Read Half Brother for Free Online Page B

floor.
    “That’s bad, Zan!” I shouted. “Bad boy!”
    I grabbed a towel and dried myself off. Zan made a little playful pant-hoot up at me.
    “Oh, you think it’s funny?” I said. “How about if I pee on you? Would you like that?”
    I was undoing my zipper when Dad came into the room.
    “What’s going on?” he asked, looking at me sternly.
    “Zan peed all over me!”
    Dad looked at my open zipper. “Were you going to pee on him, Ben?”
    “Maybe,” I muttered, pulling up my pants.
    “Ben, he’s just a baby. Of course he’s going to pee on you sometimes.”
    “I don’t see him peeing on
you!
Why don’t you change your freaky little son once in a while?”
    “Ben, you’re shouting,” Dad said calmly.
    Zan was watching all this, looking solemnly from me to Dad, like he was trying to figure out what was going on.
    “Mom asked you to babysit for just a couple hours,” Dad went on. “Does that seem so unreasonable? Two hours?”
    “Two hours more than you,” I shot back.
    “You need to work on controlling your temper, young man.”
    Control.
Another one of Dad’s favourite words.
    I looked back at Zan and felt my anger wash away. His eyes were huge. Above his backside he had this little white tuft of hair, which all babies had for the first few years. It was very cute. He rolled over and I dropped down beside him and started tickling him. His eyebrows shot up and he grinned, and his arms and legs pulled in with excitement. He never gottired of this, and the harder you tickled, the more he seemed to like it. He shrieked with glee. Pretty soon I was laughing too. Whenever I stopped and held my hands over him, he’d freeze, silent, and look at me with his eyes wide and expectant. Then, when my hands dived back down, he’d start panting and kicking again.
    “Get him in a diaper, pronto,” Dad told me.
    “It’s not so easy,” I said.
    “Don’t let him get away with it, Ben. You’ve got to be firm.” “I
was
firm.”
    “He’s only going to get more stubborn. The way we treat him now is going to affect his behaviour the rest of his life. Show him you mean business.”
    And with that, Dad bent down, grabbed Zan from behind, and picked him up.
    I think Zan must have been startled, because he gave a little shriek, turned, and bit Dad on the wrist.
    It wasn’t a real bite—because Zan’s baby teeth hadn’t even come in yet. But Dad’s expression darkened. He held Zan up so they were face to face.
    “No, Zan!” he said, with a stern shake of his head. “No!”
    Zan’s eyes got so big his body seemed to shrink.
    “You’re scaring him, Dad!” I said.
    “Good,” said Dad. “He needs to know that’s unacceptable. We can’t have him biting. Just wait till his teeth come. Now get him in a diaper, please.” He passed Zan to me and left the room.
    Zan lay very, very still on the diaper mat and just watched me while I changed him. Dad was right: being strict seemedto do the trick, but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Zan. We could put him in diapers and pretend he was a baby, but he was still a chimp, and chimps bit sometimes. I’d read in one of Mom’s books that they bit each other in play. Their skin was so much thicker than ours, they didn’t feel it as much.
    I’d even let Zan nip me a few times when he was overexcited, but I guess I should have been harsher with him when he did it.
    He wasn’t allowed to be a chimp. He had to be a human.
    That night after dinner, Tim Borden dropped by and we went out on our bikes.
    I’d been spending a fair amount of time with him over the summer, which surprised me, because we didn’t really have a ton in common. Maybe we were both just bored. It didn’t matter. It got me out of the house, away from poopy diapers.
    We’d mostly ride around, or hang out in his basement, playing pinball and Monopoly and Risk and taking peeks at his father’s magazines. We spent time at my place too. I was a bit nervous the first time I showed him Zan. I