“It brings me immense joy. You have no idea.” He leans closer to the camera, and I can see the sharp angles of his face more clearly now—the same jawline as Dad’s, the same dark eyes that can cut through a person at fifty paces. But there’s a looseness to him that didn’t exist when we were younger. New York has been good for Marvin. Or maybe distance from Dad has been good for Marvin. Probably both. “So what’s the damage? Are you expelled? Suspended? On some kind of watchlist?”
“None of the above. The dean assigned us summer penance. Community service, essentially. We’re sorting through archives in the library basement.”
“We,” Marvin repeats, eyebrows climbing. “Who’s we?”
“The hockey team. A few of them, anyway. And Jackson.”
“And you.”
“And me.”
Marvin shakes his head, a grin spreading across his face that I haven’t seen directed at me in years. It’s not mocking. It’s genuinely amused, the kind of expression that reminds me we share the same mother—the woman who would have laughed until she couldn’t breathe at this entire saga. “Ryan Abrams.Skinny-dipping. Arrested. Sentenced to manual labor. Mom would’ve had a field day.”
The mention of her doesn’t sting the way it used to. It aches, but it’s the good kind of ache. “She would’ve made me tell the story at least four times.”
“Five.She’d want the version with sound effects.” Marvin shifts on the fire escape. A burst of laughter erupts from the street below, and someone shouts something in Spanish that I can’t make out. “So who roped you into this? Jackson?”
“Jackson got me to the pool. But Oliver’s the one who—” I pause, choosing my words. “He’s been looking out for me. Since that night and after. He’s sort of taken me under his wing.”
Marvin goes still. The bottle pauses halfway to his mouth. “Oliver Jacoby?”
“Yes.”
“As in, the kid from Westbrook?”
“That’s the one.”
Marvin sets the bottle down on the fire escape railing and folds his arms. The neon signs behind him cast shifting colors across his face—red, blue, green, red again. “I forgot he goes to BSU.”
Now it’s my turn to raise an eyebrow. “You knew?”
“I follow college hockey. Not religiously, but enough. His name came up a couple of years ago when BSU started its championship run. Oliver Jacoby, left winger, BSU Barracudas.” Marvin lifts one shoulder in a gesture meant to be offhand, but the tension in his jaw betrays him. “I recognized the name. Looked him up. Saw the roster photo and thought, yeah, that’s definitely the same kid who ate dirt bikes off the curb in front of our house.”
“You never mentioned it.”
“What was I supposed to say? ‘Hey, Ryan, your childhood best friend grew up to be a six-foot-three hockey star at your university. Have fun with that information.’” He picks at the labelon his bottle. “I figured you’d either already know or you’d find out on your own. And it wasn’t my place to—” He waves a hand vaguely. “Interfere.”
Marvin and I spent most of our teenage years orbiting each other without ever actually connecting. He was busy constructing the version of himself that Dad would approve of—varsity letters, girlfriends, a social calendar packed to the margins. I was busy disappearing. We existed in the same house the way two strangers exist in the same airport terminal: aware of each other, occasionally making eye contact, never truly engaging.
It wasn’t until Marvin left for college that things started to shift. The physical distance created breathing room, and with breathing room came something neither of us expected—actual conversations. Stilted at first. Awkward. Two people who shared a last name and a dead mother trying to figure out if they also shared anything else.
Turns out we did. We share her sense of humor. Her stubbornness. Her inability to let an argument go without getting the last word. The discovery has been slow and ongoing, and I wouldn’t call us close, not by any reasonable standard. But we’re cordial. We check in. He calls me on Skype from fire escapes in Manhattan, and I answer.
That’s…something.
“Well,” I say, “I found out. And he found me. We’re reconnecting.”
Marvin studies me through the screen, no doubt deciding whether to say something he knows will make me uncomfortable. I’ve seen that look enough times to brace for impact.
“That’s nice,” he says, and I relax a fraction. “Oliver was good for you back then. You were a different kid when he was around. Less—” He searches for the word, his jaw working. “Wound up.”
I don’t have a rebuttal for that, so I let it go. On his end, the city continues its assault on the microphone, the ambient roar of eight million people refusing to sleep.
“I’m glad you two are reconnecting,” Marvin says with a sincerity in his voice that catches me off guard. It’s unvarnished, no sarcasm buffering it, no older-brother posturing to dilute it. “He was always a solid kid. Loyal to a fault.”
“He is.”
“That said.” Marvin points at the camera, his expression shifting into something more familiar—the older brother who once dangled my favorite book over the toilet to get me to do his chores. “I do wish he’d reconnect with you while wearing pants. Because when the dean’s office described the incident, they were very thorough about the state of undress involved, and now I have a mental image of Oliver Jacoby’s naked ass that I will carry to my grave.”
