Free Hold Still by Lynn Steger Strong Page A

was Good and Safe and Dependable. Sometimes he went out with friends and sometimes girls stood too close to him at parties. And sometimes he let them corner him in the kitchen of whoever’s parents’ apartment they were at that time and he’d kiss them. But he never let them lead him to another room. Everything he knew about girls—his mom, his sister—told him they couldn’t be trusted. There was nothing to be sure of when they got you alone.
    Once he got to college there had finally been a girl with whom he’d wanted to escape no matter what happened, no matter how out of control she made him feel. But then she’d turned out to be just as batshit as he knew she would. She fucked him in the dirty bed of some frat dude who had sheets with race cars on them and a hard white stain in the middle and then cried herself to sleep. She was almost too skinny, just like his sister. Just like his mom. He’d tried to hold her as she slept, all those bones jutting up against him, but she’d slipped from him and then asked him to please not talk to her as they dressed later and left.
    He was exhausted by and avoided the soccer guys. They were all such bros, a term he hadn’t understood until leaving New York. They grunted at one another. They took off their shirts. They said “screw” when they talked about sleeping with girls and called each other “fag” and “homo.” He found himself missing his sister more and more. He wasn’t as impressive when he wasn’t being constantly compared to her.
    He’d taken a philosophy class and macroeconomics. Though he loved it, he’d almost failed philosophy. He got so excited about the assignments he usually ended up not answering the questionsthat were asked, but going on for pages about some tangential idea that interested him more than the specific prompt. He got an A in econ only because it was so mind-numbingly boring that he had taken vigorous notes in order to stay awake.
    â€œI started saying I was an econ major at parties, just to see if people thought that might seem like a thing a person like me might do.”
    He’s managed to consume completely his stack of pancakes. Now, as he talks, Ellie dips her finger in the syrup.
    She wants to tell him that she’s sorry. It was supposed to be her job to take care of him. When they were very small, when their mom disappeared, before he didn’t seem to need her anymore, Ellie would spend hours concocting games to distract him from their mom having locked herself inside her office again. Ellie could always tell when their mom had decided she couldn’t be their mom for a little while. (When she disappeared, her voice changed, the look of her was firmer in the jaw, tight around the eyes and mouth. Her gestures were all slow and heavy and she flinched sometimes if either Ben or Ellie came too close.) They had adventures among their dad’s flowers, dressed in hats with nets and magnifying glasses, with picks and shovels, in search of unknown treasures, sometimes digging up some of their dad’s plants accidentally, frantically replanting them, laughing, before he came home (he never noticed, was fastidious in his work even in the time he spent out in the garden, but Ellie figured he didn’t think quite enough about his children, when he wasn’t with them, to imagine that it might have been his kids, and not the weather or a bird, who had dug up or overturned his plants), building forts in the bunk beds in Ben’s room, piling up blanket after blanket until they might as well have not been in their house anymore, until their whole world was just color after color all around them,and they could lie back and Ellie’d read aloud to her brother, or they’d tell each other secrets, about nothing, really, about people that they knew or neighbors that they’d never spoken to, that, often, they just made up on the spot. Ben would wind