Free Going Home Again by Dennis Bock

of tail, Bellerose,” he’d say, and I’d tell him thanks, but I was all right for now. On Saturday mornings they played ball hockey in the house league and afterward went off drinking for the rest of the day. Icleared out on the weekends they brought the team back to the house. I’d go to the pool on campus or find a carrel at the library and read all day. There was always a stack of novels I had to get through. During the week they studied incessantly and rarely got home before midnight. I admired how they could turn that switch on and off in their heads.
    It was a Thursday night when my brother called. I was home alone—doing what, I can’t remember—but I know I was alone. I’d just broken it off with Sandra, the volleyball player. We had decided to go to the same university after a couple of good months together in high school, and things hadn’t worked out as well as we’d hoped. When I answered the phone, I heard my brother’s voice. Two years had passed since we’d last seen each other. “Uncle Hugh gave me your number. He figured I should give you a call. So I’m calling.”
    His team, the Syracuse Orange, had been eliminated in the second round of the conference finals, and now he was sitting in a dumpy hotel room somewhere downtown with a couple of his teammates watching TV and drinking Courvoisier. I heard noises in the background, loud talking and laughing, and a girl’s voice. Nate had captained the lacrosse team in high school and won most of the medals and ribbons that counted, and now he was trying to do the same in university. I couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t surrounded by girls. He knew how to talk to them, and what to say, and after some exchange in the school hallway—chuckling to himself as he sauntered past my locker, where I stood helpless, two years his junior andin awe—he would turn to the girl I was trying to talk to, or to the girl two lockers down who smiled at me from time to time, and whom I dreamed of at night, and he’d talk to her effortlessly or make a wisecrack at my expense that made her laugh and look at her feet and forget all about me once he walked off down the hall. It was like a game to him. When he ended up winning a lacrosse scholarship to Syracuse University, I was relieved to see him go.
    Nate’s hotel was in a part of the city I wasn’t familiar with. It was a cold night, and the taxi’s headlights caught the colors of the leaves drifting over the street, and when the driver finally found the address Nate had provided, I saw the billboard he’d told me to look for. Situated over an abandoned parking lot and fastened to the side of the hotel, it showed a pretty model’s face, an advertisement for an optometrist, I think.
    I wished I was at home reading or at Miles and Holly’s apartment. I was over there once or twice a week in those days. But I felt I should make the effort to see my brother. In fact, I almost tricked myself into believing that he’d come all the way from Syracuse to visit me, though obviously it was a lacrosse tournament that had brought him here.
    When I got to his room on the fifth floor, he introduced me to the girl whose voice I’d heard over the phone. Her back up against the headboard, she was sitting on the bed, legs crossed at the ankles. She had a very attractive face. “My name’s Bunny,” she told me.
    Nate beamed ecstatically. “Bunny! Can you believe that? We have Bunny here with us this evening.”
    She worked at the strip club where they’d spent the afternoon. Her hair touched the tops of her shoulders, and her bangs were cut high and straight across her forehead. Her fingernails were painted in an alternating black-and-white pattern, almost akin to a piano keyboard, and when Nate introduced me she smiled and said, “Hello, little brother.”
    The other two people in the room that night were, like him, forwards—attackmen, in lacrosse parlance—and they all played together on the same line. One of