Three Weeks With My Brother by Nicholas Sparks, Micah Sparks Page A

every man for himself—and there was no real end to the game either. You simply kept hiding and hunting and shooting each other until dinnertime, when everyone had to go home. There were only two rules: no shooting in the face, and you could only pump the BB gun twice (which limited the velocity somewhat); but even those were more “guidelines” than strictly enforced rules. Consequently, everyone cheated. There was a perverse joy in shooting at someone, hearing them scream, and watching them dance in circles holding the wound, trying to get rid of the sting. Of course, what goes around comes around, and I spent years with welts all over my body. On more occasions than I can remember, each of us had to push out a BB that had embedded itself into our skin.
    Micah, though, always seemed to suffer injuries worse than any of us. Part of it was because he was always pushing, always trying to do more. Once when he was playing with his BB gun in a garbage-strewn abandoned house, he thought it would be fun to kick out the rest of a window that had long since been broken. I suppose he was imitating what he saw people do on television, but no one told him that on TV they use special glass that doesn’t shatter. Anyway, after kicking out the window and shooting someone circling the house, he knew it was time to find the next hiding place, and started to leave.
    The next thing he knew, he heard a squishing noise coming from his shoe. Figuring that he must have stepped in a puddle of some unknown liquid, he kept going, trying to ignore it.
    As he put it, “But I realized the squishing only seemed to be growing louder. When I looked down at my shoe, I noticed that my sock was turning pink, and my shoe was soaked. Obviously, I told myself, I’d stepped in some wine left behind by some teenagers. So there I was, step, squish, step, squish. And I could feel my foot getting slimier, and then I suddenly realized that I must have cut myself on the glass. So I sat down and took off my shoe. My sock and shoe were soaked in blood, and all of a sudden, the blood spurts from a cut over my ankle like water from a drinking fountain. It spurted high with every heartbeat. Looking back, I must have cut—or at least nicked—an artery, because it was really spurting.”
    He yelled for his friend, who came running. Using the bloody sock, they put a tourniquet on the ankle, and with his friend’s help my brother hobbled home and called for my mom.
    Because it was a weekend, she happened to be at home and she examined his ankle as it spurted blood all over the kitchen linoleum.
    “Looks pretty bad,” she said succinctly. And as always, she knew exactly what to do.
    She stuck a Band-Aid on it.
    Then she told Micah to put his hand over the Band-Aid, and told him he might want to rest it for a while before he went outside to play again.
    As wild as we were, my mom always made it a point to bring us to church every Sunday, and that continued in California. My brother and I were often bored and would poke each other. The challenge, however, was that the other wasn’t allowed to flinch, and the poker couldn’t appear to be moving, so that our mother wouldn’t catch us.
    Dana didn’t like this particular game very much, and while my mother didn’t know what was going on, my sister certainly did. She took church very seriously—because our mom did, I suppose, and she wanted to be just like her—and in between her prayers, she would frown at us, trying to get us to stop.
    Dana loved to pray. She prayed in the morning, she prayed at night. She asked God to bless everyone she knew, one at a time. She prayed for relatives and friends and strangers, dogs and cats and animals at the zoo. She prayed to become kinder and more patient, despite the fact that she didn’t need help in either department. She seemed completely at ease with the world, and had a way of making others comfortable around her. In her own gentle way, my sister had quietly become the rock