His phone lit the ceiling a cold blue. Joel was so exhausted he mistook it, initially, for some new breed of ghost.

This place is bullshit, wrote Dylan, his brother.

Joel studied the message for a very long time before responding: Everything ok?

Dylan was eleven years younger than Joel. He was a senior in high school this fall, if Joel’s addled brain was doing the math right, and still lived in Bentley, Texas, a rotten rind of a town which Joel had escaped the moment he could and hoped to never see again. When Joel missed his family, he flew them to Manhattan. Which was most Christmases. Some. Twice.

As he waited for his brother to respond, Joel scrolled up to see the last time they’d spoken: three months before, when Joel, likely drunk, had sent Dylan a picture of a football player tackling a massive rooster mascot. Dylan had responded, wordlessly, with a GIF of two handsome underwear models colliding with one another on a catwalk.

The brothers’ relationship was a muted one.

Joel’s screen slid back down with the arrival of a new message.

lol sorry wrong person.

Joel typed a message, deleted it and tried again. It’s cool. He added after a pause: What’s up?

Joel watched his screen. The status of his message changed from Delivered to Read. Joel waited, waited, but no reply came.

Joel was almost asleep again when his phone lit up for the second time.

actually it’s not ok.

Joel tried to call. It went to voice mail after two rings.

can’t talk rn, his brother wrote. sorry.

Lil D, Joel wrote—an old pet name that felt rusty from disuse—What’s wrong?

dumb dreams. bad dreams. i’m stupid.

This was followed by a GIF of a linebacker shaking his head on the sidelines of a game.

i fucking hate football

Oh.

what’s stupid about hating football?

how else i’m gonna get out of this place?

Joel climbed out of bed. In the kitchen he poured himself another seltzer, debated for a moment and splashed it with vodka.

The way their mother described it, Dylan was the best thing to happen to Bentley’s football program in a decade. He’d made varsity when he was just a freshman and had been the starting quarterback the year after that. The team had flourished under Dylan: they made it all the way to state quarterfinals his first year as quarterback, had made it to semifinals last year and now, according to the breathless calls Joel had received from his mother over the summer, the Bentley Bison had a shot at the state championships for the first time in a generation.

In all of his Instagram photos, Joel’s little brother had never once appeared to be anything but affable and handsome and casually, ruthlessly charming in the way of Southern boys who knew their towns were made for them. Now, sitting on the chilly bar stool in his kitchen, Joel debated how best to approach the idea that Dylan had anything resembling a problem in his life.