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Chapters 1-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Avi”
Avi, an introverted high school sophomore and artist, reflects on his life three months after moving from Brooklyn to a Boston suburb with his mother, Hannah. He is having trouble fitting in and has a recurring dream about a thrilling, weightless fall from a skyscraper. When he returns home from school, his mother, who he considers his best friend, reveals she has been secretly dating a man named Tom for two months. Avi is shocked, as this is her first serious relationship since his father’s death ten years ago. He learns that Tom is recently divorced and has a son his age. Seeing how happy the news makes his mother, Avi reluctantly accepts the situation. He remains deeply unsettled by the sudden change and the prospect of a potential stepbrother, turning to marijuana to calm his anxiety.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Kyran”
Kyran reluctantly leaves his girlfriend, Becca, to attend a mandatory Friday night dinner organized by his controlling father, Thomas Harbor. Resentful of his father’s focus on maintaining a perfect image, Kyran arrives home to meet the guests: his father’s new girlfriend, Hannah Vega, and her son, Avi. Kyran is immediately hostile toward Avi and grows increasingly unsettled as he witnesses his father acting uncharacteristically happy and affectionate.
During the tense dinner, Kyran is shocked to learn Hannah is Jewish, a stark contrast to his father’s strict Irish Catholic background. Hannah raises the topic of Avi looking into Boston College, and Tom muses aloud that it would be fun if the two boys ended up at the same school. After dinner, Kyran confronts Avi outside, accusing him and his mother of being leeches. Avi retorts with his own insults before leaving Kyran alone, who is left desperately hoping his father’s new relationship is only temporary.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Avi”
Six months after his mother first told him about Tom, Avi’s life has been upended by a series of rapid changes. Tom proposed on Thanksgiving, his mother said yes, and over Christmas break Avi and Hannah moved into Tom’s house in Somerville. Avis was forced to change schools again and live with his new stepbrother, Kyran, who is openly hostile. At school, Kyran and his football friends bully Avi, leading to a near-fight that is broken up by a pink-haired girl named Frankie, who befriends Avi.
That afternoon, Avi overhears Kyran on the phone begging his own mother to let him move out to escape the new living arrangement. When Avi confronts him and suggests they try to get along for their parents, Kyran unleashes a vicious personal attack, calling Avi a worthless, aimless “waste of space” that nobody needs (28). The chapter ends with Avi left stunned and deeply wounded by Kyran’s cruel words, fearing that part of what he said may be true.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Kyran”
One year later, Kyran, a star football player heading to Boston College, decides to break up with his girlfriend, Becca, feeling emotionally detached and incapable of love. Before he can do so, he discovers her kissing another student, Ash Holloway. Rather than confronting them, he ends the relationship with a curt text message.
Kyran arrives home to a surprise birthday party for his stepbrother, Avi, which he had forgotten. Kyran harbors deep resentment for Avi and his stepmother, Hannah, because his father treats them with a warmth and affection he never shows Kyran. His anger stems from a traumatic past event when Kyran tried to tell his father something at age 12 that tore the family apart and for which his father still blames him. The tense celebration culminates in Avi’s shocking announcement that he too will be attending Boston College, shattering Kyran’s dream of escaping his new family. Enraged, Kyran has a breakdown in his room. The conflict later escalates into a physical fight between the stepbrothers, which their parents break up, forcing a reluctant apology. The chapter ends with Kyran threatening Avi to stay away from him at college, cementing their hostile rivalry.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Avi”
One year later, Avi is a freshman at Boston College with his friend Frankie and a new social circle. He and Kyran, the university’s quarterback, actively avoid one another. Avi recalls their only significant interaction during the year, a tense confrontation at a party where Kyran publicly threatened him before backing down. As the semester ends, Avi’s friends find a flyer seeking someone to be the football team’s mascot, Baldwin the Eagle. They encourage Avi to apply as a way to antagonize Kyran, but he dismisses the idea. However, Avi soon receives his sophomore housing assignment and discovers he has been placed in Walsh Hall, the same dorm where Kyran and many other football players live. Faced with the prospect of constant, unavoidable proximity to his hostile stepbrother, Avi resignedly accepts that the mascot flyer Frankie presses into his hands may be his best option.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Kyran”
Four months later, Kyran is the sophomore starting quarterback for Boston College, preparing for the first football game of the season. To manage his hidden stress, he has a private ritual of staring at the lines on his palms. During the game, he and his roommate, Guty, are amused by the antics of the team mascot, Baldwin the Eagle.
At halftime, Kyran is shocked to discover that the person inside the mascot costume is Avi. The revelation distracts him, causing him to hesitate and get sacked. He recovers, however, and ultimately throws the game-winning touchdown pass to Guty. After the victory, he confronts Avi, who claims he simply took the mascot job for fun. Their argument is interrupted by Kyran’s casual girlfriend, Lexi, who flirts with Avi before Kyran sends her away. The chapter ends with Avi running off, leaving a furious Kyran feeling as though his victory has been tainted.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Kyran”
Kyran is bothered by his father’s absence from his games as well as Avi’s presence. He accepts an invitation for a family birthday dinner, intending to confront his father. Upon arriving home, Kyran and Avi find the house strangely empty and their parents, Tom and Hannah, visibly distressed. At a tense dinner, Tom reveals his business has failed, leaving the family broke. He announces they can no longer pay for college housing, meaning Kyran and Avi must move back home after the current semester. Devastated, Kyran views this as the end of his escape from his dysfunctional family. After a brief argument with Avi, who points out that the crisis affects him too, Kyran storms out. He returns to campus, determined to find a way to avoid moving back in with his parents.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Avi”
Avi reflects on his family’s new financial situation. Despite living in a luxury dorm by a lucky fluke, he needs roughly $12,500—$3,500 to finish sophomore year and $9,000 for housing—to stay at Boston College. His best friend, Frankie, suggests he start an OnlyFans account, revealing that she has been successfully making money this way. Desperate and determined to prove he can support himself, Avi agrees.
Frankie helps him set up an account under the username Backwardz_Cap. While filming his first explicit video, Avi is surprised to find himself aroused by the thought of his male subscribers and fantasizes about being with a man, leading to new confusion about his sexuality. The video is a major success, and he quickly earns a significant amount of money. Frankie then proposes they collaborate on a pay-per-view threesome video with another man for Halloween. After some hesitation, Avi agrees, viewing it as a way to earn more money and explore his curiosity. The chapter ends with them needing to find a trustworthy third participant for their video.
Chapters 1-8 Analysis
The novel uses an alternating first-person point of view, shifting between the two protagonists’ perspectives. This structural choice immediately establishes Avi and Kyran’s opposing internal worlds and foreshadow their inevitable collision. Avi’s chapters are characterized by introspection, metaphor, and emotional vulnerability, beginning with a detailed account of a recurring dream about a “suicidal Freudian slip” (3) and a weightless fall. This interiority defines his identity as an introverted artist who processes the world through a filter of dreams and feelings. In contrast, Kyran’s chapters are grounded in the physical, driven by resentment, and focused on external control. His narration opens with blunt frustration—“I want absolutely no part of this” (11)—and is preoccupied with bodily sensations, social strategy, and his father’s suffocating expectations. This structural choice prevents a simple hero/villain dynamic by granting the reader equal access to both characters’ anxieties, forcing an understanding of Kyran’s hostility and Avi’s bewilderment as products of their deeply different personal histories and family dynamics.
The initial meeting between the two families stages a collision of social and cultural worlds, with the Harbor home in Somerville serving as the first battleground. Avi and Hannah enter a household whose dynamics are already shaped by Tom’s rigid expectations and Kyran’s resentment toward his father. Kyran’s surprise upon learning that Hannah is Jewish, thinking, “I never thought I’d see the day” (19), reveals how strongly he associates his father with a particular Irish Catholic identity and how destabilizing he finds Tom’s unexpected willingness to depart from his rigid life. Kyran’s perspective immediately introduces The Burden of Maintaining a Public Image through his understanding of his father. Tom has taught him to value appearances, achievement, and the impression their family makes on others, leaving Kyran acutely conscious of how he is expected to behave and who he is expected to become. Kyran’s aggression toward Avi, therefore, is a response to the unwanted change of his family life over which Kyran already feels he has little control. Ironically, Tom appears warmer and more emotionally expressive with them than he does with his own son, furthering Kyran’s resentment while exposing the distance between the image of family stability and the dysfunction underneath it.
Beneath the surface of this new family dynamic, the narrative builds a foundation of unspoken trauma and corrosive secrets. 12 but for which his father “blames [him] for all of it” (34). The novel deliberately withholds the full circumstances from both Avi and the reader, establishing Trauma and the Cost of Secrecy through what Kyran cannot yet bring himself to explain. Similarly, Tom’s sudden financial collapse is a secret he keeps until the family is on the brink of ruin, but this is only a symptom of a much deeper, unaddressed wound tied to secrecy and the family’s public image. Kyran’s private ritual of studying the lines of his palm reveals the anxiety concealed beneath the confidence of the star athlete, emphasizing the layer of narrative that even Kyran’s first-person point of view keeps hidden. Secrecy is therefore established as central to the novel as it begins to examine the damage that occurs when fear, shame, denial, or a desire for control makes honest communication impossible.
Football becomes the central setting for Kyran’s conflict over identity, control, and belonging. For Kyran, football is more than a sport; it is a carefully controlled performance space where he can earn his father’s conditional approval and escape his internal turmoil. On the field, he is more than Tom’s son or Avi’s hostile stepbrother as he becomes a successful quarterback whose ability can be publicly measured and celebrated. Avi’s decision to become the team mascot, Baldwin the Eagle, disrupts that separation. By donning the mascot costume—an identity based on anonymity, performance, and humor—the artistic, non-athletic Avi can occupy the field on his own terms, simultaneously participating in and mocking the hyper-masculine world Kyran dominates. Kyran’s anger and his accusation that Avi has intruded on “the one thing [they] haven’t taken from [him] yet” (58) is particularly revealing because Avi has not consciously taken anything from him yet. Instead, Kyran comes to view Avi as the embodiment of everything he believes he has lost: his father’s attention, his former home, and now the exclusivity of his refuge at college. Football thus becomes yet another setting in which Kyran’s problems inevitably follow him.
The family’s financial implosion acts as a catalyst, forcing the characters into new, unexpected roles and introducing one of the novel’s central motifs: social media and online personas. Facing the loss of his college education, Avi moves from a state of passive anxiety toward deliberate action. Creating adult content under the username “Backwardz_Cap” is initially a pragmatic solution to financial instability, and the narrative emphasizes Avi’s desire for independence instead of presenting his decision through shame or transgression. The account also introduces another kind of performance tied to larger questions about constructing identity that appear throughout the novel. Unlike Kyran, whose public identity as a successful quarterback has been largely shaped by familial and social expectations, Avi creates an online persona that he controls himself. At the same time, the experience unexpectedly raises questions about his sexuality that he has not previously confronted. In this way, the account begins as a means of economic survival but quickly becomes intertwined with questions about identity, performance, curiosity, and self-knowledge. Avi’s determination to “prove, definitively, that [he] deserved this just as much as they did” (71) connects his decision to the larger struggle for autonomy that drives these opening chapters. Ultimately, both stepbrothers are searching for ways to build lives that do not depend upon the unstable family their parents have created.
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