blowing fuses

What's not to love about some good old fashioned sibling rivalry?

Walking home from the bus stop, I stopped off at every house I knew. Rita’s first, where her mom sat us down in the kitchen and gave Rita, Lori and I some orange juice, asking about our day. After a glass and some short “oh, you know” ’s and “well, nothing new today” ’s, the usual response from adolescents, Lori and I traveled to her house where we went through the same routine, sans o.j., with Rachel, her step-mom. A good hour after I should have been home, I attempted to leisurely waltz through what I thought would be an unlocked door.

 

My older brother and I grew up as latch-key kids. Sort of. Actually we didn’t carry keys to school like the other kids, we just hid ours under our doormat. Regardless, we were those kids, the kids that no one would play with because no sane mother would let us antagonize their children with no supervision. We spent a lot of time alone.

 

No big deal, I thought. Maybe Nate locked the door behind him. I reached down and flipped up the mat. No key. Oooooh that a*****e…I pounded on the door until his face showed up in the window. Next to his blonde head was his hand, and in his hand was the key to the front door.

“Open the f*****g door!” I screamed at him. Such language. The neighbor next door looked my way, but said nothing.

 

“Open the door now or I’m gonna go to Lori’s and call Mom and you KNOW she’ll be pissed!” I could see him laughing in the window. “Alright dumbass, but I’ll just tell her how you were an hour late getting home. Who’s she gonna be more mad at, huh?”

 

Ah, he got me. I sat down on the porch until I figured he was tired of having his face in the window. When he disappeared, I made my move. Sliding along the walls, under the windows, I made my way to the back door. Locked. I’m smarter than this, I thought. In my cockiness, I got the garden spade from the carport. Shoddy handiwork of military housing exposed a huge gap between the door and the frame. A slight wiggle of the spade and I had the lock popped. The door opened into our laundry room and I slammed the spade on the dryer, echoing the boom throughout the perfect-acoustics kitchen.

 

The way our house was set up, everything was in a straight line, from the kitchen to the living room to the hallway, a row of bedrooms. As I came out of the kitchen my brother stepped out of his room. We stood there, staring at each other, an angry grimace morphing our faces. I’m not sure who moved first, but it was like a backwards sort of flower-frolicking film. We ran towards each other, not arms open but fists swinging.

 

“You f*****g a*****e,” I heavily breathed out as I changed my position from offense to defense. My forearms shielded his heavy fists. As he pulled back for another crack I saw my opportunity and kicked him square in the crouch. Dead on. Unfortunately, I tasted blood before I realized what happened. Nate’s fist had caught me straight in the mouth, and my foot had done no damage to speak of.

 

He got up, shoving me back down as I tried to sit. “Punk!” he said and spit on me. I love my brother. I like to chalk it up to anger issues. I spit back. Luckily, I somehow wound up closest to the hallway, and though he was already standing, the grace of God had me up and running for my door before he could grab me. I got through the door, slammed it and locked it, with him only a heartbeat behind me.

 

Leaning against the door, I felt it shudder from his kick. One kick, two and three kicks. Four breaths later and he was in his room, slamming the door. I had some blood on my shirt so I changed. How was I going to explain a split lip to Mom…? I don’t tattle when violence is involved. Just means more violence later.

 

A soft knock on my door startled me. “Hey Ape, open up.” Oh he is tricky, this one. “How about NO? Go away.” I didn’t even bother getting off the bed. A slight click told me he had grabbed a penny from our change jar, all you need to open locked doors in the house. He sat on my bed, nice as could be, and asked for my help. “For what? What do you need?” I asked, never really certain if I should be nice or sarcastic. Nate was a sort of Dr. Jekhl meets Mr. Crazy.

 

“So, I was in class today and I sort of did something that was pretty cool,” he began. Uh oh, I thought. When something is described as pretty cool, it means stay away. Last time something was pretty cool, I wound up having my arm set on fire with hair spray. Yay. “No, no, no and no,” I said shaking my head. He held up a piece of paper with a paperclip attached to it, one end sticking out. “Ok, well you watch then. It’s funny,” he said. He got up and walked into the dining room, me right behind him.

 

He sat down on the floor by the light socket, a very bad foreshadowing I thought, sitting down beside him. Paper in hand, Nate thrust the paperclip into the light socket. The closest I can describe the sound is probably like a bug flying into a zapper, amplified twenty times louder. The whole “ZzzZzz POP!” thing. Every light in the house went out, leaving us sitting in the slight gleam of the burning paper.

 

“You did this at school?!” I sat with my mouth still open from my question.

 

“Yeah, but they didn’t know it was me and Ryan. All the lights in the hall went out, but the paper never caught on fire like this,” he said, blowing it out, a hint of awe in his voice.

 

“That’s great,” I started, but my perpetual anxiety started to increase in volume. “Great, absolutely great, we’re going to be in so much trouble and burning paper is more important to you. No. You’re going to be in trouble. Not me.” I started to get up from the ground and Nate grabbed my arm. “Oh no sis, you were part of this,” he said with a wry little smile. Duped, again.

He laughed at the look of understanding on my face. “Don’t worry, we just flip the breakers. No big deal retard,” he said heading for the fuse box in the hallway. Oh, but was it a big deal. Nate flipped every breaker…twice. There were no lights in the dining room. I couldn’t help but laugh at his face, even if we were in this together. “Didn’t expect that, did ya smartass?”

 

It seems that only when faced with certain death by the mother, would my brother and I ever get along as adolescents. Ok, death is a little melodramatic but still. Death seemed better.

 

Nate started to panic and ran to his room, emerging with a new piece of paper and a new paperclip. “Maybe if we do it again, it’ll fix itself,” he said, sounding so hopeful. “Ok Genius, let’s put out the kitchen lights too,” I replied, seemingly unheard. Once again there was the bug-zapping, popping noise and darkness. No fire. And not surprisingly, no lights in the dining room.

“What are we going to say? What could have flipped the breaker?” he asked me, as if I understand that stuff. We decided to go with the ever-popular “it just happened! We don’t know!” story.

 

The fear that our Mom had instilled in us seemed to defy the laws of physics. Time sped up in amazing ways. I heard her keys in the lock through my closed bedroom door. “Hello?” her voice drifted down the hallway. “You guys can’t greet your Mom after a hard day of work?” I opened my door in time to see her flip the dining room switch on. Flip it off. Flip it on. “Has this been like this all day?” she asked as Nate stuck his head out of his door. “Yeah I don’t know what’s up,” he said, pulling his head back into his room.

 

“Hold it,” Mom said with her usual air of knowing. She locked in on me. “Has this been like this all day?” Her eyes felt like they were burning my soul. She’s like a walking lie detector. “I didn’t notice,” I mumbled and turned back into the safety of my room.

 

“So Nate knew all day but you didn’t notice at all? You mean to tell me, the both of you have been home all day and one of you knew and one didn’t?” I heard the pitch of her voice change. The subtleties in perception that anxiety produces are amazing. I felt like I was sitting in front of a light socket hovering with my paper-paperclip lie.

 

She began walking down the hallway, thumping Nate’s door hard enough to make it swing into the wall. “So the son that never talks to us suddenly chimes in even though nothing happened?” My stomach began to creep into my throat. Oh she knows.

 

I heard the front door jingle open again and my Dad’s voice floated down the hallway, “Hello? Why’s everyone in the dark?”

 

“Apparently our lovely children did something to the lights,” my mom said from my brother’s room. I poked my head out of the door just in time to get the “now you did it” look from my Dad. He knew the wrath was coming.

 

“Nate stuck a paperclip in the light socket and the fuse blew and we couldn’t get the lights back on!” The words came pouring out like a left on faucet. My Dad’s face contorted to a look of shock and anger and something I haven’t yet been able to define. I heard Nate blurt out “She was an hour late getting home from the bus stop!” Silly boy, like that was going to get him out of it.

Dad walked down the hallway and grabbed my door handle. “Get on your bed and sit there,” he said, shutting the door. I chose not to listen to the yelling down the hall, but even through my fingers, hands over my ears, I heard the pain of selling out my brother. I licked the cut on my lip and waited for my turn.