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and my mom put my chubby little girl hand on her belly to try and explain, I immediately pulled away, ran to my room, and came racing back carrying Slumber Party Barbie, my favorite.
    â€œWhat is this for?” my mother asked, confused.
    â€œFor my new baby brother,” I said. “I want to share.”
    It’s one of those stories that gets told over and over again at family reunions and everything. One of those cute things kids say or do. A little anecdote to prove how precious I am.
    Or, rather, I was.
    There are no stories like that about me anymore.
    When Dylan was born I loved that I got to hold him (as long as I was sitting on the couch with my mom or dad next to me), and I loved how his baby heels were so soft and smooth, and his skin smelled better than my fruit-scented markers. He was my baby brother. Mine.
    But it didn’t take long before my parents noticed something was wrong. Mostly my mom noticed it. I was too tiny to put it all together, but I remember my parents sending me to my room when they talked about him. I remember my mom hovering around while he was in the crib or in his high chair. I remember her long conversations with her sister in Chicago and her crying as she talked in soft whispers. And as he got older, I remember being dragged around to doctors’ appointments, stuck in waiting rooms on vinyl couches, doodling in old Highlights or Ranger Rick magazines while we waited for another doctor who was running late.
    Later on, I took my homework to those doctors’ appointments, especially when we had to drive all the way into the city to go to them. I’d show my mom the stickers my teachers gave me, like the one with the funny parrot on it that said, “Awk! Good job, matey!”
    â€œThat’s so nice, honey,” my mom would say, her eyes on Dylan as she tried to get him to stop sucking on his fingers or making some strange noise over and over again.
    It would be a lie if I told you Dylan didn’t frustrate me sometimes. He did. He does. But Dylan and me, we have our own thing going. Or at least we used to before everything that happened to him in May. I could get him to laugh when I made him his breakfast. I would put his favorite blue plastic bowl on my head (it’s the only bowl he’ll eat out of, so we have, like, ten of them), and then I would say, “Where’s Dylan’s blue bowl? Where’d it go?” And he would do this high-pitched laugh that’s totally his and smack the kitchen table with both fists.
    And I could distract him. When he threw fits in the middle of the Wal-Mart because he wasn’t allowed to climb inside the shopping cart or he decided he didn’t like the feel of his new socks, I could distract him by whistling. Mostly David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” but sometimes that “Dock of the Bay” song my grandfather likes a lot. If I whistled loud enough and long enough, he would sometimes calm down. And if people in the Wal-Mart stared at us, I gave them the business right back with a dirty look.
    It felt good knowing Dylan depended on me. Which only makes what happened that morning he wandered outside worse.
    In the months he’s been back, my whistling doesn’t help. Bowls on my head don’t help. Nothing seems to be helping Dylan. He still wakes up shrieking. He still wakes up crying. There are moments when he doesn’t want my mom or me to touch him even though we were some of the only people who could touch him before, and this makes life hard because Dylan still needs help with basically everything from washing to dressing to eating.
    And he’s really scared to go outside, even though it’s October now and the Texas summer is finally over and the weather is actually nice and cool. This means my mom has to practically drag him to the car to get him to go to school, where he spends his time in a special classroom for other kids like him. He used to like going there,