Free My Brother's Keeper by Patricia McCormick Page B

worry, Jake’s little brother,” she says. “We do this all the time,”
    I nod like I do this kind of thing all the time, too. Then I yell “Look out!” right in Andy Timmons’s ear. Since he’s busy flipping through his CD case, he doesn’t see the Wonder Bread truck coming straight at us. He yanks the wheel to the right. Which means we don’t die in a tragic head-on collision with a bread truck, but which means we end up on the side of the road in the grass.
    Which is when everybody stops laughing.
    “Nice going, brainiac.” This comes from Vince, the Pissing-Off-the-World kid, who isn’t exactly a member of the National Honor Society, if you know what I mean.
    Jake grabs the brim of my baseball cap and jams it down over my eyes. I can feel the blond girl shift around in her seat so she isn’t touching me anymore.
    I yank my hat off and see that Andy Timmons is pulling something out of his jacket pocket.
    I’ve never seen a joint in real life before, only laminated pictures like the ones Mr. Fontaine passed around during Freedom From Chemical Dependency Week. It’s surprisingly small.
    Jake’s friends each take turns smoking it and passing it around, including the blond girl, who inhales like she’s kissing. Then she holds the joint out in my direction, her mouth still all kissy holding in the smoke.
    “That’s okay,” I say, waving my hands through the air in front of me.
    She keeps holding it out toward me. Vince and the spiky-haired girl are looking at me.
    I morph into Miss Manners again. “No, thank you,” I say.
    Finally, she exhales. “Pass it, will you?”
    I realize they’re all waiting for me—not to succumb to peer pressure and ruin my entire life—just to pass it along so they can keep smoking. So even though I keep expecting a helicopter full of FBI agents in navy blue windbreakers to parachute onto the hood, point their semiautomatic machine guns at me, and haul me off to prison, I take the thing from her.
    I plan to hold it the way Jake did, pinching it between his thumb and index finger, but somehow I end up holding it between my first two fingers, the way little kids do when they fake-smoke with pretzels. It weighs practically nothing. Still, I keep picturing myself accidentally dropping it and setting the car on fire and killing everyone, which would be just the kind of tragic surprise ending that always happens in Mr. Fontaine’s videos.
    But nothing happens. They smoke the joint down to nothing. Then Andy Timmons pulls back onto the road, driving a little fast but mainly normally, and not showing any signs of impaired reflexes or hand-eye coordination. Vince puts in a new CD, which the girl with the movie-star teeth and the spiky-haired girl sing along to. And Jake doesn’t look any different than he does when we watch TV alone together after school.
    All of this strikes me as sort of weird but I still don’t relax. Not until we get home and I can see that my mom’s car isn’t in the lot.
    I jump out of the car, thank Andy Timmons for the ride—even if he did just about get me killed by a bread truck—and run inside and grab the Citrus Magic and spray it all over myself.
    A fter I’m done, I bring the Citrus Magic into the den for Jake, who’s sitting on the floor playing with Mr. Furry. Some hip-hop song is on MTV, and Jake has Mr. Furry standing up on her hind legs, holding on to her front paws, making her dance in time with the music.
    “Mr. Furry,” he says. “The J.Lo of cats.”
    He pulls her paws back and forth and makes her hips swivel, which I have to admit actually makes her look like a short, hairy Jennifer Lopez with a tail.
    When he sees me watching, he makes Mr. Furry take a bow.
    I smile, sort of, even though I don’t want him to think I’ve forgotten about him and his friends practically getting me imprisoned for life. But it also cracks me up seeing Mr. Furry, who’s so stuck-up, looking so miserable.
    Then the front door opens and our mom and Eli