Free Hold Still by Lynn Steger Strong

she’s what’s dangerous about the place where they live.
    Her brother: he still looks like a little boy to Ellie. He was shorter than most of his classmates in middle school, and rounder. Ellie’s mom would rub her hands over his cheeks and smile at him and Ellie’d want to grab her mom’s hand and remindher she was hers. But then suddenly, sometime at the end of middle school, he’d shot straight up, all crooked aimless height and limbs, twisted and folded and hanging over couches, curled up in the backseat of the car.
    â€œMom’s pissed,” he says, walking to the left of her, separating Ellie from the street.
    â€œI don’t want to talk about it, Benny.”
    â€œEl.”
    â€œWhat’s it like?” she says. “Being the good one. Don’t you get bored?”
    â€œPlease, El.” He looks angry.
    She doesn’t want to hear his answer.
    He says, “The only person who’s allowed to think in terms of what they want in our family is you.”
    She wants to start again. Her brother is the only person in the world she always likes.
    â€œI’m sorry, Benny,” she says. “I’m trying this time, though, okay? Please?”
    â€œSure,” he says, not looking at her.
    â€œAnd you’re free of me now anyway. She’s shipping me off, and you’re a college kid.” She loops her arm through his elbow. He keeps his arm limp, but doesn’t pull away. “Seems like you’re having plenty of fun up at school.”
    He called her the second month of classes. He’d tried LSD. There had briefly been a girlfriend. He’d been crying. Her little brother. He sounded six years old. A friend of his had had the tabs and they’d slipped them on their tongues and let them melt while sitting on the dirty couch at some off-campus party. “Oh, Benny,” she kept saying, as he blubbered at her, “it’s not the seventies.”
    â€œMy mind is wild ,” he said.
    Ellie swallowed a laugh.
    â€œI can’t make it stop,” her brother said.
    He’d run out of the party. The music was too loud, he told her. It was too hot. There were too many people. Too, too, too. He’d run out onto the street and almost been run over by a Camry.
    Even the cars that almost hit him were reasonable and good.
    She’d talked to him until he fell asleep. He became more and more coherent and she ached to go to him. To curl up with him in his tiny dorm bed and tell stories like they had when they were little. He hated soccer. He’d met a girl. Ellie’d seen her Facebook pictures. She’d texted her brother immediately. “Stay away,” she’d said. It took a girl like her to know another one. And then the week after that Benny called with the LSD scare, and once they’d hung up Ellie couldn’t help but smile at herself. Her poor sweet brother: he’d called her.
    â€œI thought I’d be so happy to be free of all your shit,” he says now. He bumbles through, but talks more than he maybe ever has. Ellie eats slowly, mostly picking at her omelet, watching her brother form before her eyes.
    â€œBut you know the most fucked-up thing?” he says. “You’re the only person I can talk to. You’re awful and you continue to make everybody else’s life impossible, but I still think about you all the time and worry whether you’re okay.”
    It was the way she seemed to always be suggesting that there was something somewhere that she could be doing that was more exciting than the thing everyone else was doing around her, he said. The way she had a place she went sometimes when she was right in front of you that could make you feel like, nomatter what you did or said, it wasn’t as good as what she was refusing to do or say in front of you.
    Before he left he’d felt it was his job, in the face of her, to act as some kind of corrective for their parents. He