Lynn Strong - Hold Still

“Mom’s pissed,” he says, walking to the left of her, separating Ellie from the street.

“I don’t want to talk about it, Benny.”

“El.”

“What’s it like?” she says. “Being the good one. Don’t you get bored?”

“Please, 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.

“I’m sorry, Benny,” she says. “I’m trying this time, though, okay? Please?”

“Sure,” he says, not looking at her.

“And 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.”

“My mind is wild ,” he said.

Ellie swallowed a laugh.

“I 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.

“I 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.

“But 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, no matter 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 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 questions that 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.

“I 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 his limbs over the top of her on the couch as they watched the same movies over and over, or they danced together to their mom’s records.

Sometimes, after their mom had come out again, unlocking her office door and coming toward them slowly, seeming better somehow, seeming just barely willing to be their mom again, Ellie would put something fast and fun on the turntable and turn the music up loud. And she’d grab hold of Ben and her mom would sit and watch them until finally, sometimes, she’d dance with them. Her hair would fall from its bun, reaching down the middle of her back. They would all three swing their limbs and sing and dance. And those times, that fun, their mom free and careless, laughing with them after not even wanting them too close, all would have been because of Ellie. She’d known how to save all of them then.