Free The 6th Power by Justin David Walker

I sat where I was and tried to focus on what I’d just heard. 
    I put Chet in the hospital. A ball of laughter, all nervous and high pitched, wanted to explode out of me. Down, boy. Keep it down. It finally dissolved, replaced by a sick feeling, a creamed spinach on the yellow lunch tray kind of feeling.
    I never… I only wanted to… He wouldn’t stop…
    I needed more data. Following Dad into the kitchen, I asked, “So… when is Chet coming home?”
    Dad was tying on an apron. “Probably sometime tomorrow. They want to make sure he hasn’t torn his esophagus. If…”
    “What?” I shrilled.
    Dad stopped reaching for something in the pantry and looked at me. “Hey, it’ll be okay,” he said. “That can happen sometimes if you…,” he made sure that Kiki was oblivious, “puke enough. Happened to your grandma once when she had the stomach flu.”
    My lungs didn’t want to work. I encouraged them to do their in and out routine, but they got all wheezy. Fortunately, there was a kitchen chair underneath me when I sank down again. Did I… tear… my brother? I mean, Chet was a creep and he’d done a lot of stuff to me over the years, but I never wanted to… I shook my head. “What, uh, what do they do if his, uh, you know?” I pointed to my throat.
    Dad was chopping an onion into large, irregular pieces. “I don’t think they do anything unless it’s really bad. It should just heal on its own. Not a big deal, usually.”
    I didn’t think I had the strength to ask what would happen if it was, in fact, “a big deal.” A subject change was pretty much a necessity. “What about Robert?”
    Dad pulled a large saucepan out of a cupboard. “He seems to be doing okay. Claims he just threw up because he saw Chet do it. Should be home tonight. They just want to make sure that he doesn’t have whatever Chet has.”
    Robert would be coming home. I put him and his twin in the hospital. I’d be extremely lucky if he let me live through the night. I should have been concerned about that, but the word “esophagus” kept blinking in my mind like a computer error message, interrupting all other functions. I went back into the living room, sat on the couch, and listened to Mozart.
    And to top it all off, Dad was making goulash. I knew this because that’s what he always makes when he was stuck cooking dinner. He had learned the recipe in college and claimed that his roommates had loved it. That meant that Dad’s roommates 1) were either born without taste buds, 2) were extremely polite or 3) just didn’t want to do the cooking themselves.
    I had once seen someone on public television extolling the virtues of goulash, saying that it was a wonderful dish of beef simmered in a rich tomato sauce, laden with paprika and other spices, served over warm noodles. A dish that would warm you to the marrow on a cold Hungarian night. The television lady’s words, not mine.
    The goulash that Dad made consisted of ground beef, onions, stewed tomatoes and soggy elbow macaroni. Occasionally, Dad added salt and pepper. When he remembered. His version of goulash tasted like underwear, and yes, thanks to my brothers, I know what underwear tastes like.
    That night, though, I could have made it taste like anything. Pizza, ice cream, filet minion, sushi, drywall, salamanders, whatever. Instead, I sat there at the table and ate every bite without complaint. I ate every overcooked piece of pasta, every tasteless hunk of steamed burger, every gagging glob of stewed tomato, and I thought about my brothers. I tried to think more about what they had done to me, what they were about to do to me, and what they would have done to Hannah.
    But my thoughts kept coming back to the words “hospital” and “esophagus.” I sat at my family’s mostly empty dinner table and ate bad goulash until my plate was empty.
     

Chapter 10
    I went to bed after dinner. Dad, who was facing the prospect of getting Kiki to sleep without Mom’s help, had no