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the head.
    I learned other things I hadn’t known before, like that Scott had wanted to join the Canadian Armed Forces after high school. Many articles said he was devoted to his two younger sisters, but I already knew that because one of his sisters was my best friend, Jodie.
    I just had a chest pain. Can you have a heart attack when you’re thirteen?
    Anyway. I respected the local reporter because he also dug up a lot of stuff about the constant bullying my brother had put up with, including some incidents my parents and I had never heard about: The “Jesse Larsen’s a Faggot” fan page on Facebook that quickly got shut down, but not beforeJesse saw it – and the fifty-two “fans” it had acquired in less than a week; the “accidental” tripping in the hallway that sent him to the hospital for stitches (we knew about the stitches, of course, but not that Scott had sent him head-first into the water fountain); the dog poop Jesse found in his locker one day. That reporter looked at the story from all sides. But a lot of other articles I read were peppered with lies. Some so-called “experts,” people who didn’t even know us, suggested that my parents must have been abusive, or absent, or stupid.
    These people were wrong. From the beginning of high school, my parents worried about Jesse all the time. They talked to the guidance counselor and to our family doctor a million times. Mom even took Jesse to a therapist once, but Jesse didn’t like her and refused to go back. Mom had him on a waiting list for another one, but then IT happened, and the appointment was no longer necessary.
    The lies that hurt the most were the ones that were told by people we knew. One of our neighbors, an old lady named Alice Clayburn, told a reporter that she’d seen us performing witchcraft in our backyard. I wracked my brain over that one. All I could come up with was that once, about three years ago, I’d found a wounded kingfisher with Jodie, and we’d carried it back to my house in an old towel. Jesse and I kept it in the yard and tried to feed it, but it died thenext day. So we buried it in the yard while Jesse pretended to be a minister, saying stuff like, “We commit his body to the ground,” which he’d heard on a TV show.
    Witchcraft, my butt. And to think that Jesse had mowed that old bag’s lawn two summers in a row. For free!!
    Gord Saunders, one of Jesse’s classmates, told a national newspaper that when Jesse was ten, he used to torture cats for fun.
    LIE!!!! And the paper printed it!!!! I wanted to find Gord
and
the reporter after that and give them both the Testicular Claw.
    It was like Jesse was one person when he was alive and another after he died. When he was alive, Jesse was the babyface. Scott was the heel. But the day Jesse took Dad’s rifle to school, they switched roles. Scott became the babyface, and Jesse became the heel.
    Oh, man. I suddenly get why Cecil seemed so pleased in our last session. I’d been talking about wrestling; he’d been talking about my brother.
    One big glaring difference, Cecil.
    On “Saturday Night Smash-Up,” everyone comes out of it alive.

M ONDAY , F EBRUARY 4
    INTRIGUING FACT: The most poisonous animals on earth are often the most colorful. Why? Because they
want
to be seen. That way predators have to eat only a couple of them before their buddies go, “Hang on. If I eat this colorful dart frog/coral snake/monarch butterfly, I’m going to die a very painful death, just like my buddy Bob!” Pretty soon everyone knows to leave them alone.
    Alberta is a human version of the dart frog. You can’t help but notice her; but you learn very quickly that she’s toxic.
    Like today in Home Ec. I sat at the sewing machine facing hers. Alberta was wearing a cut-off jean skirt with green-and-white striped tights underneath and a powder blue T-shirt with a picture of a tabby cat in a sweater, playing the piano. On her head was a red beret.
    “Okay, class,” said Mrs. Bardus,