“Who doesn’t want a sword?” Nolan asks indignantly.

Alex immediately raises his hand. He looks to me and waits expectantly. When I don’t move, he scoffs.

“You must really have it bad for him if you’re willing to pretend you would spend actual real-life dollars on a sword.”

“I think it would be neat,” I say. I don’t mention that, after years of traveling through wardrobes and sailing to foreign lands, I’ve already thought of what name I would give my weapon. (Pen. Because it’s mightier than the sword.) “A lot of people have swords.”

“Yeah,” Alex says. “But most people don’t use them to stab their phones until they are so broken even the manufacturer’s help desk says it’s beyond repair.”

Nolan looks at me, shamefaced. “It was a really bad review. And I was only fifteen.”

“But that doesn’t explain the clunker phone from the eighteen hundreds,” I say.

Alex bursts into loud hearty laughter so contagious that even Nolan joins in.

“He did it twice,” Alex wheezes. “He got a new phone and read another review and stabbed it again.”

“I was fifteen,” Nolan reminds us through his laughter. “No impulse control. It was easier to get a crappy phone to stab instead of banking on my ability to walk away.”

“He keeps saying he’ll get a new phone, but he never does,” Alex tells the floor of the boat. He’s bent over to put his head between his knees, taking in deep gulps of air around more peals of laughter.

“It hasn’t broken yet. No reason to get something new,” Nolan says. “And the best part is that I don’t have the review app on here, so I haven’t even wanted to stab it.”

When our laughing fit passes, it grows quiet, and we lounge and look at the stars. It’s late enough that I feel the dark weaving the old kind of magic that has bound friends together through decades of sleepovers and accidental late-night talks on porches and doorsteps. There’s something about the absence of light mixed with near-exhaustion that loosens tongues and strengthens relationships.

I don’t fight the memory of Jenna when it comes for me. It’s less a single remembrance and more a cobbled-together picture of admitting deep truths to each other, stretched out over dozens of nights.

Some nights I would let my anger and confusion about my parents boil over. I would rail against how absent they felt, the unfairness that the two people who once argued playfully over the placement of glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling could fall so out of love with each other, and with me.

But on the good nights, we would talk about things that secretly delighted us, our hopes and dreams for futures we didn’t quite believe were real.