Like Brothers

Fiction by ​​Tom Roth

Northeast Ohio Writer

I was the one who said that Marcus and I were like brothers. 

“Brothers?” Marcus said. 

His frown, incredulous and amused, ruined any hope of connection I was trying to find, reminding me of the difference between us. It wasn't just because of our looks, because I was white and he was black. When I remember it now, I think of this invisible line running between us. My side, his side. But we never tried searching for it, never once felt its taut course in our hands. If one of us would've found the line with our fingers, we could've cut it away and then maybe there'd be no sides, no line. I skimmed something on my phone once about how humans are more alike than they are different. I can’t remember where I found it, but I was soon watching a video of Bill Nye talking about how some people like vanilla ice cream with honey and others don’t, and then my thumb was scrolling and scrolling down an endless stream of links and videos about differences and common ground and similarities and kindness and hate and empathy and fear and love. And my head fried up, overcooked with so much content, flaming with all the available information just a touch of the thumb away. It got me nowhere, gave me only part of the answer. I had to turn off my phone and think without all that shit in my hand. So I started with Marcus.  

“Brothers,” he said again. The smile on his face fell away, not so funny anymore. He shook his head as if to say I don’t get you sometimes. “Brothers how?” 

“Like this,” I said. 

We were sitting on opposite ends of the couch, a stash of Cheez-Its, Ho Hos, and popcorn between us. It was our feast after a successful session of sharing funny YouTube videos. This was 2006, when YouTube was a place for finding random funny shit to watch, before the age of influencers and algorithms and ads with skip clicks. YouTube. Once a simpler place: i like turtles; grape lady falls; i’m dying out here in this country ass fucked up town! 

All the junk food put Petty, my dog, in an award winning performance of begging. The fat rolls on his pug face wrinkled up, and those buggy eyes of his sweetened and shined like dark juicy blueberries. We flipped Cheez-Its to him. 

“We’re just chilling after school,” I explained. “Just us, some snackage.” 

“Snackage,” Marcus said, mocking me in a caveman voice. “Snackage.”

“You’re gay,” I replied. 

A part of seventh grade taught me things I ended up unlearning when I got older and met my wife. There existed this center of status and standard that we, the clan of boys in the grade, created and conformed to but never fully understood, this small circle of ideas containing the essence of being a guy. Status and standard. One way to be. We named what was gay and what wasn’t gay, what was us and what wasn’t us. We blended in with one another, speaking and acting out the same role: the kid in seventh grade who didn’t give a fuck, the one who never had to check himself on anything, who was always ahead of everyone else. I still haven’t pinned down how or where it came about—this image of us—just that one day it was there to model and we were dropping strange jokes about girls, whispering slurs, calling everything else gay with no second thought. It seemed fine, it was the norm, because none of us were any of those things, so no one was hurt, and because Marcus, being one of the very few black kids in our school, went along with it, too. But when I think of it now, when I find myself saying us and things, I feel like I’m walking in a cave and there’s this awful sound somewhere far in the dark that I don’t want to follow. 

“Good one, brother,” Marcus said. 

Marcus tossed another Cheez-It to Petty. We were in my living room watching Rush Hour on DVD. “Do you understand the words that are comin’ outta my mouth?” Chris Tucker shouted into Jackie Chan’s face. 

“Are you my brother, too, Petty?” Marcus asked. “Petty. Funny name.” 

Marcus was nothing like Chris Tucker, nothing like I’m dying out here in this country ass fucked up town! He had a cold delivery in his speech. His voice kept a thick, deep tone that sounded sarcastic or indifferent, that made you think he didn’t give a shit about anything. It was a contrast to his frown. You expected to hear something bright, something flimsy and fun out of his mouth, but his low voice always sobered you and slapped any assumption off your mind, and it made you so unsure that, in the quick moments of silence, you were afraid of what you should say back to him. 

“It’s because of Tom Petty,” I said. “My parents kissed at a Tom Petty concert, like for the first time.” That wasn’t true—my parents were just crazy fans, fellow heartbreakers they called themselves. But I felt I had to tell Marcus something more interesting than that. 

I was trying anything that year to make myself stand out in the circle, to be the guy who was ahead. Most days, Marcus and I sat at the same table for lunch. I ate in silence and laughed along with others. Sometimes, I even found ways of modeling the others around me at the table. Slouching in my chair. Tilting my head. Looking cool. I had no real effect on the table, though, other than disappearing from them, vanishing into my silence. Marcus had once said he forgot I was there. 
His funny guy frown was back, eyebrows raised. 

“Your mom sure is an American girl, mhm-hm,” he said. “Isn’t she? Your dad was probably yelling ‘Do me like that’ after the concert.”

I shut my eyes and shook my head. 

“I’d watch,” Marcus said. 

“Dude, you’re disgusting,” I said, snapping my eyes at him. 

He started making sex sounds, moaning in his monotone voice, casually humping the air with a Cheez-It in one hand, but I could only say dude again, and then he squinted, pretending to be all spaced out and stoned, and said, “Dude, where’s my car?” 

It got me laughing, made me feel like his friend. 

“Chill, Trey. I’m just messing with you.” 

I said I knew, then we watched the movie for a moment. “Sit there and shut up,” Chris Tucker said to Jackie Chan as he drove his old school convertible. Marcus was nothing like Chris Tucker. I expected him to be loud and goofy all the time, cocking his head every which way and saying the most ridiculous things. How black people, I thought then and maybe still do now, were supposed to be. “This ain’t no democracy,” Chris Tucker went on. 

 But sometimes I thought he wasn’t just messing with me. And I couldn’t just chill, because the rest of the seventh grade still went along with the “Trey is Gay” trend. Someone spread the rumor I had secret boyfriends from other schools, that I watched YouTube videos of guys making out. I never got a name on who started the whole thing, but the joke was such a hit that I thought people might soon begin believing in it, and I just wanted to disappear from everyone again if it wasn’t going to get old anytime soon. 

“I’m here for the girl,” Jackie Chan said. 

“The girl don’t like you,” Chris Tucker replied. “Nobody likes you. You came all the way over here for nothin’. You ain’t gonna be on—” 

Jackie Chan stopped listening to Tucker and flipped on the radio. Surfin’ U.S.A. 

I suspected Marcus was the one behind the whole thing. It was partly why I started inviting him to my house after our bus rides. I figured if I could find out from him I could kill the joke for good and get on with rest of the year. 

“The Beach Boys are great American music!” Jackie Chan said. 

“The Beach Boys gonna’ get you a great ass whoopin’,” Chris Tucker said. “Don’t you ever touch a black man’s radio, boy!”

It was a beautiful day for early spring. A good sun. Warm enough to remove your jacket at recess. The clear sky promised summer, and the wet bare branches of the trees glistened in the sunlight. On the bus ride home, Marcus and I helped the smaller kids up front put their windows down. We lived in a part of town where there were swimming pools in the backyards and movie theaters in the basements and basketball hoops in the driveways. Where people smiled and waved on the sidewalks. Where clean, new cars backed out of garages. Where kids got all the toys they wanted for Christmas. Where everyone, on the surface, looked the same, with the clothes they bought and the tall houses they lived in, and where everyone could treat each other the same. I remember believing in where I lived, and I remember feeling like I was from a place where there was little difference among us, where we lived like true Americans. 

“But for real,” I said now, making sure not to use brothers again. “We’re cool, right?” 

“Cucumber cool, that’s how cool we are,” Marcus replied. He sucked Cheez-It dust off his thumb, then asked what I meant by cool. 

“Like we got each other’s backs,” I said. “Like we’re always there, no matter what.” I pointed my chin to Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker on the screen. “Like them.” 

Marcus snorted, trying to stifle a laugh. 

“Which one am I?” he said. “Actually, what I’d really like to know, is which one are you?” He pressed his fingers to his temples and pushed the skin back to make Asian eyes. I’d find my son doing the same thing one day, and I’d have to tell him it was wrong, but I’d never confess to him that I had done the same. “Are you Jackie?” 

My hands formed a karate grip. I made wah-wah ninja noises. Marcus jerked his shoulder and popped his shirt, grinning widely, repeating Chris Tucker’s line: “Never touch a black man’s radio.” 

The memory that I have now, the image of myself there on the couch, acting out that poor version of Jackie Chan, has become a blur. I watch on the other side: He resumes the rest of his impression, trying to impress Marcus, but there is nothing to feel or think, there is nothing real about him except for the fear he hides from others, from himself, and when his little show is over, he fades back into the background of everything else, convinced and thrilled he has finally become part of some center he deems valuable and meaningful. But he is too young to understand all of this, and I know now that what I keep in my head, the memory of myself then, is still incomplete. 

Marcus went still, glaring at me, and I felt then I hardly knew him. 

“Yeah, we’re cool,” he said with nothing in his voice. 

Petty whined again, afraid of the silent tension between us. 

Marcus smiled, bent down to pat Petty’s head. 

“Just messing around, Petty,” he said. 

Petty sneezed and kicked his back leg when Marcus scratched his stomach. I could never tell if Marcus accepted me as a real friend. He could talk to anyone, but none of us seemed close to him. Everyone wanted to be, though, because he said things his own way, he had a look no one could match, and, simply, because he was black and the rest of us were white. Or he was partly black. I remember the shock we felt after sixth grade basketball practice when we saw his mother waiting for him, a white woman sitting in the car. 

“That’s your mom?” someone said. 

“You guys seem surprised,” Marcus said with his frown. “You think she changes colors with the seasons or something?”

I had thought, too, that befriending him might offer me a higher, more respectable status in school, and the two of us would share this status separate from the general crowds and cliques everyone else relied on. What I understand now, though, was that I never had any real interest in him, in who he was beyond what I wanted him to be for me. 

I hardly knew him, and he was in my house for only one reason. 

“So we’re cool?” I said. 

“Didn’t we already establish this?” he replied. “Yes, we’re cool, or whatever. Everything’s all good.” He looked down at Petty. “Right?”

“So if we’re cool,” I said, “I need to know if it was you.” 

“If what was me?” 

“Don’t play dumb,” I said. “You know what I’m talking about.”

He stopped eating and set the box of snacks down on the couch. Nothing ever caught him off guard. He was always ready for what was coming, and there was no surprise, no break or hesitation in him. 

“You think I started that?” he said. He crossed his arms, and then said it again. 

“I heard it was you,” I lied. 

“Heard from who?” 

It didn’t matter what he would say or what I would think. I had already made up my mind about him. And I didn’t need to drop a name because he was responsible. It’d be like that for the rest of the year, and whether or not it was true, I decided he was to blame.

“Just go,” I said, staring at the paused screen of the movie. “I let you hang out here and everything, and you just lie to my face.” 

“Whatever.”

There was no hurt in his voice, only a steady firmness, his words heavy with surety, and my eyes were wet for a moment, full of regret for what I said, but I didn’t stop. I told him to get out of my house. I told him this wasn’t over either. I was standing in the doorway and he was walking down the driveway, mocking me in that deep voice of his. 

“Why are you such an asshole?” I said. 

“Funny you should ask,” Marcus said as he made his way up the street to his house. 

Those weren’t the last things we said to each other. I ended up telling a teacher about it, and in return Marcus had to apologize to me, the two of us shaking hands in the principal’s office. Nothing else came out of it after that, though, and the joke died down by the time our class learned that Marcus was moving away in the spring, somewhere in Houston, because of a new job his dad got. I eventually found my way into the center after Marcus was gone. I followed along with the others for some time, and I can’t say when I stopped, only that one day I found myself outside of the center again, ashamed and afraid of myself. 

In my free time at work, I google Marcus on my phone. After some digging, Facebook photos of him appear in the images, old ones from high school and college, nothing new or that relevant. I swipe through the images until I’m not even looking at Marcus anymore but just random pictures of strangers, and I have to turn off my phone again. It frightens me how only two decades ago you had to go to a computer to look someone up or watch a funny video. Now it’s all in your hand and there’s no end and it fucks with your brain and your heart. 

I think of Marcus when my wife and I are getting the kids ready for bed after their baths. His reflection looks back at me in the mirror. He follows me around the house and feeds snacks to the dog on the floor. He sits on the other side of the couch when I’m watching television. At first, he recites a line from Rush Hour, drops a joke with his deep voice, but then he begins telling me about his children and his wife, his house and his job, but he is still young, he is still the same kid on the couch, speaking, waiting for me to listen. 

Tom Roth

Tom Roth teaches creative writing in Cincinnati, Ohio. His most recent publications are in Bridge-Chicago, Mania Magazine, and Miracle Monocle. He earned an MFA from Chatham University. He has a publication forthcoming in The Core Review.