The shade of his mixed-race skin, like something just this side of burned, was more vivid than I’d let myself remember. But when I added the name of the state where he grew up, I was rewarded promptly with a decade-old YouTube thumbnail that showed part of a face-only a nose and mouth-that I sensed right away must be his. His real name, when I searched, got half a million hits I braced myself for a long wild-Google chase. I’ll call him Ricky, which sounds almost right: boyish, a little innocent, a little insolent. Then one day, at my writing desk, inventing another teenage boy-my stories are overpopulated with them-I was hit by a truth I must have worked to keep at bay: by now he’d be findable on the web. Over the next fifteen years, I liked to tell myself I’d made meaning out of his life: planted the scanty seed of him and grown a magic beanstalk of what if? But I could never stop wondering about the actual him. Whenever someone asked me if the book was based on a boy I knew, I hedged: “Nah, I mostly made him up.” Gallantly protecting him, I wanted to believe, but more truly protecting myself from old, dismaying questions.
Why did it take me so long to think of tracking him down? In 2002, I’d published a novel that starred a boy inspired by him, and once I’d forged my fictional kid, I tried hard to smother thoughts of the real one.
