summer stained blue

prologue

"Dad? Dad, can you hear me?"

Static crackled noisily over the line, and Finn held the phone a few inches further from his ear. His father's voice was distorted when the older man finally spoke, but the familiar raspiness still rang through his cheap phone speakers. He couldn't fight back the small smile that tugged at his lips, and he held the device a bit tighter as he made his way down the deserted city sidewalk.

"Sounds like I'm going through a fucking blender, but sure, I can hear you. Something wrong?"

"No, no. Nothing's wrong," he replied quickly. "Service is always awful in this part of town."

"Well, why'd you call me when you're on the shitty side of town, then?"

Even in the same gruff, unyielding tone, Finn knew that his father was joking. He sighed, more to himself than to his father -- or to the Chicago streets threatening to swallow him whole. A car alarm squealed a few blocks down, and he flinched before he could stop himself.

He had just finished his morning run, and he was going to be late for work if he didn't put a little pep in his step. His feet felt heavy, a consequence of three miles behind him and a dreadful sense of imposter syndrome that, even after five long years, he couldn't quite shake. Maybe it wasn't his feet so much as the sidewalk beneath him; maybe this city wasn't built for his footsteps.

With a quick shake of his head, Finn banished his self-doubt. He had always wanted to make a life for himself in Chicago, and here he was. He was doing it. He could hear his father's voice in his head before the older man even spoke, listing off every little thing he had to be grateful for.

"Finn? You still there, son?"

"Yeah, yeah. I'm here. Sorry." He used his free hand to pull his light jacket more securely around his shoulders, the spring wind circling his slim waist like a freezing fist tightening around him. "I just need some advice.

"Is this about a boy? Because I'm not quite ready to have that conversation."

Finn exhaled a shaky laugh, forced and familiar. "No, Dad, it's not about a boy."

He turned the last block to his apartment building, and he stopped, leaning his back and one foot up against the brick wall. The stones were sharp and unforgiving against his spine, and just like always, his father seemed so close yet so far away. The telephone wire stretched between them felt about the same as reaching across the living room -- endless.

"Well? What is it, then?"

Before he could even think twice, Finn had unloaded all of his work problems onto his father -- every little thing from his condescending boss who hated every single report that he turned in to his snooty coworkers who called him a "friend" and knocked him on his ass in the same breath. After doing everything in his power to escape the cutthroat popularity contest that polluted his small-town high school, he had stupidly walked straight into another one.

He thought that working as an administrator at a private school in Chicago would be the perfect combination of and lucrative, the ideal balance of useful and selfish. Instead, he found himself complaining to his father:

"It's literally my job to create better organizational structures for the school, but everyone acts like even the smallest suggestions are personal attacks on them. Any change to the schedule or the curriculum or the fucking lunch menu causes an uproar, and my supervisor told me earlier this week that I shouldn't sit in on classes anymore because it makes the teachers uncomfortable -- like it isn't one of the most important parts of my job! They're trying to pigeonhole me as this flimsy, uneducated college kid from a middle-of-nowhere cornfield town, and I have no clue how I'm supposed to ignore their bullshit, judgemental attitudes and actually do my job."