My Brother's Keeper Read Online Free PDF

didn’t get it, which was actually worse than watching him get all choked up about some long-lost dog from his childhood.
    Either look meant I had about ten seconds to get Dad inside and get him up the steps before he woke my mom up. Which I was usually able to do, especially if I stayed up reading The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia until he came in. But when I wasn’t, it meant that my mom came down to breakfast the next day with her eyes all puffy from crying and my dad had to sleep on the La-Z-Boy that night and they went back to fighting and Eli went back to sucking his thumb from under his blankie and Jake and I had to be on our good behavior until they made up. But after a while they stopped making up, which meant my mom’s eyes were puffy pretty much all the time and my dad slept on the La-Z-Boy pretty much all the time until he left.
    The look, in Jake’s case, means his eyes are like mirrors. I can’t tell what he’s thinking. All I can see is my own scared self looking back at me.
    I grab the coat rack and steady it. Then I grab Jake by the shoulders and steer him in the direction of the stairs. He misses the first step and starts laughing.
    “Shhh.” I clap one hand over his mouth and squeeze him by the back of the neck with the other, then I push him up the steps, nudging my knee into his back, step by step, until we finally get to our room.
    I get him into our room, where he kicks off his jeans and starts to climb up to his bunk on the top. He wobbles a little, sort of like the coat rack, then bolts into the bathroom and throws up. I swing the door closed, flick on the fan, and pray our mom hasn’t heard anything.
    While Jake is hanging his head over the toilet, I get out the can of Citrus Magic, this orangey-smelling spray that says it makes odors disappear magically. Our mom opens the door and walks in, wearing her pink robe with the coffee stain down the front.
    “Honey?” she says to Jake. “Are you sick?”
    She sniffs and I give the room another blast of Citrus Magic.
    Jake doesn’t look up. “Food poisoning,” he says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “The shrimp cocktail.”
    She looks confused. “That’s funny. No one else got sick… .” Her face gets that long-term fatal headache look.
    “Me, too,” I say all of a sudden. “I don’t feel too good, either.”
    “Did you throw up?”
    I shrug. “Not exactly, but my stomach feels weird. I couldn’t sleep.” Both of which are technically true.
    She pats the pockets of her robe like she’s looking for cigarettes, even though she just quit smoking again last week, and you know it’s one of those times that she wishes she wasn’t someone’s mother, that she could have a smoke and go back to bed and not have to worry about things like barfed-up shrimp cocktail.
    I tell her to go back to bed, and that if we’re old enough to handle Human Sexuality class, we’re old enough to take care of this. Which we do, mostly by Jake going to bed and me fumigating the entire place with Citrus Magic.
    T he next morning on the way to the bus stop I ask Jake about how he managed to get up on the Dumpster the night before.
    “My manly upper-body strength,” he says.
    Then I try to think of a way to ask him about him and Andy Timmons without acting like I care.
    “Last night,” I say.
    Jake won’t look at me straight on.
    “It wasn’t the shrimp cocktail,” I say.
    Jake doesn’t let on if he hears or not. He’s eyeing my new baseball cap. “Gimme that for a second,” he says. “I’ll fix it for you.”
    I hand it over sort of cautiously. Jake puts it on his own head, cups his hand around the brim, and squeezes it. He takes it off, examines it, then curls the brim a little more till it has the rounded, broken-in shape he considers cool. He puts it on my head, snugs it down, • and steps back to admire his work.
    “There,” he says, tugging it down till it practically covers my eyes. “Now you won’t look like such a