, I want to say something about how just because my brother chose to enter this war doesn’t mean I’m for it, and that if the circumstances of my life were different, I might have shown up at the antiwar rally last fall.

  I want to say that.

  But I also want to say something about this protest Eddie organized. Something about people who sit around all day getting high, and then have the nerve to complain about the people who put their own lives at risk every time they swing their feet out of bed and drop them on the floor.

  I want to say both of these things, and I’d settle for either, but I say, “Thanks, Eddie.” And I continue down the path to first period.

  See, I never got any sort of a chance to make up my own mind about this war.

  I’ve just become a character, we all have, in a story we don’t get to write ourselves.

  Pearl stops by for a study session. I’ve got a Spanish final coming up. She’s got comparative religion. Pearl gets bored as soon as we crack our books, so she starts digging through my closet. She changes into an old pair of my jeans that fit her snugly.

  “Ooooh. Skinny jeans!” she says as she checks herself out in the mirror.

  We flee to the roof.

  Pearl is now officially dating the guy who sells popcorn at the movie theater. He’s her fifth boyfriend.

  Girlfriends I’ve had: zero.

  I haven’t even had the Maddie Green kind of non-girlfriend like Zim. I’ve had my share of drunken, fumbly, grabby party moments. But who hasn’t?

  “I think you’ll like Popcorn Guy,” Pearl says.

  “I doubt it.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right. He’s not really your type.”

  I pick up a broken piece of the roof’s slate tile and hurl it into the yard.

  Pearl lies back and closes her eyes to the sun.

  “Levi, what’s going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. With Boaz. And with everyone. It doesn’t seem like much has changed around here since he’s come back.”

  “That’s because he’s not really back. He just hangs out in his room and comes downstairs occasionally to eat. He’s the surly teenager he never was when he was a real teenager.”

  “What do you think he’s up to in there?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I hate to sound like an after-school special, but do you think maybe it’s drugs?”

  That question has crossed my mind. You hear about soldiers coming back so screwed up they turn into drug addicts. That idea is totally at odds with what I know about Boaz, but at this point, I can’t rule anything out.

  “Maybe he has an online girlfriend,” Pearl says. She stubs out her cigarette on the sole of her hot-pink Puma. “Or maybe he’s stuck in a bidding war on eBay.”

  There’s a knock at the door.

  “Come in,” I shout.

  I’m expecting Zim, or maybe Mom with a pile of laundry. When the door
opens there stands Boaz, looking like he’s gone and gotten himself lost.

  “Hey!” I scramble back in through my window.

  “Hi, Boaz!” It comes out like a squawk. Pearl can’t do peppy.

  “Hey, Pearl.”

  She starts shoving her books into her backpack.

  “Well, boys, I gotta run. Mama Goldblatt no likey when Pearl’s late for dinner.”

  She darts around Bo and turns to shoot me the call me or I’ll kill you look.

  “It’s broken,” Bo says.

  “What’s broken?”

  “My computer.”

  I think of pointing out that my days as a card-carrying member of the computer club are over. But still. Here’s my brother. Standing in my room. And he’s talking.

  I don’t want to ruin the moment.

  Plus there’s no denying I know a thing or two about computers. I’m just not sure what I can do about Boaz’s. It’s ancient. The same big, bulky desktop he used in high school. It’s a small miracle it’s held up this long.

  “Do you want me to come take a look?”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “Not at all.”

  I follow him down the hall to his room.

  This is it. My invitation into the den of darkness.

  It’s a colossal mess.

  I mean epic.

  A bare mattress off its frame lies on the floor with nothing but a tangled cloud sheet. Clothes, shoes, towels all over the floor. A couple of barbells, and papers everywhere. All the while the radio spits out static.

  Mom would have a coronary if he ever let her in here.

  I try my best to read all this as a good sign. Maybe he’s letting loose. Rebelling against the rigid life of a marine.

  And anyway, messiness is something I can understand.

  I make straight for the computer. I don’t want Boaz to think I’m inspecting or judging his room, even though that’s what I’m doing.

  His computer screen has gone pale gray, and in its center is a sad little face with Xs for eyes and a tongue sticking out an upside-down U of a mouth.

  The message indisputable: Game Over.

  I drum my fingers on the desk. “I’m afraid it’s your motherboard.”

  “What’s that?”