For the Fans

Hannah's boyfriend has a son Avi's age—and he's already furious

Fifteen-year-old Avi Vega, a weed-smoking Brooklyn transplant adjusting to suburban Malden, learns his mother Hannah has been secretly dating Tom Harbor, a well-off Irish Catholic businessman from Somerville.

Hannah's boyfriend has a son Avi's age—and he's already furious

Fifteen-year-old Avi Vega, a weed-smoking Brooklyn transplant adjusting to suburban Malden, learns his mother Hannah has been secretly dating Tom Harbor, a well-off Irish Catholic businessman from Somerville. Tom has a son Kyran's age. At an awkward dinner at the Harbor home, Avi meets Kyran for the first time—a preppy, scowling quarterback who radiates hostility from the handshake onward. Kyran scrutinizes Avi's ripped jeans with visible disdain while Avi observes how different Tom acts around Hannah: laughing, warm, almost human. On the back deck afterward, Kyran warns Avi to stop leeching off his family. Avi fires back that he'd sooner die than associate with Kyran's preppy world. Neither suspects this revulsion will become something far more complicated.

Kyran bullies Avi through high school—then Avi crashes his college team

Tom proposes to Hannah on Thanksgiving; Kyran storms out. The families merge into the Somerville house, where the boys weaponize their shared bathroom. At school, Kyran knocks Avi's art book from his hands and mocks him before his jock friends. In private, he delivers a verbal dismantling—calling Avi a waste of space, friendless, a nobody. The words burrow deep and stay for years. When Avi gets accepted to Boston College, Kyran's planned escape route, he's livid enough to spit on Avi's birthday cake and tackle him in the hallway. Their parents peel them apart. At BC, they ignore each other entirely—until Avi signs up as the team mascot, Baldwin the Eagle, dancing on Kyran's sideline in a bird suit the quarterback cannot stop watching.

Tom's bankruptcy leaves both sons unable to afford campus housing

Sophomore year at BC, Kyran is the Eagles' star quarterback and Avi has landed a luxury single dorm through sheer luck. Then Tom summons them home for a birthday dinner that becomes a funeral for the family finances. His business partner made catastrophic investments and drained the pensions. The house is half-stripped of furniture, both cars sold, Hannah working sixty hours. The lethal blow: they cannot pay for either son's housing. Kyran's football scholarship requires on-campus residency—without it, he loses the team, the championship path, the entire escape plan. Avi faces identical ruin with even fewer options. Both leave the table devastated, separately dreading the same humiliation: moving back into this house, back under the same roof, back to a starting line they thought they'd left behind.