Blood Brothers Page 0,10

he used the belt on me. Why would anybody want to feel like that?"

Careful to avoid the welts on Gage's back, Cal draped an arm over his shoulders. He wished he knew what to say.

"Soon as I'm old enough I'm getting out. Join the army maybe, or get a job on a freighter, maybe an oil rig."

Gage's eyes gleamed when he lifted his head, and Cal looked away because he knew the shine was tears. "You can come stay with us when you need to."

"It'd just be worse when I went back. But I'm going to be ten in a few hours. And in a few years I'll be as big as he is. Bigger maybe. I won't let him come after me then. I won't let him hit me. Screw it." Gage rubbed his face. "Let's wake Fox up. Nobody sleeps tonight."

Fox moaned and grumbled, and he got himself up to pee and fetch a cool Coke from the stream. They shared it with another round of Little Debbies. And, at last, the copy of Penthouse.

Cal had seen naked breasts before. You could see them in the National Geographic in the library, if you knew where to look.

But these were different.

"Hey guys, did you ever think about doing it?" Cal asked.

"Who doesn't?" they both replied.

"Whoever does it first has to tell the other two everything. All about how it feels," Cal continued. "And how you did it, and what she does. Everything. I call for an oath."

A call for an oath was sacred. Gage spat on the back of his hand, held it out. Fox slapped his palm on, spat on the back of his hand, and Cal completed the contact.

"And so we swear," they said together.

They sat around the fire as the stars came out, and deep in the woods an owl hooted its night call.

The long, sweaty hike, ghostly apparitions, and beer puke were forgotten.

"We should do this every year on our birthday," Cal decided. "Even when we're old. Like thirty or something. The three of us should come here."

"Drink beer and look at pictures of naked girls," Fox added. "I call for-"

"Don't." Gage spoke sharply. "I can't swear. I don't know where I'm going to go, but it'll be somewhere else. I don't know if I'll ever come back."

"Then we'll go where you are, when we can. We're always going to be best friends." Nothing would change that, Cal thought, and took his own, personal oath on it. Nothing ever could. He looked at his watch. "It's going to be midnight soon. I have an idea."

He took out his Boy Scout knife and, opening the blade, held it in the fire.

"What's up?" Fox demanded.

"I'm sterilizing it. Like, ah, purifying it." It got so hot he had to pull back, blow on his fingers. "It's like Gage said about ritual and stuff. Ten years is a decade. We've known each other almost the whole time. We were born on the same day. It makes us...different," he said, searching for words he wasn't quite sure of. "Like special, I guess. We're best friends. We're like brothers."

Gage looked at the knife, then into Cal 's face. "Blood brothers."

"Yeah."

"Cool." Already committed, Fox held out his hand.

"At midnight," Cal said. "We should do it at midnight, and we should have some words to say."

"We'll swear an oath," Gage said. "That we mix our blood, um, three into one? Something like that. In loyalty."

"That's good. Write it down, Cal."

Cal dug pencil and paper out of his pack. "We'll write words down, and say them together. Then we'll do the cut and put our wrists together. I've got Band-Aids for after if we need them."

Cal wrote the words with his Number Two pencil on the blue lined paper, crossing out when they changed their minds.

Fox added more wood to the fire so that the flames crackled as they stood by the Pagan Stone.

At moments to midnight, they stood, three young boys with faces lit by fire and starlight. At Gage's nod, they spoke together in voices solemn and achingly young.

"We were born ten years ago, on the same night, at the same time, in the same year. We are brothers. At the Pagan Stone we swear an oath of loyalty and truth and brotherhood. We mix our blood."

Cal sucked in a breath and geared up the courage to run the knife across his wrist first. "Ouch."

"We mix our blood." Fox gritted his teeth as Cal cut his wrist.

"We mix our blood." And Gage