Florida FAST Practice Test 6

What My Brother Does All Day

¹Everyone in our family agrees that my brother Elias used to be somebody. He ran the 800 meters in a time that got his picture in the Lakeland Courier, and Coach Delacroix said he had "the lungs of a much larger animal," which Elias had printed on a T-shirt. That was last spring. This fall he quit the team without telling anyone, and now, as far as I can tell, my brother's main activity is sleeping.

²I am not exaggerating. Elias sleeps until one in the afternoon on Saturdays. He comes home from school, eats standing up at the counter, and goes into his room, and when I knock he says, "Not now, Kit," in a voice like a door closing. Around ten at night he leaves again. Mom says he is "helping out a friend." I am thirteen, not stupid.

³Here is my evidence. One: his sneakers, which he leaves by the back door, smell like the inside of a fast-food bag. Two: on Tuesday I found a roll of bills in his jacket pocket—not a lot, but more than a person gets for helping out a friend. Three: last month, after Mom's hours at the clinic were cut, a pink notice from the electric company sat on the refrigerator under the pineapple magnet for nine days. Then it disappeared, and Mom stopped sighing at the mailbox, and Elias started drinking his coffee black, the way Dad used to, even though he hates it.

⁴I laid all of this evidence out for my friend Hollis on the bus, and Hollis was incredulous that I had not figured it out already. "He's selling something," he said. "Obviously." I said I didn't think so, but I also couldn't think of anything better.

⁵On Friday I decided to stay awake until Elias came home. I sat on the stairs in the dark with a flashlight I didn't turn on, practicing what I would say. At 2:14 a.m. the back door opened. Elias came in slowly, the way old men climb out of cars. He was wearing a paper hat. He took it off, looked at it as if it had said something rude to him, and dropped it in the trash.

⁶Then he saw me.

⁷I expected him to yell. Instead he sat down on the bottom step, two below me, and for a while neither of us said anything. He smelled like the sneakers.

⁸"You're supposed to be asleep," he said finally.

⁹"So are you," I said. "That's what you do. You sleep."

¹⁰He laughed—one short breath through his nose—and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. "Yeah," he said. "That's what I do." He stood up, put his hand on top of my head for a second, the way he did when I was little, and went upstairs.

¹¹I still don't know exactly where he goes. But I have decided to stop telling Hollis about it, and on Saturday, when Elias slept until one, I made sure the television stayed off.