Half Brother Read online

  There were a bunch of other private schools at the dance, and it was crowded. I milled around trying to find people I knew, and it seemed to take ages before I finally spotted Jennifer, dancing with Hugh. It was a great song and she looked like she was having a really good time, and I wished it was me out there with her.

  I found David standing on the sidelines with Evan.

  “Tarzan, hey!” he said, waving me over.

  We talked a bit, but the music was so loud we were shouting into each other’s ears. His eyes kept darting all over the place. I smelled booze on his breath.

  “You tanked up, Tarzan?” he asked. “You imbibe some European cocktails with your très groovy parents?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t feel like I needed anything to drink. The music pulsed through me, up through the floor, the bass thumping in the centre of my chest like a bigger, better heart. I was in this fabulous cave of sound and shadow and light. I wanted to get out there on the dance floor.

  When ABBA’s “Waterloo” came on I started walking out towards Jennifer to ask her, but she didn’t see me, and kept dancing with Hugh. So I spotted Selena Grove, who was pretty cute, and asked her to dance. I caught Jennifer’s eye and she waved at me and beamed, which made me feel great.

  The song went fast, these big, bright, loud moments all jammed together. Dancing, sound swirling, shouting to be heard, arms pumping, light everywhere like confetti, the acrid smell of dry ice, a whiff of shampoo as a girl whirled past. And the music hurtling you through it all.

  After Selena, I danced with Jennifer a few times. I wondered if she’d had something to drink too, because she seemed more affectionate than usual, grabbing my arms and jumping up and down.

  Afterwards, she went back to Shannon and Jane and they all hugged each other. I hung out with them for a bit, but it was frustrating because it was really hard to hear, and mostly they seemed to be laughing at bad dancers or complaining about the square music the DJ was playing.

  I didn’t want to look like a barnacle on Jennifer, so I went off to get a drink and then danced with some other girls, and talked to some of the guys from my grade. On one side of the hall was a kind of observation gallery and I could see people up there in the near dark, making out. I wished I could take Jennifer’s hand and lead her up there too—but maybe not. Maybe that was more for professional making out, and I wouldn’t know what I was doing. It looked pretty intense.

  As I stood around in the shadows I ran into David again. I got the feeling he didn’t like dancing that much.

  “Where’s Hugh?” I shouted into his ear.

  He pointed at the observation gallery.

  “Up there?” I said, surprised. “Who with?”

  “Kelly Browne.”

  She was a grade nine girl. “He likes Kelly Browne?”

  David shrugged. “He does tonight.”

  Towards the end, the DJ was pumping out some really far-out music, and the dry ice machine was belching fog so the auditorium looked like a scene from a Dracula movie. Coloured searchlights swept the room. Civilization had totally broken down and you could get away with anything.

  As the strobe lights started going I found Jennifer and pulled her into the thickest part of the fog. She was laughing and her eyes were super bright and her cheeks were flushed and I just wanted to stare and stare.

  She said something to me that I couldn’t hear. “What?” I shouted, leaning closer. “Stop staring at me!” she shouted back. “Okay,” I said, and kissed her.

  I didn’t know how good a kiss it was, because it was my first. Her mouth was moving a little bit against mine, but I wasn’t sure if it was excited moving or just polite moving. Her lips were soft and warm and tasted like lemonade, and something hotter and harsher underneath.

  “Whoa, tiger,” she said, grabbing me gently by the hair and pushing my head back. “Is my lip gloss smushed?”

  “I don’t care about your lip gloss.”

  “I do,” she said, running her index finger round the edges of her lips.

  I saw her glance off to the sides, like she was wondering if anyone had seen. The fast song ended and they started playing “Stairway to Heaven.”

  “You going to ask me to dance?” she said, tilting her head.

  “You want to dance?” I asked.

  I held her and we moved back and forth. I didn’t kiss her any more because the fog was seeping away and I felt self-conscious.

  “Stairway to Heaven” is seven minutes and twenty-one seconds long. I know because when I got home later that night, I took out the album and checked, then played the song very quietly into the headphones so I wouldn’t wake Mom and Dad. Seven and a half minutes.

  I’d held her for every second.

  Saturday was my morning with Zan—and today, Peter was sharing the shift with me. We got Zan up and fed him and took him outside to play, our logbooks and pens always at the ready. I was getting pretty good at recording information. I’d found it hard at first, because a lot of things could happen really close together, but over the weeks Mom and Peter had given me some pointers and the pages of my logbook weren’t a total mess any more.

  Right now, Zan was watching the birds come and eat from the feeders hanging from a couple of our trees.

  I kept stretching and yawning and muttering “Man,” over and over again.

  “You tired?” Peter finally asked.

  I looked over. “Hmm? I didn’t get much sleep. There was a dance last night.” “Any good?”

  “Pretty good,” I said. I’d been hoping he’d ask. I liked Peter a lot, and imagined he had an exciting life with lots of girls and parties.

  “Jennifer Godwin and I made out a bit.”

  “Well, well, well,” he said, nodding. I’d already told him a little about her. “Quite the ladykiller.”

  “Not really.” I couldn’t imagine talking about this with Dad—especially since Jennifer was the daughter of his boss. There might be a rule against that. Peter was only seven years older than me; he was a guy and he’d understand. “Hey, can I ask you something?”

  “Shoot,” he said.

  “What I don’t get,” I said, “is what happens next.” “What do you mean?”

  “Well, like, should I be getting her flowers or chocolates and stuff?”

  Peter stared at me. “Are you marrying her?” “No!”

  “I don’t think you need to send her flowers. Why not just take her out on a date?”

  “She’s not allowed to go out until she’s sixteen.”

  “Ah.”

  “We go out as a group sometimes,” I said. “Did you have a girlfriend in grade eight?”

  He looked shocked. “Me? No way. At your age I was a nerd.”

  Now it was my turn to look shocked. Peter was my idea of cool. He was relaxed and smart and he was really good with Zan, and I thought the way he dressed was right on too. After some of the Sunday meetings, Dad and Mom (Mom’s idea, for sure) usually let the students have a drink and stay and smoke and talk, and Peter sometimes brought his guitar. He could play pretty much any song you wanted, and could do it by ear. When I watched him, I wished I could play a musical instrument. Guitar looked hard. How could he not be cool?

  “No way,” I said.

  “Yes way,” he said. “Thirteen, I was a disaster zone. Yellow police tape all around me. Do Not Enter.”

  “Why?”

  “I was weird, man.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I had ant farms and stuff. And newts. And two iguanas. My room smelled. No one wanted to come in. Especially girls. Not that I invited any.”

  “Are you going out with someone now?”

  I’d always assumed Peter was going steady with one of those really smart, sultry girls you saw on campus. They had long hair, and John Lennon glasses—the glasses just made you want to take them off so you could see how super amazing they were underneath.

  Peter shook his head. “Not at the moment, alas. Couple of years back I w
ent out with this girl named Suzanne. But that wasn’t really anything—well, nothing good.” He kind of shuddered. “Not for either of us. My advice to you is to play it cool. Just, you know, hang out together. Get to know her. You’re thirteen, man!”

  Playing it cool. That seemed like good advice. I wondered if I could take it.

  That night at dinner, Zan was awful.

  He wailed in his high chair and threw his food and spilled his water. Mom and I tried our best to make him happy, but nothing worked. It was impossible to talk: Zan was making so much noise. I could hardly eat my own food, I was so busy picking up spoons and forks and wiping vegetable goo off my arm and cheek. Across the table Dad got grumpier and angrier until his face looked hard as concrete.

  “Maybe we should give him Jell-O,” I said to Mom.

  Someone had told us that chimps loved Jell-O, and it turned out they were right. Zan was crazy about it. We often served it to him as dessert.

  “But he’s eaten nothing,” said Mom, shaking her head in dismay.

  Very slowly, Dad said, “Give. Him. The frickin’ Jell-O.”

  I went to the fridge and scooped some green Jell-O into a plastic bowl. I put it in front of Zan.

  He fell silent, looking at it jiggle. I exhaled. The Jell-O never let us down.

  But before I could spoon some into his mouth, Zan grabbed the entire quivering blob and whipped it across the table. It hit Dad right in the face and kind of exploded over his forehead and hair.

  We all sat there, staring. Even Zan seemed a little stunned, but only for a second, and then he was hooting and rocking his high chair back and forth. Mom and I started laughing. Dad chuckled as he mopped up his face with his napkin—but it sounded forced.

  “I guess Zan didn’t like his Jell-O,” Mom said.

  Zan brushed the tip of his nose with his index finger, twice, then twice more.

  Funny.

  He’d signed funny!

  “Yes!” I said to him. “Funny!”

  We’d been using that sign with him for months now, whenever we were laughing together. We’d told him that tickling was funny. Putting his doll in the toilet was funny. Making silly faces was funny. This was something he’d never seen before—Jell-O on Dad. But, instinctively, he knew this was funny too.

  Funny! I signed back to him.

  “You should sign it too,” I said to Dad, who was still wiping Jell-O out of his eyes. “To reinforce it.”

  “Our little scientist,” said Mom with a smile.

  “Yes, of course. Funny,” Dad signed. But then his big, fake smile turned into a real one as we all started laughing, and I felt a rush of happiness.

  After Mom had put Zan to sleep, we were all in the living room. Mom was reading some scientific journal, and Dad was looking over a ream of computer printouts. I was finishing my homework, but kept wondering what Jennifer was doing. Was she at home, or out with her friends? Was she thinking of me? Was she thinking of our kiss?

  After a while Dad said, “Zan’s signing has definitely taken a sharp decrease over the past three weeks.”

  “He doesn’t like sitting at the desk,” I told him. This was old news. The only person who claimed Zan signed better at the desk was Ryan Cross, but I was pretty sure he was lying.

  “It’s the most controlled way of teaching him, Ben,” said Dad. “The most effective way. There’s no way around it. The real issue is his behaviour.”

  “What do you mean?” said Mom, frowning.

  “Discipline,” Dad said. “We’ve got to be firmer, or he’s going to think he runs the place. He’s a male chimp and he’s already starting to exhibit all the characteristics of an alpha male.”

  “How can he be the alpha male if you’re the alpha male?” Mom asked, and there was an amused and slightly challenging tone to her voice.

  “We need to be firmer with him,” Dad repeated.

  “I do, you mean,” she said.

  “All of us have to be firmer,” said Dad. “Or else his behaviour, and his learning, will deteriorate. Dinner tonight was appalling.”

  Mom rolled her eyes. “He’s only ten months old, Richard.”

  “I bet I was pretty noisy when I was that old,” I said, looking hopefully at Mom. “Wasn’t I?” I hated to think Dad thought Zan was really bad.

  “You certainly were,” said Mom, giving me a kind smile.

  “The issue’s a larger one,” said Dad. “I think it’s time to add another shift during the day, and include Sundays. We can get the students to give Zan a separate dinner in his suite and put him to bed at night.”

  In alarm I looked from Dad to Mom. “But I want Zan to have dinner with us,” I said. “During the week, I don’t see him that much because of school.” And when I got home there were students with him until six. “The evenings are the only time we’re all together—and Sundays.”

  “Zan takes a lot of energy,” Dad said. “Especially for your mother. We need more help.”

  “I don’t think it’s necessary,” said Mom.

  “We talked about this at the outset,” Dad said. “It was always the plan to increase the shifts to provide total care for Zan.”

  I didn’t remember any mention of this. I guessed this was just one of the many things they’d decided without me.

  “But I’ll hardly get to see him!” I protested.

  Dad just said, “We’re scientists, Ben, not zookeepers.”

  “That’s not the way it is, though,” I said. I was really angry and trying to keep my thoughts straight, but my head was jumbled with images of the day Mom brought Zan home, and we were all looking at him asleep in her arms, and he was like a baby come home from the hospital. How Dad said he was more my little brother than my pet. Mom letting him suck at her breast …

  “We’re supposed to raise him like a human, for the good of the experiment.” I threw that last bit in for Dad, so it didn’t sound like I was being sentimental. So it sounded scientific. “Human kids eat with their parents.”

  Dad sniffed and shook his head. “Ben, when I was a kid I had a separate dinner. Your Mom too. When we got more civilized, then we ate at the table with the adults. Zan’s not there yet—as we saw from the Jell-O incident. At the end of the day, I think I’m entitled to a civilized meal.”

  I said nothing, I was still too angry.

  Mom was watching me. “I think we could work out a schedule so we have Zan with us some nights, and other nights we get the students to feed him separately. But I think it’s important we’re the ones to put him to bed at night. At night he needs us.”

  Dad grunted. But he didn’t say no, and I realized we’d scored a little victory.

  But I also knew something had changed. Maybe not for Dad, but for me. I finally realized something. As far as Dad was concerned, Zan had never been a beloved little baby. Zan was, and only ever would be, a specimen.

  Monday when I arrived at school, I was so nervous my joints felt like Jell-O.

  “Hey, Ben!” Jane said with more of a sneer than usual. I supposed Jane and Shannon knew. Jennifer would have told them right away. It took all my determination to keep walking towards their little group in the hallway—Jane’s force field was very powerful today.

  “Hey,” I said casually to Jennifer, and then our eyes went elsewhere. I’d hoped that, after our kiss, we’d have this amazing unspoken bond, and electricity would be coursing between us. But things seemed worse now, much worse. All the good opening lines I’d prepared in my logbook evaporated inside my head. I just stood there listening to her talk to her friends, and wishing the bell would hurry up and go.

  As I made my way to homeroom, I suddenly felt paranoid. Everyone was looking at me. How many people knew? Had she told David? She didn’t need to. All it would take was one person to spread it through the whole school. Jane would do that, no problem.

  Over the weekend, I’d thought I wanted everyone to know I kissed her. But what if she’d told her friends I was a bad kisser? Or she hadn’t wanted to ki
ss me but she was just being polite and now everyone would think I was a total nerd?

  Later that morning, as I was changing for gym, Mike Heaman said, “So, you and Jennifer Godwin. Good going, Tomlin.” He didn’t sound sarcastic, but genuinely admiring.

  “Yeah, well,” I said, tying my shoelaces. Playing it cool.

  “So are you two going out now?”

  “Nah. I mean she’s not allowed to go out till she’s sixteen. Parents.”

  “Oh yeah?” He didn’t look convinced by this.

  I was kind of late getting to lunch that day, and David and Hugh were just leaving. David nodded his head in greeting but didn’t say anything. Maybe it was best that way. A big group of grade tens came in and filled up the middle of the table, so I sighed and headed down to hobbit-town.

  “Hey, Ben,” said Henry Gardner, handing me a platter. There was one french fry left. I put it on my plate.

  “Kill it, you fill it,” said one of his nerdy friends, and guffawed.

  “Yep,” I said, getting up.

  After lunch, I was on the way to math class when Andrew Rees said, “Hey, Tomlin, nice work,” and winked at me.

  Between Geography and Science, Mark Curtis said, “She’s quite the babe, Tomlin.”

  My alpha male pride was feeling pretty stoked by the end of the day.

  After final period, as I was getting stuff from my locker, Jennifer came up to me without Jane or Shannon attached to her.

  “Hey,” she said, smiling, and I felt this wave of happiness crest over me. Palm trees sprang up and sand spread out to the blue sea.

  “Hey,” I said, and had to fight hard not to mention the dance. I wasn’t going to be the first to do it. I was going to play it cool, just like Peter said.

  “So, like, at the dance?” she said.

  “Uh-huh,” I said helpfully.

  A couple of people passed by, looking at us, and I felt pretty important, just hanging out and talking with Jennifer.

  “That was fun, right?” she said.

  “Oh yeah, it was fun,” I agreed, nodding.