Free Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy Page B

have George’s control. A few times his edges skidded, and his legs felt shaky. The snow was deep but not always soft. Aaron’s headache had returned, or he had begun to notice it again. He felt thirsty, in spite of the two beers. He regretted the beers.
    They skied down to a second steep slope, George still well ahead, and Aaron stopped to catch his breath and rest his knees. Bending over to stretch, he had an attack of vertigo, followed by nausea. For a moment he blamed the burger, but then he recognized the feeling, and understood his growing headache. Bea had been right, that he had forgotten what altitude sickness was like, and how quickly it came on. She had brought a physician’s sample of the pills, but he had told her he didn’t need them, and was too old to be stressing out his kidneys. He sat dizzily against the hillside, to rest a minute.
    He heard a shout, and squinted at the small figure of his brother below, against the white slope. The distant George patted his hand on his head to ask if everything was all right. They had learned the signal as kids in canoes. Aaron didn’t think he could stand, but he patted his head anyway: Everything’s fine . He tried to push himself to his feet, slid a few yards on the backs of his skis, and collapsed into the snow again. There was another shout from George, a more urgent hand signal, which Aaron didn’t bother to answer.
    If they’d had it out when they were younger, really whaled on each other, then maybe it would be out of their systems. They could be civilized to each other now. But George had always been younger, and Aaron too restrained to take advantage of his greater strength. By the time they were the same size, Aaron was in college and didn’t think about his brother. And if he had thought about it, he’d have realized that George could already beat him. He lifted his head and patted the top of it, to show that he was on his way down, but George had started side-stepping up the mountain. He was coming at a good clip. The nausea surged again, and the remains of Aaron’s burger came out in a soupy mess in the snow, between his knees. He coughed, with the taste of bile in his throat. George would never let him forget being rescued from his own puke on the closed black-diamond run. The story would be hauled out every time they were together: Remember that time ? George would regale Claire with her father’s weakness, and Claire would be caught between them, sneaking her father guilty looks.
    He struggled to his feet and stood uneasily, resting on his poles. Then he dug his edges into the hillside and tried to ease into a turn, but lost his balance and fell to his downhill side. It all happened very quickly. The skis went into the air as he rolled, and rolled again. One ski released and skidded free, and the other wheeled with him, and then he slammed into something that turned out to be his brother. They tumbled, and came with George’s help to a tangled stop.
    Aaron groaned, and tried to sit up. He felt warm wetness near his eye, and took off his glove to feel a gash on his forehead that must have been from the edge of a ski, though how and whose, he wasn’t sure.
    “Why didn’t you move?” he asked his brother.
    “I didn’t have time,” George said. “You could have died, hitting a tree.”
    “I could have died hitting you .”
    “That’s my fault?”
    “I have to get to a lower elevation,” Aaron said. “The altitude.”
    “Were you puking?”
    “No.”
    “I saw you.”
    Aaron looked down the hill. He could see the lodge in the distance, the parking lot full of tiny cars. It was such a long way. “I have to get my ski,” he said.
    They tried to stand, and Aaron put his hand on his brother’s shoulder for support. George snarled at him like a wounded dog, and pushed his hand away. “It hurts,” he said.
    Aaron reached to investigate the pain in George’s shoulder—it was what he did all day—and George knocked his arm away with