I was thirteen the first time it happened. My older brother had just smacked me upside the head. It hurt. Bad.
Jeremy was a couple of years older than me, and he’d just had his first big growth spurt. He was a late bloomer, just like I’d be. When you grow that fast, you don’t realize your own strength. He didn’t intend to hit me that hard. At least, I hope he didn’t. For brothers, we’d always gotten along pretty well. Never fought much. Actually enjoyed spending time together.
He was driving me to the mall. I’d blackmailed him into doing it. Caught him the night before with his hands down a girl’s pants. I threatened to tell our parents. It worked like a charm.
So we were driving down the road, and I was poking at him, doing my best to piss him off. He was focused on the road, so he couldn’t really fight back. He reached his limit, I guess, because he swung his arm across the car and right into my head.
I nearly blacked out.
It wasn’t the kind of pain that makes you cry, like an unexpected slap, or a punch in the gut. It felt more like my head was expanding into a giant, chunky balloon. I could barely sit up.
I didn’t move, which I think freaked him out more than if I’d cried. “You okay?” he asked.
But I didn’t hear him. I was surrounded by fog. I could see the dashboard, and a bit of road in front of the car, but nothing else. I wondered how the weather had changed so fast.
Out of nowhere, a dog ran out of the bushes lining the road. Black and brown. Big German Sheppard.
“Watch out!” I yelled. I reached over and shoved the steering wheel.
The fog disappeared. It was sunny again. Jeremy was jerking the wheel back and forth in a desperate bid to bring the tail of the car back in line. “What the Hell are you doing?” he yelled.
I didn’t reply at first. I was too confused, and I felt like I might throw up. “You almost hit a dog,” I finally said.
The car settled back into a straight line. He glanced over at me like I was crazy. “What dog? There wasn’t any dog.”
I craned around, looking out the back of the car. My head still felt swollen and misshapen. All I saw was empty road. “I swear, a dog ran in front of the car. It was a German Sheppard.”
“There wasn’t any damn dog. And I’ll do worse than hit you if you ever grab the wheel like that again.”
I was still confused, so I sat in silence. A few minutes passed. Well, five, to be exact, but I wouldn’t figure that out until later.
The road curved, one of the few place in our boring little suburb where the streets weren’t perfectly straight. We passed the town’s water treatment plant. Low hills and bushes surrounded it, probably to keep in the stink, and to keep people like me from seeing the giant pools of turds festering within its perimeter.
A flash of fur dashed out of the bushes. My brother jerked the wheel. The car went into a full spin. My head whipped to the side. It was more nauseating than painful.
We slid to a stop. A German Sheppard trotted past the front of the car. It stopped and looked at us for a few seconds, then it disappeared across the road between some cheap houses.
My brother looked at me like I was a freak. “What the Hell?” he whispered.
Cars curved around the bend, headed straight at us. He slammed the transmission into first, dropped the clutch and spun the car. He didn’t say a word to me for the rest of the ride.
In fact, he didn’t say much to me for the rest of the day. He never brought up what happened. Not that day. Not that week. Not even the last time I spoke to him, which was a few years back. And he never hit, smacked or so much as hugged me again.
I think he was suddenly afraid of me. Afraid of his little brother.
