From Ant to Eagle(2)

Oh crust.

The wasps swarmed thickly around him, so I locked the door.

He fumbled with the handle, struggling with his winter gloves. It took a few seconds for him to realize it was locked.

“Open the door!” he wailed.

Through the thick fog in his goggles, I saw his eyes start to tear. He banged at the door but I didn’t let him in. I couldn’t. They would have stuck me like a pincushion.

“Run around, run around! They can’t get you when you’re running!” I yelled.

“They’re stinging my arms!”

By now Sammy was hysterical and not listening. He fell defeated and sobbing by the foot of the door and it took nearly ten minutes for the cloud of wasps to disappear enough for me to open the door and drag him in.

I saw it instantly—the chink in his armour. His Achilles’ heel. Except it wasn’t a heel so much as a wrist. I’d forgotten that Mom had said Sammy needed a new snowsuit. There was about four inches of bare skin between his gloves and sleeves, and I could already see a few red bumps forming. The look on Sammy’s face was a mix of pain and anger; I pretended not to notice.

The rest of the day, I went out of my way to be extra nice. In total there were six battle wounds—two on his right wrist, four on his left. Dark red splotches with a white bump in the middle. I knew that if he were still upset when Mom and Dad got home I’d be in trouble, so I brought him ice to put on the stings and told him how brave I thought he was. But it didn’t matter. He sat sulking on the couch and nothing I did or said could make him feel better. Finally, I thought of the one way I could always get Sammy to cheer up.

I ran up the creaky wooden steps to the second level of our house. Sammy and I shared a bedroom at the end of the hall. Our room was small with nothing but a dresser, bunk beds and a night table with an old lamp on it. The lampshade was tilted and broken. Since our room faced east, we always left one of Mom’s quilts over the window so the sun didn’t wake us too early in the morning.

I ran to the bedside and dropped to my knees. The storage space under the beds was split half-and-half but Sammy didn’t really understand what a half was, so my side was bigger.

I pulled out a tin cookie container and opened it up. Inside there was an assortment of crinkled papers and an old, leather-bound journal. I grabbed the journal and raced back downstairs.

Sammy was sitting on the sofa looking through his baseball card binder. I walked up with an air of importance about me, trying to draw attention to the journal beneath my arm.

When he didn’t look up, I shut his binder.

“Hey! I’m looking at those!” Sammy said angrily, but when he saw the journal he sat up quickly. “Do I get a Level?”

“I’ve been going through the details of today’s mission over and over again trying to figure out if it warranted a Level. On the one hand, it could be argued that the mission was a complete failure. Many wounds were sustained and I’ve since looked at the enemy’s fortress and little seems to have changed in the way of their numbers.” Sammy’s smile faded and disappointment flooded his face. “BUT…Levels aren’t based only on the success of a mission. Things like valour, bravery, courage, and commitment to the team are also factored in. After long hours of meticulously examining every detail of today’s operation, the committee has decided to award you your next Level.” Sammy’s eyes brightened, his lips started to form a smile but he quickly suppressed it as much as he could; he knew what a serious occasion receiving a Level was.

In the two years since I’d inaugurated the Level system as a method to make my little brother do nearly anything, he had slowly but surely passed through a number of Levels in exchange for the hardships I’d put him through. Ant—his first—was received for sticking his finger in a crayfish’s claw to see how much it hurt; Fly was awarded for sneaking down one night to steal food from the fridge because I was hungry, a mission he was caught for but never confessed my involvement; Beetle for retrieving our basketball from deep within Mom’s rosebushes; Worm for eating a worm; Snail for mowing the lawn all summer for me, a Level that was revoked when Dad told him he wasn’t allowed to do my work, but that was regained for not telling on me when I stuck a stick in the spokes of his bike and made him fall. His last Level, Rabbit, was for lying to Mom and telling her that he had broken the lampshade in our room.

I was already the highest Level possible, Eagle. Of course, I’d never actually done anything to get it. I just made up elaborate stories of walking over lava and fighting dinosaurs and eating scorpions and told Sammy it had all happened before he was born. He believed every word of it. He believed anything I said.

“Sammy, the committee has decided to award you the Level of Fox for the bravery you demonstrated today in Operation Bee Elimination. Of course, like all missions, the information is completely classified.”

“What does classified mean?” Sammy asked.

“It means the same thing as Top Secret, you can’t tell anyone. All missions are classified. You didn’t know that?”

“Oh…no.” Sammy looked disappointed with himself.

“It’s a word they say in the army. Only people who actually do the missions can know about them. If you tell anyone something that’s classified you get shot.” Sammy’s eyes went wide. “So yeah, don’t tell anyone about our mission.”