Free The Little Brother by Victoria Patterson Page A

our pathway to her bedroom.
    I stifled a burp from the carbonation and set my soda on the table.
    With all my nerve, I hazarded a full look at her. I’d thought she had brown eyes, but now I saw the green in them, and the little V of a divot on her upper lip just about killed me.
    Oblivious, she lit a cigarette, not more than a foot away. I could barely hear the thumping bass from a neighbor’s stereo filtering through the walls: Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On.”
    â€œSara?” I said.
    She glanced at me, distracted.
    â€œCan I sleep in the bed with you?”
    I expected her to be surprised or upset, but her expression hardly changed. She shifted and faced me. “How old are you, Even?”
    â€œI’m almost sixteen.” A lie—I had a ways to go until my birthday.
    She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “I’m nineteen, Even. I know I look younger, but I’m not.”
    Though she’d just lit it, she stubbed her cigarette into a half-eaten taco in its paper wrapper. “I may be a drunk,” she said, “but I’m not a slut.”
    â€œI would never think that,” I said. “That’s not what I meant.”
    â€œIs that right?” she said.
    I stared at her and didn’t say anything.
    â€œSo,” she said, her gaze steady and intense, “all you want to do is fuck me?”
    â€œOh, no,” I said, my face heating, sweat in my armpits, “you have the wrong idea. I really like you. I think you’re so pretty”—and then I shut up.
    I was trying to decide how to leave discreetly when, to my surprise, she leaned her head back on the couch and laughed.
    â€œGood for you,” she said, looking up at the ceiling, “good effort.”
    â€œI should leave,” I said.
    â€œNah,” she said, stretching her arms. She yawned, rubbed her eyes. “Don’t go.”
    She rose and motioned with her hands at me. “Up, up,” she said encouragingly. Once I stood, she flipped the sofa cushions off. “Help me,” she said, and we yanked at the couch. It creaked open, we stepped back, and it clanked down to become a bed.
    I called my dad from my cell phone—just in case he might worry—and left a message, letting him know that I was spending the night at a friend’s.
    One might assume that my forwardness with Sara would have stunted the possibility of a friendship between us. But oddly, Sara appreciated me for it, as if we’d cleared up any misperceptions and defused the awkwardness of my being sexually attracted to her.
    After that night, she spoke to me openly, and we went to meetings together. We got to be close friends.
    She worked at an insurance company. Her day life was boring, routine-filled, and efficient. Mexican mother, Irish and German father, no siblings. A horrific home life. She’d left at sixteen, had been on her own since. Independent, tough, and practical.
    I could go on and on about Sara. She’s really beautiful and strong. She got sober eventually, and she’s the one who helped me, for good and for bad, to do what I had to do.

10.
    JULY 3, 2003
    T HOUGH I’ VE BEEN able to recount what happened so far, the events over the Fourth of July weekend are difficult for me to narrate. Nearly impossible. A jumble of images.
    Tove Kagan, a girl I knew from Cucamonga, arrived at our dad’s house with Crystal Douglas and another girl, Melissa Stroh, at around four in the afternoon on July 3. Tove pretended not to know me. I wasn’t that surprised. She ignored me, since I’d left for Newport without saying good-bye to her. In grade school, we’d been good friends. We had history, Tove and I. Gabe didn’t know; the others didn’t know. Only Tove and I knew, and that was how we kept it. Both of us were sophomores now, sixteen and driving, her little red Dodge Dart parked at our curb. Her eyes brushed right past me, and then she