Brood by Chase Novak

Author:Chase Novak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2014-10-16T16:00:00+00:00

Adam stands in the tub adjusting the temperature of the shower. He frowns because the water pressure sucks here in this ramshackle apartment on Riverside Drive—it’s worse than the worst of the foster homes Adam drifted through over the two years between his parents’ deaths and his aunt Cynthia adopting him.

He winces. Thinking of Cynthia makes him feel bad for a moment. He knows she is worried. Oh, well, there’s nothing to be done about it…

The water temperature is right, or at least as right as he is going to get it. He looks down and sees the water pooling over the drain, which, as Rodolfo warned him, is clogged with hair. There’s an economy-sized bottle of Liquid-Plumr on the side of the tub, but when Adam picks it up, he can feel it’s empty.

Adam steps into the spray of water broadcast by the shower’s corroded head. He lifts his right arm and worriedly runs his finger along his armpit’s moist skin. A single, nearly invisible hair is growing, and he pinches the top of it and yanks it out. He hunches his shoulder until it touches his cheek and sniffs. A very faint odor of something that reminds him of turkey soup. Uh-oh. He is on constant lookout for early signs that his body is transforming, and he knows that a change in your body’s smell—a deepening, an intensifying—is an early volley puberty shoots across the bow of childhood. Next thing you know, the pirates of adolescence have boarded your ship…

Adam grabs the soap. Once this perfumed bar was animal fat, and now it seems to be reverting to its original state. Hairs, long and short, dark and yellowish, are embedded everywhere in that slippery pinkish parallelogram. Adam tries to pick the hairs out of the soap, but there are too many, and he is defeated by the hopelessness of the task. He decides the hot water alone will be enough to wash him clean. He steps farther into the spray, letting the water beat against the top of his head. He tilts back, opens his mouth, and lets the water fill it. He glances down at his lower half. Every time he visually visits this part of his body, his heart quivers with anxiety—one day his stuff is going to be bigger, encircled by a disgusting doughnut of hair; one day the silvery down on his shins is going to darken and curl. Who knows? Even the knuckles on his toes might sprout their own wiry vegetation.

He inspects himself through a squint. So far, so good.

His shower completed, Adam steps out of the tub. The racks are jammed with towels, and the black-and-white-tile floor is strewn with everything from washcloths to bath sheets, not one of them dry, all of them redolent. Adam chooses the least gross one he can find and quickly dries himself as best he can, keeping his eyes half closed so he won’t see something on his own body he doesn’t care to see.

Rodolfo—whom

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