And then there were those of us who were born here and never left. That was me, and my brother Lucas, and about half the class we graduated with from the tiny island high school, and the old fishermen, the Portuguese and Cape Verdean grandpas and their sons and grandsons, and the shop owners, the barkeeps, the waitresses, and hotel clerks. The people who stayed had various and complicated reasons for staying. For me it was because of my brothers—Lucas, the living brother, who needed me to look after him, but also my dead brother in the little island graveyard. They held on to me the way families do—that love-anchored gravitational pull.

I felt a shadow and looked up to see Eddie Frank standing by the information booth. The crooked expression on his face was completely familiar to me, one eyebrow up, one corner of his mouth raised in a half grin. I’d known him all my life, like almost everyone else on the island. We’d been in the same classroom from preschool on. When others from our graduating class had gone, we’d stayed behind on the island together.

He leaned on the booth. “You coming into the bar tonight?” he asked. “It’s been a while.”

“I told you—”

“You look like you could use a drink.”

“I’m trying to be a good person, okay?”

“That means no drinks?”

“That means no drinks with you.”

“Sometimes a drink is just a drink,” Eddie said.

I shook my head and he went away, back to the bouncer’s stool outside One Eyed Jack’s, the bar across the street from the information booth. I watched him as he went, his broad back, his already thinning hair. I put my head down, closed my eyes.

That night my brother Lucas didn’t come home after work. I opened the mail, swept the kitchen floor, and read the first few pages of a novel recommended by Elijah West, our new librarian. When Lucas still didn’t show, I retrieved a folder I kept hidden on the top shelf of the pantry, under a waffle iron we hadn’t used in years. This was something I couldn’t let Lucas see—so I worked on it at times like these. I took the brochures out of the folder, the applications for scholarships.

I didn’t intend to hide it from him forever—just for now, while I completed the applications. There was always the chance that I wouldn’t be accepted, wouldn’t get enough scholarship money to make it possible, and then Lucas would never have to know.