My fingers slipped over the trophies on Dean’s shelf, tracing the outlines of the statuettes. A plastic boy in a crouch with the ball tucked under his arm. Another with a bat over his shoulder. One with a basketball in hand, preparing to dribble. Most valuable player. Most improved. Captain. Most points. Most tackles. All proudly displayed on those shelves.
As a kid, I would lie in bed with a book in hand as Dean sat hunched over his desk, struggling through his homework. I pretended to read, but really, I stared across the hall through his open door at those trophies taunting me with his successes.
I pretended they didn’t matter to me and mocked them, calling them a bunch of cheap trinkets just to irritate him. Mostly, I had resented them. Awards didn’t come to average students like me who blended into the background. Not excelling at sports or academics or much of anything.
The only awards I ever got were participation trophies, and I hated those. They screamed average. Unimportant. Not like the superstar jocks.
In my angst-filled youth, I thought that was all of him. A jock. A dumb jock. How many times had I thought those words, not just about Dean, but his friends too?
I’d never really looked at Blake and thought of him as anything else. Never paid attention to the bruises. Or thought that maybe he hung out with his friends and played so many sports because he was scared to go home. Maybe he picked on kids smaller than him because that’s all he knew.
But Dean figured it out. Every adult in Blake’s life failed to protect him, but his teenaged friends found a way. No most-valuable-player trophy marked the simple act of sleeping on a friend’s sofa in order to keep him safe.
What else had I missed because of my self-absorbed thoughts?
My eyes moved to the pictures on Dean’s wall. A baseball team here. Football team there. Junior high wrestling team, a sport I had forgotten he’d even done. The boys stood shoulder to shoulder, serious looks on their faces.
For the first time, though, I noticed the more candid photos in frames. A celebration of a win. Teammates in a huddle. A group of boys fishing on a riverbank. Not posed but smiling faces and twinkling eyes. And Dean’s arm was draped over a friend’s shoulder in more than a few. He was at the center of the group, supporting them all. How many other sofas had he slept on, doing something uncomfortable because it helped someone? How often had he done that for me?
I crossed back to my room, grabbed the scrapbook off my desk, and settled onto my bed. I opened the book to the beginning then flipped slowly through the pages, really seeing them for the first time. Understanding what they meant.
Dean and I at three or four years old, playing with blocks on the den floor as sunshine flooded through the window. On that beautiful day, he could have been outside, but we were together inside. Had he stayed with me to keep me entertained after I had an allergy attack?
In a picture from a few years later—we were maybe eight or nine years old—I was sitting in the tire swing while Dean and Russ pushed. All three of us were laughing.
A shot at the river showed Dean holding up a fish he’d caught. Russ and Blake were sitting near him with their own lines cast in the water and cheering for him. In the background, I leaned against a tree with a book in my hand, watching them from a distance.
Dad and Dean stood in the yard, working on the tractor together, both wearing overalls, with grease smeared over their faces. I sat on the front steps, watching them.
Dean, wearing a baseball uniform, leapt through the air to jump on the home plate. Russ, Blake, and others were waiting to celebrate his home run. Mom and Dad stood cheering, beaming proudly. I sat on the bleachers with my arms crossed and a scowl on my face.
Did Dean push me away? Or did I retreat? For every time he hid a snake in my bed, he’d also scooped me up and carried me home to find my inhaler. And because of a stupid accident, I’d never had the time to figure it out and tell him.
I leaned back on my bed and closed my eyes. Visions of the accident-scene photographs flickered through my mind. The twisted metal. The boot prints in the mud. The shattered windshield. The blood-splattered seats. The dangling graduation tassel.