Ask Him Why by Catherine Ryan Hyde

me.
    “You don’t want milk?” I heard her call after me.
    “Not particularly,” I called back.
    I stuck my hand in the box on my way up the spiral stairs and shoved a handful into my mouth, but it tasted much too sweet and made my stomach turn. Well, something made my stomach turn, and I guess the cereal wasn’t helping.
    I closed myself back into my room and turned on my laptop.
    In a fit of uncharacteristic bravery, I did an Internet search on my brother’s name. “Joseph Stellkellner,” in quotes. Fortunately, we had an unusually distinctive name—at least, I thought it was fortunate for a very brief moment that morning. It was never destined to feel like an advantage again.
    I got five hundred and eighty-seven hits. Five. Hundred. Eighty. Seven.
    I lost my appetite for the cereal.
    I narrowed the search by choosing “News.” It returned sixty-seven stories from papers and news websites across the country, and some national—and, because they were sorted with the newest first, none seemed to be the original story. These were dozens of versions of a more recent update. They all had similar titles, and the titles were all about my brother’s mental health history.
    I just froze there a moment, trying to think whether my brother Joseph had a mental health history, but nothing came to mind. He’d always been just like everyone else, as far as I knew. At least, as much as any of us were.
    I clicked on one of the articles. Actually, over the next few minutes, I clicked on four of the articles. I was so wrapped up in my shock—almost literally from the feel of it, like being mummified in Bubble Wrap or cotton batting—that it took me four articles to realize they were all the same. Something a bunch of papers had picked up from the Associated Press or something.
    They said Joseph had been institutionalized when he was twelve and that once upon a time that would have caused the army to reject him, or at least probably it would have been a deterrent to his making it into the army. But now, the papers said, it was wartime, and there was no draft the way there had been during Vietnam, and so the armed forces had lowered their standards to get new recruits, because who wants to volunteer when they know they’ll be shipped over to Kuwait or Baghdad pretty much straight away? I’m paraphrasing, of course. They worded it much more politely.
    “Maybe somebody who wants to get away from Brad and Janet,” I said out loud, but quietly.
    Then I read some more.
    I had wildly mixed feelings about what I was reading. On the one hand, the rush to hold someone sickeningly responsible came through loud and clear. But now this new revelation seemed to take a tiny bit of the heat off my brother and direct it toward the army itself, for the crime of letting him join. And yet that was its own mortal insult: the idea that my brother Joseph was so deeply defective that they should have known better than to even consider letting him serve.
    And there was another wild card thrown in: apparently, the army was also investigating the commanding officer to see why he sent soldiers out on a mission that was clearly undermanned.
    It wasn’t much in the way of relief—still, it was a lifting that I could feel. They were saying that something bigger and totally outside our family was really to blame, and that helped me breathe a little more easily.
    I heard the paint sprayer shut down out front, and I wondered if they had actually succeeded in covering whatever shame had been placed there, or if my mother had simply told them to give up and stop trying.
    Then I finished the fourth article—or at least the fourth repetition of the same one—and made the mistake of reading down into the comment thread.
    Now, any fool knows you never read the comments on an Internet article. It’s like one of the three modern rules for living a decent life, although I’d be hard-pressed to say what the other two are. Maybe “don’t feed the trolls,” but