Read Online Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul on Tough Stuff by Jack Canfield - Free Book Online Page A

down the street, slapstick-style, with a sheepish look on his face and handlebars in his hands, steering into thin air. I only heard bits and pieces of what the baby-sitter was trying to tell me—
    â€œ. . . With the towel soaked in blood . . .”
    I was going to tease him when he got home with his stitches—
    â€œ. . . Couldn’t find the tooth . . .”
    My mind was chattering to itself, to block out a feeling I wasn’t quite familiar with. I was afraid. It wasn’t funny anymore, and yet I heard a surge of hysterical laughter coming from my mouth—
    â€œ. . . Surgery . . . we don’t know . . .”
    I sat down to let it sink in. And to calm myself. Daniel didn’t come home that night. My big brother finally wandered in—he had been crying, though he would never admit it now. He gave me the story, as he knew it.
    My little brother had been racing down a steep hill on a borrowed bike. All of a sudden, a screw fell off and the handlebars of his bike were no longer attached to the rest of the bike. He had no helmet on. If a car had been coming, it would have hit him. Luckily, Daniel skidded sideways into the gravel on the shoulder of the road. Face first.
    If he had hit at a slightly sharper angle, he would have broken his neck.
    My little brother lay bleeding by a ditch while his friends turned their bikes around and rode back up the hill. Somehow, the two other little boys managed to get him to the nearest parent.
    Daniel lost his tooth completely. His skin was horribly scarred. My little brother had to endure a series of oral surgeries. I felt sick at heart—his face was a swollen mess, black and blue and bright red. I almost cried every time he smiled, his gash of a mouth opening to reveal a horribly jagged line of teeth and gums. But he didn’t smile much because it hurt. My poor baby brother.
    If you look at him now, you would never guess that Daniel had ever had an accident. His porcelain tooth is perfect. His skin, miraculously, healed without even the hint of a scar. When he smiles, it doesn’t hurt.
    And now we’re pretty much even. It takes a lot to scare a big sister.
    Natalie Atkins

Sixty-Second Flashback
    I sit in my Honda Civic stopped at a red light, staring straight ahead, when I catch a glimpse of a white Subaru. Out of habit, I turn my head to see if it is someone I know, someone I love deeply but haven’t seen in three months—to see if it is Zach, my older brother, my other half. The man driving the Subaru reminds me an awful lot of Zach, but it’s not Zach.
    Suddenly, I drift off into my memories and remember all the things about my brother I love and miss so much. I think of how his dishwater blond hair would curl, and how he would try so hard to straighten it by wearing a baseball hat until his hair was dry, or by plastering it with gel, only to make it curl even more. I think of how he would get angry with me for trying to wear his baggy pants and shirts so I could look like him. He wanted to be his own person. I remember how, whenever I was down, he would hug me and tell me how beautiful I was and then cheer me up even more by cracking some off-the-wall joke. He had a sense of humor that, no matter how upset somebody was, could always make that person laugh.
    I recalled a conversation he and I had when I was fourteen and he was eighteen. We were both going through a tough time with our parents, though our situations were different. We were driving in his Subaru, practically brand-new then, and for the first time he opened up to me. I felt like he looked at me as his equal instead of his little sister. He began talking to me about how much he loved music and how music was his outlet for stress when things got too rough for him to handle. He looked me in the eyes, which he rarely did because he usually avoided direct eye contact, and he told me that I also possessed something deep down that would allow me to create when I felt I