I was constantly skipping important life steps and having to backtrack. I blamed my parents, who got pregnant with me when they were barely old enough to buy cigarettes, never got married, and then broke up when I was five, only to get back together when I was thirteen. They had a single year of engagement bliss before Dad got sick and I had to start working as a busboy at a local gastropub when Dad lost his job and we couldn’t make ends meet, effectively ending my “Age of Innocence,” as Ma put it.
Maybe that was why I grew up deconstructing food, parsing the ingredients out on my plate just to put it back together and critique it. Or why I preferred reading spoilers to books and movies before reading or watching because Ihadto know the endings before I began.
I often wondered if Ma had known that Dad would eventuallyget sick if they would have gotten back together at all. Or maybe sooner, instead of wasting all those years because that wasn’t how life was supposed to happen.
Life always felt backward.
Until Ricky. In a world that never made sense, Ricky DeLuca did. He understoodme. We were in this together.
“You’re the only thing I’ve ever been certain of,” I told him, but the world around me felt fuzzy. Fog rolled over the ocean, but the sky was still clear. Panic set into my chest. It didn’t make sense when he said he needed to find himself. If anybody knew who they were, it was Ricky DeLuca. “You’re the only person I know who is certain of who they are. And you make sense of me when I don’t make any sense.” I wanted to reach for my phone, google the answers, find a way to tell himnotto do what he was about to do.
“You’re not listening, Fielder.” He was pacing the beach now. “I need to be on my own. We skipped too many steps, and I feel like I don’t have any control now because all I think about is you. Us. I need to think about me.” He was talking with his hands, gesturing widely in front of him, crashing like a wave, a tsunami on the shore. “I can’t do long distance. You know me; I work in measurements. No matter how many times I look at it, it just doesn’t square . . .”
He continued talking, but I snagged on two words.
Long distance.
What was he talking about?
“I feel like I’m always having to take care of you, Fielder. I’m the responsible one. And I know I’m older and it looks like I haveeverything figured out, like what I want to do with my life, but sometimes I just want some room to figure it out like you.” He stopped moving, his arms falling to his sides. The moon reflected the wetness in his eyes.
“What do you mean, ‘long distance’?”
He exhaled through his nose, then took out his phone. “I got this a few days ago.” He flashed his screen to me, an email from some man named Christian Richards.
Catching his gaze, he nodded toward the screen in a “read it” motion. He waited for me to start before repeating it word for word.
“It’s my pleasure to offer you a coveted apprenticeship at Sawdust Woodworkers, working directly under myself—”
I heard the words and saw them on the screen, but my brain couldn’t absorb them.
“This is amazing, Ricky, but—” My eyes skipped down to the bottom of the email:
Seattle, Washington.
My throat closed.
“I leave in three days.”
Three days?
Breathe, Fielder, breathe.
“Yes, breathe,” he instructed.
“We can make it work. You there, me here. I can move to Seattle next year after graduation. I can build my audience more, monetize my channel, and—”
“Fielder—” Ricky said, and I immediately knew.
Tightness pulled at his jaw, and he squeezed his eyes shut the way he did when he was trying to prevent himself from crying.
“Don’t do this, Ricky.”
Silence—it built in my ears, my chest, every cavity in my body until I was a balloon so full of air that my elasticity was at its breaking point. “If you’re doing what I think you’re doing, you need to say it. Full voice.”
He moved in for a hug. My body went rigid.
“We can make it work,” I pleaded.
