The Little Brother by Victoria Patterson Read Free Book Online Page A

movie.
    After a few minutes, she went to her bedroom and returned with a hairy-looking afghan. She sat next to me on the couch and spread the afghan over our legs. Her hand reached for mine. I held her hand until our palms got sweaty, and then I broke free. Something in the way she kept glancing from the TV screen to me made me feel like a kid again.
    Gabe wasn’t home yet from hanging out with Kevin and some others, and so she began to worry. Every fifteen minutes or so, she’d try his cell phone again. Her leg kept jiggling under the afghan. She looked old. Up close, I saw that her eyelids sagged.
    â€œWell,” she said, “this has been so hard. All of it. It’s been hard on everyone, but especially Gabe.”
    After the movie ended, I went to bed, kissing her good night on the cheek. “Get some sleep,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
    In those days, despite my occasional bouts of insomnia, I could sleep fourteen hours easy, and I liked sleeping in my childhood bed—the shadows, smells, everything known and familiar in a deep sense.
    I woke at around two in the morning to Mom shaking me lightly by the shoulders, whispering, “Even. Even, wake up.”
    Gabe wasn’t back yet, and she was upset.
    I made her turn around—I wore only boxers because she kept it so hot in the house, and yet still I sweated—and I put on my jeans and shirt.
    â€œWait here,” I told her. “I’ll find him.”
    Earlier I’d heard Gabe talking on his cell phone about meeting at the playground, and I planned to look there first. He kept his cell in his front pocket, and I tried to call him a few times before I left, imagining the phone vibrating and ringing in his jeans, but it just went to his voice mail.
    I took my ten-speed bicycle from the garage and started pedaling around my old neighborhood. It felt good to be outside in the cool air.
    I circled the playground—in the dark it had a menacing feel, the deserted swings and merry-go-round creaking slightly in the breeze—and then I stopped near the swings, kickstanding my bike. Gabe and I used to play here. Gabe claimed to have saved my life on this playground, and I suppose he had.
    One afternoon when we were kids, I had climbed to the peak of the jungle gym and fell. Gabe, on the partition below, grabbed my arm and slowed my fall, perhaps preventing a snapped neck or concussion. He went down with me because he didn’t let go.
    While I have no memory of the incident, we both have visible scars, mine on my hairline from where I hit my head, his on his arm from where he scraped against a protruding rivet on his way down. Because of the fall, the city installed a rubber cushion as flooring and sanded the rivets.
    I listened to the breeze shaking the tree leaves. A car drove past, its headlights lighting up the jungle gym, creating elongated shadows, and then shrinking back to dark.
    Before leaving, I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and speed-dialed Gabe.
    To my surprise, I heard his ringtone in the distance, the thumping, tinny-sounding beginnings of “Area Codes” by Ludacris. “I’ve got hoes. I’ve got hoes, in different area codes, area, area codes. Hoes, hoes, in different area codes, area, area codes, codes.” The song had been popular the year before, but Gabe still loved it.
    He didn’t answer and the phone went to voice mail. I called once more, following the music to the base of the jungle gym, to a cave-like opening for the largest of the slides, which was in the shape of a huge green snake—as kids it had frightened us, the opening of its mouth. The ringtone echoed inside, and when I looked, I saw the ridged soles of Gabe’s Nikes.
    I crawled through, leaning forward and pulling him by his calves, sliding him out. He snored and his breath reeked of pot and tequila.
    â€œGabe,” I said, smacking him on the cheek. “Gabe, wake up.”
    He twisted, woke