Page 4

Spoiler Alert: The Act One Breakup!

My question lingered on the warm Atlantic breeze.

What happens now?

The hem of my shirt billowed open.

What happens now?

His hands found their way to my exposed skin.

What happens now?

“Fielder,” he whispered, his fingers sending shock waves through my system.

I shuddered.

His ocean eyes were millions of miles of endless dark waters.

Normally our lips moved in syncopated rhythm, and I would get lost in him, but something tugged at me. At him, too.

His fingertips were cold. His touch distracted. His eyes full, wet.

I moved back beside him, elbows digging into cool sand, and stared up at the stars, my new dream box in my lap.

He stood up, brushed the sand off his legs, grabbed his hoodie, and threaded it over his upper body. “Let’s do something wild.”

“Like?”

“I don’t know,” Ricky said, bouncing on his heels. His nervous energy over the last week had grown in intensity every day. I usually knew how to read him. But there was something strange in the way he avoided looking directly into my eyes. “Skinny-dipping!”

“With the sharks? Lord.”

Though it elicited a small laugh, it ended quickly.

It wasn’t unlike Ricky to suggest being naked—he liked being one with nature and all that—but this felt forced. Like he was trying to be spontaneous as a distraction for something else.

Suddenly, as if he was unable to achieve the desired outcome, he groaned.

His head tipped back as he vibrated like he was trying to expel his demons; the whites of his eyes glowed in the moonlight.

When we were kids, Nonna would watch us while our parents worked, and her favorite pastime was making us fried meatball sandwiches and sitting us down to watch those ridiculous “documentary” shows about “real people” who experienced hauntings and demonic possessions.

While we watched poorly acted reenactments of children getting possessed by the devil or a lesser demon, she would say, “This is why you need to be good.” Ricky and I used to take turns pretending to be possessed, and Nonna would call upon Jesus and grab her crucifix.

Ricky’s sister, Sienna, would laugh at us from the corner of the living room, where she lived on her phone, and tell us we were going to hell.

At night, Ricky and I would sneak out onto the roof to stargaze.

We talked about ghosts and demons, god or the gods, love, and whether or not we thought any of it was real. How, together, we would find answers.

The thing about ghosts was that they lingered; even if you couldn’t see them, you felt them.

On the beach, Ricky shouted the sign of the cross in Italian: “Nel nome del Padre, e del Figlio, e dello Spirito Santo. Amen!” Dropping to his knees, he clasped his hands together in prayer above his head.

A hungry look came over him, the one he got right before he speared his opponents during wrestling matches in school, and he darted toward me, launching into my midsection, and tackling me into the sand.

Nonna called me “Pasta Dolce,” sweet dough, because of my blond surfer hair and soft linebacker body—but I didn’t date the captain of the varsity wrestling team for all those years without learning a move or five.

Using my weight against him, I pinned him to the ground.

“I win,” I panted. I knew he let me, but it still felt good.

His face twisted like an evil Disney villain right before the sneak tickle attack.

Shooting up between my pits, his fingers wriggled until they found my switch, and my entire body convulsed, folding into the sand.

Writhing, scream-laughing, begging him to stop, I eventually got him to concede, and he pulled me into a hug on top of his chest. His lips pressed against my forehead.

I caught my breath and kissed the fabric of his shirt.

My head tried to find comfort nestled into his neck, but his body writhed out from under me, and I fell off him.

My phone screen lit up in a small, dark pocket of sand.

It must have fallen out of my shorts when he tackled me.

There were hundreds of new notifications from that latest video.

I muted my notifications and looked back to where Ricky had been lying.

But all that was left was an impression of his body in the sand.

Ricky was at the water’s edge.

The smooth sand was cool against my bare feet, and it grew chillier the closer I got to him. The moon hung overhead like an ethereal night-light, illuminating the peaks of small waves. The salt water rushed toward us and splashed our legs as we teetered between land and sea. Ricky felt miles away.

“You ready to talk to me?” I borderline begged. Okay, maybe I whined. But there was a knot in my chest that moved up into my throat the longer the night waned.

He looked away.

“Dude, really?”

“Did you just dude me, bro?” he asked.

“Did you just bro me, homeslice?” I mimicked. This was our routine; usually it happened in the middle of our epic make-out session where we pretended we were straight bros using ancient slang.

“Did you just homeslice me, buddy?”

“Nah, pal.” I pushed him, and he puffed out his chest.

His temporary smile flickered and I was over it.

“Okay, Riccardo Guiseppe DeLuca, spill.”

“Not the full name!” His voice shook.

With my Spidey-sense tingling, my heart started to race, faster and faster and faster until it throbbed in my ears.

Since I was a kid, I suffered from panic attacks, which my therapist thought started when Ma and Dad would scream at each other, fighting all night.

They continued after Dad left, and got worse when he moved back in years later because it all felt so fragile, and they fully kicked into high gear when Dad passed.

It was like playing a never-ending game of midnight manhunt without flashlights, always on edge waiting for someone to dash out from a bush and grab you.

Ricky was supposed to be a safe zone, my home base.

“Look at me.”

He refused.

“What’s going on with you?” The words burst through my chest like a parasite, latching on to him.

The therapist I started seeing after Dad died said I had a tendency to say what was on my mind, unfiltered, especially in moments of intense emotion because I wanted people around me to show up authentically.

So I pushed for a reaction. It wasn’t intentional, but subconscious.

Ricky braced for a Fielder blowup, but all I could say was, “You’re so far away. Talk to me?”

“It’s hard.” He picked his head up, but the way he did it, slow and pained, his head looked like it weighed a million pounds. “To look at you.” His lip quivered.

“Why?” My eyes stung.

His body tensed, but he didn’t look away. “Because you’ve been my everything. For as long as I can remember, Fielder.”

“And you’re mine—”

“That’s the point. I don’t know who I am outside of you. Us. ” He paused, licked his dry lips. “Do you ever think we moved too fast?”

His words retreated into the ocean, lost in the undertow.

“Too fast?” I repeated, unable to grasp his question.

“Yeah, like, we did everything backwards. Fell in love at freaking five years old, and planned out our entire lives before taking the SATs. This is, like, the time when everybody is supposed to grow up and move away and find themselves. I need to find myself.” He was breathless, his voice soaked and shaky.

Nonna used to say I was born with sneakers on my feet, that once I came out of the womb, I was unstoppable, rolling, crawling, running, bouncing off the walls.

Sometimes, when she would watch me and put me to sleep, she let me keep my shoes on because she knew once I woke up, I’d tear off down the halls and she wanted me to be ready.

This resulted in me habitually putting my shoes on before pants, and it became a theme in my life that everything happens backward.

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 I had to know the endings before I began.

I often wondered if Ma had known that Dad would eventually get 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 understood me . 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 him not to do what he was about to do.