My best friend, Tom Sinclair, is good—no, excellent—at complex and detailed things: baking Michelin star–level pastries, being editor in chief of the college newspaper, swimming butterfly—but tying a tie is not one of them. It’s somehow endearing that the simplest tasks, the ones where overthinking is a disadvantage, are the ones that trip him up most.

We’re in his room—a refuge of dark blues and crisp sheets and eight editions of The Princeton Review SAT Prep Book he’s kept for god knows what reason—hiding from the high-heel clacking and glass-clinking downstairs. The Parker/Sinclair New Year’s Eve party—an annual production hosted by my mom and Tom’s mom, Christa—is about to be in full swing.

“Which one?” He holds up three ties as I sit on the edge of the bed, watching.

I tilt my head. “The navy. Makes your eyes pop.”

He nods and carries on—Tom doesn’t have time for compliments. I scroll on my phone while he moves into the walk-in closet to change. I’m already done up in a velvet dress and heels because the pride-and-joy party of our best-friend mothers does have a dress code. He reappears in wool slacks and a white button-down, the tie draped around his neck. And then he props his phone up on his dresser, playing a step-by-step video of a man tying a tie.

“What is that, wikiHow?” I ask.

“I can never get it right. Not like Dad taught me.”

My stomach drops. It’s flat, the way he says it. Not bitter or sad, but in that way, it’s almost worse. Tom’s dad moved out after the divorce, right before we went to high school, only months after we first met.