Half Brother (8 page)

“Welcome, Mr. Tomlin,” he said, shaking my hand. Like a lot of teachers at the school, he had an English accent.

“Good morning, sir,” I said. You were supposed to call everyone sir and ma’am here.

“This is Henry Gardner,” Mr. Davies said, introducing me to another grade eight boy. He was short and sandy-haired, with glasses. “He’s going to be your guide today, just to make sure you know where to find everything. We don’t want you wandering off into the bog.”

“Okay, great, hi,” I said, shaking Henry’s hand. I took a seat beside him and some of his friends. Back behind a desk, running my fingers over the gouged pen marks, feeling the same vague panic I always felt before a test.

“So, do you know David Godwin?” I asked Henry.

“He’s grade nine,” he replied, like there wasn’t much else to say. “Why, do you know him?”

“Sort of. Our dads work together at the university. He seems like a nice guy.”

Henry looked at me doubtfully and shrugged. “I stay away from those guys. Their idea of fun is shoving people in lockers
and throwing their clothes into the swimming pool.”

“There’s a swimming pool here?” I said.

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t advise swimming in it,” Henry said, and laughed a bit.

I laughed politely. I’d already decided Henry and I would not be spending much time together. As more and more kids filed into homeroom, I could tell that Henry and his pals were definitely low-ranking. I knew, because in my last school,
I
was a class nerd, and I wasn’t planning on being one again.

I had it all figured out for this year.

New city.

New school.

New Ben.

I could be whatever I wanted here. And what I wanted was to be a dominant male. No one messed around with the dominant male. He submitted to no one. Everyone submitted to
him.

This was my plan, and I kept repeating it in my head like a mantra, as the room filled.

Just before the bell rang, Jennifer Godwin walked in, talking excitedly with two other girls. The blonde one was almost as good-looking as Jennifer; the other one was kind of plain, and she was doing most of the talking. Before Jennifer sat down near the front, she saw me, and I said hi, and she gave a little smile and a nod and then she was back into conversation with her friends. I’d been hoping she’d come sit near me, but that was expecting too much, I guess.

She looked younger in her uniform than she had in her
bathing suit. I thought about lotioning her back, and my face felt hot.

Mr. Davies took attendance and handed out our timetables. After that there were some announcements and the bell went again and we were off, Henry at my side, talking to me really fast and explaining everything. He was like that pesky little dog in the Looney Tunes cartoon—the one the bigger dog is always swatting and telling to shut up. I’d spend the day with him, let him show me around—and then ditch him. I didn’t want people to think we were friends. I figured that would pretty much finish me off at Windermere.

I guess one of the reasons Henry had been picked as my guide was that we were in all the same classes. Math. English. History.

All the guys seemed to be calling one another by their last names. “Hendricks!” “Thompson!” “Burns!” But I didn’t catch the girls doing this to each other. I guessed I would be Tomlin.

All morning I kept looking around for David Godwin, but couldn’t see him anywhere. I passed his hairy brother, Cal, in the quad, and he just grunted at me without stopping.

This was the first school I’d been to where you could get a hot lunch. The dining hall had a high-raftered ceiling (fake Tudor), and long wooden tables with benches on either side. The noise of people eating and talking swooped from table to table.

I looked around and hoped Henry would lead me to the table where Jennifer Godwin was sitting. There were definitely girls’ tables and boys’ tables, and not a ton of mixing. Henry took me to the farthest corner of the dining hall where
a bunch of small, bespectacled kids sat near the end of a table. They looked like hobbits.

There was obviously a system here. The oldest kids sat at the end nearest the kitchen, and everyone else sat farther away. I soon realized why. The grade twelves came back from the kitchen carrying big metal trays of food. They helped themselves first, then passed the trays on down the table until they were empty.

“You kill it, you fill it,” chanted someone to the person who’d taken the last of the lasagna. Then that person took the tray back to the kitchen for a refill.

Way down at the hobbit end of the table, I could see it would take a while to get some food.

To my surprise, David Godwin and Hugh arrived at our table and, near the middle, kids made room for them. Clearly, they were higher-ranking males than the usual grade nines.

“Hey, David! Hugh!” I said.

David looked at me coolly. “Tomlin,” he said slowly, drawing out each syllable.

“That the chimp kid?” the guy across from him asked.

“He is indeed the chimp kid,” said David, helping himself to some lasagna.

“Was he raised by chimps or something?”

“He
looks
like he was raised by chimps,” Hugh said.

“That’s me,” I said. “Chimp boy.”

I nodded and tried to laugh along with everyone else, looking at David and trying to figure out if he was laughing with me or at me.

At
me.

Everyone at the table started jibbering and
eeking,
the way they thought chimpanzees sounded. I took a deep breath. A dominant male did not submit.

“They don’t sound like that,” I said. “You guys sound like monkeys. Little teeny-weeny monkey boys.”

“What’s the difference?” someone asked gruffly.

“Chimps are bigger and much more powerful,” I said.

“So how do they sound, Tomlin?” David asked.

“More like this.” I started doing deep pant-hoots, faster and faster, until they were almost barks, rocking up and down in my seat. Everyone was looking at me like I was crazy, so I went a little further. I jumped off the bench onto the floor and, hunched over, moved on all fours towards David. I shoved my way onto the bench beside him and started grooming his hair.

“Tomlin, you freakin’ weirdo!” he said, trying to push me away.

I smacked his hands away and pretended to find something really exciting in his hair. I let loose with a shriek of excitement as I popped it into my mouth. I gave a few more contented pant-hoots, and then stopped.

“Tomlin, you are seriously twisted,” said David, giving me a shove, but he was sort of smiling.

“That’s
how chimps
really
sound,” I said, and started back to my seat. All across the dining hall, people were looking my way, including a male teacher, who was walking over with a frown.

“Sit down,” he told me. “This is not a zoo.” “Sorry, sir,” I said. “But I
am
chimp boy.” I heard the other guys at the table laugh.

The teacher didn’t think this was funny. “Detention on the first day is no way to start the school year,” he said. “No, sir,” I said.

“He just can’t control himself, sir,” David told the teacher. “He was raised among jungle apes.”

“You can join him if you like, Godwin,” the teacher said. “Now settle down.”

I took my seat. I wondered if Jennifer had heard all this commotion. Henry Gardner and the other hobbits were looking at me differently, and so were the other kids farther up the table. I wasn’t sure if they were impressed or freaked out.

It didn’t matter. I’d made an
impression.

I was pretty glad when the school bus dropped me off at the end of the day.

After my chimp boy routine at lunch, I’d started worrying I’d done the wrong thing, and people would just see me as a complete head case.

It was stupid to think that David would want to hang out with me at school. Grade nines didn’t hang out with grade eights. As for Jennifer, she was obviously super popular. She was too busy to talk to me, even though we were in the same English and History classes.

Inside our house it was quiet. It was one of the days both Mom and Dad were on campus. Peter McIvor and another student named Cheryl Tobin were on the afternoon shift with Zan. Through the sliding doors in the kitchen I could
see the three of them outside, playing in the sandbox.

I wanted to be with them, but Dad had told me that I wasn’t to distract Zan when he was with the students. Just as I was about to turn away, though, Zan must’ve seen me. He scampered across the lawn, with Peter not far behind, towards the sliding doors. He knocked on the glass with his little fists.

I waved at him. It was an overcast day, and kind of cool for early September. Zan wore a T-shirt and shorts, and kept gripping himself like he was chilly.

“I think he’s cold,” I told Peter through the glass.

“What?” he said.

“Cold. He’s cold. He’s shivering.”

It seemed mean to ignore Zan, now that he’d seen me, so I opened the door, and he rushed in and climbed into my arms. Then, holding on with his legs around my left hip, he leaned back and slapped his arms across his chest again.

“Holy cow,” said Peter quietly. “He’s not cold. I think he’s signing!”

“Hug!” I exclaimed. And then to Zan: “Hug?” And I did the sign back to him. I put my arms around him and hugged him. “Hug. Hug. Hug!” I said.

He hugged me even tighter. That hug felt good.

I looked at Peter and we both shook our heads.

It had been only two weeks since the project officially started.

“His first word,” I said.

“You
taught him his first word,” said Peter, clapping me on the shoulder. “Way to go, man.”

It was like Zan and I had both started school on the same day.

I
’m a slow learner.

Letters. Numbers. They’ve never come easily to me.

When I was nine, Mom and Dad had me tested. They wondered if maybe there was something wrong with my brain. A learning disability. A psychologist came to the house and asked me questions and looked at me and timed me and examined all my answers and wrote up a big report.

He didn’t find anything wrong with me.

I just wasn’t that smart, I guess.

Mom said it would all come in time: all the words and numbers would start to make sense, when I was ready. But I always got the feeling Dad thought I wasn’t trying hard enough.

He thought I had a bad attitude. He thought I was lazy. He got angry when my report cards came home.

I thought I was trying, but I just wasn’t very good at school. I wasn’t good at a lot of things, like controlling my temper. But I was good at loving Zan.

D
rink,
Zan said to me.

I shook my head and pointed at the food on his tray.
Eat,
I said.

We were talking with our hands.

Zan was in his high chair in the kitchen, and I sat in front of him, trying to feed him cereal with a spoon. He was over eight months old now, and could hold his own spoon and fork perfectly well, but he still liked throwing them more than putting food in his mouth.

Drink!
Zan signed, jabbing his thumb urgently at his lips.

He wouldn’t get his drink until he’d eaten some food. Mom was very firm about that; she worried he’d fill up on milk and ruin his appetite.

Off to the side, the photographer was moving around, taking pictures.
Time
magazine was doing a feature story on Project Zan and they’d sent a reporter and photographer to spend the day with us. At first, Dad hadn’t been sure he
wanted them to come. He didn’t think we were far enough along. He wanted to wait. But the university was keen, and I think they’d pressed Dad into it. It was an international magazine, and it would get the university a lot of attention.

And us too, Mom had said. She’d spent all of yesterday frantically cleaning the house and Zan’s suite, and worrying about what we’d all wear. She had me in cords and a vest, and had slicked my curly hair down with this cold, slimy stuff that was actually called Slik. I hated it, but I could tell everyone was stressed out about
Time,
so I just did what she wanted.

Today was like Zan’s first public performance, and we didn’t really know how he’d react to having strangers in the house, watching him all day. I kept thinking about that Bugs Bunny cartoon where the guy discovers this frog that can dance and sing. But whenever he tries to show other people, the frog just sits there stupidly and goes
ribbit.

We all wanted Zan to be our dancing frog today and show everyone how smart he was. In the six months we’d been teaching him, he could already make eight signs, and understand dozens more.

I still had trouble believing it. A chimp learning human language? But every time he mastered a new sign it was like he was learning to name the world, bit by bit. No other chimp had ever done anything like this before. For the first time in human history we could talk, really talk, to another species. Sometimes it really did seem like something from a sci-fi movie.

Dad had carefully planned out the whole day so Zan would be doing things that would encourage him to sign. I’d been a
little worried earlier, because when the reporter and photographer first arrived, Zan was pretty wild. He bounded around on all fours, he climbed furniture and bounced off walls. He was really interested in all of the photographer’s gear: the lighting stands and the shiny umbrella things and the camera itself. He wanted to shriek at everyone, and touch everything. Luckily Peter and I had managed to distract him with one of his dolls. After a few minutes, he seemed to lose interest in the strangers, and just wanted to get on with his regular Saturday.

Now, in his high chair, he signed
drink
to me once more, a little half-heartedly, and when I signed
no
he just stared at me reproachfully for a few seconds.

Out,
he signed, gripping his long brown fingers in one hand, then pulling them free.

I couldn’t help smiling. If Zan liked his food, he’d stay and eat contentedly until it was gone. If he didn’t, he got restless within minutes. This particular cereal-and-vegetable blend wasn’t his favourite, but it was good for him, so we tried to get it down him.