“Jake, listen, I’m sorry. I just—”
Jacob made a noise, deep in his throat, and drove at Tyler, knocking him out of the kitchen and into the dining room. Tyler fell into the chairs, a sharp bolt of pain rupturing through his back where the wood collided with his spine. “Jacob! Calm down!” he said, but Jacob pulled back his arm and threw a wild punch at Tyler, hitting him hard in the eye.
Tyler’s vision exploded in a billion tiny sparks. He fell back onto the table, and his head slammed into the wood. Jacob jumped on top of him, roaring, his voice too high and too loud, and started hitting Tyler with both fists: his head, his chest, anywhere he could reach. Tyler held up his arms, trying to block the blows, but his brother was stronger. Tyler’s sinewy build was no match for Jacob. His head and body took blow after blow.
Tyler’s head swam, and he couldn’t think or see. Instead, it was just black, and then those white, blinding sparks, and pain. Pain exploding all over his body in what would be great bruises, as dark and purple as ripe grapes.
“Jacob! No!”
Suddenly, the beating stopped, but Tyler didn’t move. He was still on the table, his face and body hot and sticky with blood and his mind still swimming in and out, in and out, in and out. He tried to blink, but his eyes wouldn’t work, and very, very faintly, he could just make out the outline of his father holding his prick brother back. “Stop, Jacob!” his father said. “Just stop! Calm down!”
His mother raced toward Tyler, her hands outstretched. “Oh my gosh. Oh no, baby. Oh no. Are you okay? Can you see?”
“He hit me first!” Jacob was screaming again and again, his voice high-pitched.
Tyler tried to grit his teeth, but a sharp lightning bolt of pain shot through him. “Yeah,” he said, but his voice sounded muffled and strange. “I’m fine.”
The pain of even speaking was too much, and before he realized what was happening his parents were shuffling him into a car, and his brother was left at home while his mother held ice to his eye and cooed to him about leaving her purse on the entryway table.
That was why they’d come back.
They’d saved him.
“What happened, Tyler?” his mom said. “What set him off??”
“I hit him.” Tyler’s voice sounded like he was speaking through a mouthful of gumballs.
“But why?” his mother asked. “Tyler . . . why?”
Tyler tried to shake his head, but it sent pain through his body like a rocket. So he stayed still and let his mother hold a little bag of ice to his eyes. First one, then the other, as if that would make any sort of difference.
His father kept glancing at him in the rearview mirror and making concerned noises in this throat. He said things like, “You’ll be all right, champ,” and “Really just a few good shiners you got there.”
And, as much pain as he was in, Tyler almost enjoyed the ride to the hospital.
It was the most kindness his parents had shown him in a really, really long time. Maybe since he was a little boy.
His father pulled up to the hospital, to the same emergency room entrance where he’d gone with Mattie just days before, and helped him out the car. He leaned on his parents and hobbled in.
The microphone was dangling down, somewhere near his belly button. He tore it away and stuffed the cord in the pocket of his jeans.
An hour later, he was sitting on a hospital bed while a doctor stitched a cut along his cheekbone. The doctor was a jolly, fat man with a red face and steady hands.
“He got you good, didn’t he?” asked Emile. He stood in the room, watching while they cleaned Tyler up. They’d also given him a healthy dose of Vicodin. He hardly felt anything. The swelling in his eyes had gone down enough that he had some of his vision back, albeit a narrow split of what was normal.
“Pretty good,” Tyler admitted. It still hurt to speak. Jacob had split his lips in two places.
Emile watched the doctor stitch him up. His parents were waiting just outside with the promise that they would be updated after Emile had a chance to speak to his charge.
“You should have told me, Tyler. I could have helped you.”
The doctor gently pressed a bandage along his cheek. “We’ll butterfly these other ones, okay? Sit tight. I’ll send a nurse in and she’ll take care of it.”
He stripped off his gloves and washed his hands at the sink. “Try not to get in any more fights while I’m out, okay?”
The door closed behind the doctor. Emile stepped closer to the examination table and put a hand on Tyler’s back. “I know about your brother,” Emile said. “And I know about his problem.”
Tyler nodded. Though the painkiller was starting to clear away most of the pain, it was leaving him groggy and strange. “How?”