like a warrior that way, the type of God who would unleash a swarm of arrows on anyone who tried to hurt us.
“You dream weird things,” I said.
He wasn’t finished making his point. “And then Dad went to that seminar and Mom went to get her hair done, and we’re both alone in the house with the fridge. That’s a sign too.”
I stifled the urge to tell him that me being alone with a fridge was nothing unusual. “What are we going to say when she asks us where the mushrooms and zucchini went? She’s not going to believe the ‘Geronimo’s boot camp’ thing.”
“I don’t know,” he said, but I could tell he wasn’t really giving it much thought. He had the same look on his face he’d had earlier, when he’d stood by the stove stirring one pan of zucchini and one pan of mushrooms. He was hard-eyed and square-jawed, obviously taking this boot camp thing seriously.
“Geronimo has no idea how much I hate mushrooms,” I said.
“Yes, he does.”
“I don’t think I can do it.”
He reached for the bowl of fried mushrooms and handed it to me; then he took the bowl of fried zucchini wedges and held it up to his face.
“What does it smell like?” I asked.
“Zucchini. You?”
I sniffed at the mushrooms without bringing them too close to my face, just in case my gag reflexes were smell-sensitive. “Mushrooms. Cold mushrooms. And a little bit like the boxes of bait we used to buy at the cabin. You think they’d taste any better if we warmed them up?”
He shook his head and used his fingers to take two pieces of zucchini from his bowl. That Toto music had really made him brave. “You take some out too,” he instructed, his eyes riveted to the green triangles he held.
I gagged when my fingers touched the slimy mushroom slices. “I can’t.”
“You can.”
“Trey . . .”
“Come on, Shelby.” There was something desperate in his voice. Like my failure would make him look weak too.
I picked up a couple pieces of mushroom and watched them flop against my fingers like slices of slug. “I can’t eat them, Trey. There’s no way.” It was all I could do to quell the impulse to fling them off my fingers into a far corner of the attic.
“Just do one of your persuasive speeches on yourself,” Trey said with growing tenseness. I could hear him swallowing loudly from time to time. “Tell yourself it’s not going to kill you. . . .”
“I might throw up.”
“But you won’t die. And then next time Mom fixes them and Dad’s all Godzilla, you’ll be able to eat them.” He was trying so hard to be persuasive, but I could tell he hadn’t made an outline in his mind.
“I can’t.”
“You have to.”
“I can’t, Trey!”
I felt him gathering himself next to me. When he spoke again, it was in a quiet, certain voice I’d seldom heard from him before. He sounded deeper somehow. And farther away too. “If you can eat those mushrooms, he won’t be able to scare you with them anymore. He won’t be able to make you cry . . . or feel like dirt . . . or less than dirt . . . or . . . or anything. Not with the mushrooms. Not anymore.”
“There’ll still be all the rest.”
“Yeah, but there won’t be this. It’s one less thing, and we’re deciding he can’t have it.”
I watched him drop the zucchini into his mouth and chew methodically, a red flush growing out of the collar of his Bulls T-shirt and moving up toward his jaw. He swallowed hard, froze for a moment, then swallowed again. “See?” he said, looking at me. There was sweat on his upper lip.
I closed my eyes and brought the mushrooms to my mouth. I gagged when they touched my tongue, then again when I tried to chew. I felt tears eking out between my eyelids as I gagged over and over, finally forcing the mushrooms to the back of my mouth to swallow them.
Trey was handing me a glass of water when I opened my eyes. He had more zucchini in his other hand. “You need to chew them this time,” he said.
“You’re eating more?” I asked incredulously, awed and humbled by my brother’s outrageous courage.
“Geronimo wants us to practice,” he said.
And emboldened by my brother’s fierce conviction that Geronimo had orchestrated the challenge to defeat my father’s next assault, I took another deep breath and reached for more mushrooms.