“It’s been a looong tiiime,” he said as I hugged him, his LA Latino intonation so much more pronounced than I remembered. But as I released him from my embrace, I noticed he had the same delicate features, high cheekbones, full lips, and a chin that came almost to a point. I wondered how I could have ever thought of him as ugly.

“Welcome to Boston,” I said, not really knowing how to talk to my brother. “Anything in particular you wanna do?”

He shrugged and stuck out his bottom lip. “I dunno, maybe a Red Sox game?”

The following morning, we took the Green Line with Ralph out to Fenway Park and braved the crowds to see our home team play against the Phillies. We must have made a curious trio, an older man with two younger ones, one white and one brown. I couldn’t follow the ball from our last-minute seats in the grandstand, though I clapped and cheered when Tony did, nodded when he pointed out a good hitter or how many runs the Red Sox needed to come back—being in Boston, he left his Yankees cap at home and used the hood of his black sweatshirt to cover his head in the heat, then let the rest of it drape down his back. He turned to me with a toothy smile when Boston scored a home run, his face incandescent with a happiness that exceeded the moment and reached all the way back to his rural childhood playing kick the can and climbing trees with other boys. If I had improved my lot by coming to America, Tony would have certainly been better off had he stayed at home.

As we walked among the crowd after the game, I noticed how the nearly all-white bystanders around us glared at my brother with his shaved head, baggy clothes, and brown skin, like he had already done something wrong just by being there, as they parted to give him a wide berth. It was paradoxical how the two of us shared so many genes yet moved through the world so differently, how our places could have been switched had he only been born with my genetic anomaly, one that was supposed to disable me yet had clearly conferred on me advantages Tony never had.