“Conor,” I call after him. When he doesn’t halt, I continue, “You were my best friend. And I was yours. I’m always going to care. There’s no stopping.”

A shard of hesitation, a hiccup in his movements—I think I pick up on it, but it could be my imagination. Because Conor never looks back. He leaves me alone to stare after him, my fist closed tight, teeth clenched tighter, muttering a muted, “Fuck.”

I often feel as if Eli and Conor have been best friends since before I even met my brother.

It’s not true, of course. Eli’s about fourteen years older than me, but he left home to play hockey at a college in Minnesota when he was seventeen or so and I had yet to turn four, which means that at some point in the early 2000s we lived under the same roof. For several years. Unfortunately, I don’t recall much of them. In fact, I have two childhood memories of Eli: being called pumpkin, and that time he argued with Dad and slammed a door so hard, a picture of SpongeBob and Squidward holding hands fell off the wall of my room.

Maybe it’s good that my parents died early, because I’m not sure they could have withstood seeing me become as charming and easygoing a teenager as Eli had been—that is, not at all. One can go through that shit once, but twice in the span of two decades? I like to think that if there is an afterlife, they are currently toasting with piña coladas, relieved.

If the stories are to be believed, young Eli’s favorite pastimes were arguing with our dad, pissing off our dad, and giving our dad angina. Sounds like typical adolescent stuff to me, but after Eli moved out, Dad would talk about him like he was Rosemary’s baby infiltrating our holy defenseless household, and…well. Dad could be a difficult man. Not to his precious little girl—his goblin princess, he used to call me, coming to tickle me whenever I’d pretend to be annoyed by how loud his sneezes were, or by the constant snarky commentary on my favorite TV shows, which he always stopped to watch with me in the living room. To Eli, however…I won’t blame my brother, if in his late teens and early twenties he came back to visit fewer times than he has toes. After all, I planned to do the same when I moved to Scotland for university.

I don’t know if Eli ever seriously dreamed of becoming a professional hockey player. What I do know is that during college he realized that he loved biomedical research, and after graduating he made a sharp turn, going from jock to…still a jock, but a pipette-wielding one. He moved back to Austin, but never increased the frequency of his visits. Instead he began a PhD in chemical engineering at UT, and that’s where he met Conor, who was one year ahead in the same program, and Minami, a postdoc. The three of them were instant best friends.