ezra valencia / d3 / fin

Ezra had always had a talent for food. When he was younger, he would toddle around the kitchen as his parents cooked dinner. They would always scoop him up and try to put him somewhere else in the house, away from the sharp utensils and sparking appliances, but he’d find his way back. The entire process was fascinating to his young, one-track mind. Eventually, his parents realized there was no keeping him away. Whenever dinner time rolled around, they would strap him in his high-chair and let him watch as they cooked.

He was allowed to help in the kitchen as he got older. He would help his mother with the meats, mixing together different spices and rubbing them all over beef or chicken. He would chop up vegetables and watch as his father seared them in butter in a cast-iron skillet. He learned the proper cooking times for rice, and pasta. He learned how much salt was too much and how much was not enough. When he told his parents that his dream was to open a restaurant, they let him pick a night every week where he would cook the meal (under intense supervision, of course). They wanted to support their son no matter what, and they knew it wasn’t their place to tell him what he could and could not dream of doing.

For a school project, he told everybody about his dream. Not a very practical dream when the district you live in is known for electronics. His teachers shot him down, told him he needed to pick something else, so he told them he would, but only to placate them. He was a child filled with determination that never wavered, not even when he grew up and learned how terrible society could be. It felt like a big fuck you to the world— that no matter what it threw at him, it could never take away his optimism. It was his and his alone, a gift nestled next to his heart that he could cherish.

In high school, he began to rise in popularity. He was friendly, and always had good jokes, and reached out to everybody, no matter what other people thought of them. Sometimes he would bring baked goods to school, and people would fall over themselves in the hallway trying to get a cookie or a danish from him. He’d been a bit surprised when he started to become popular, thinking such status was reserved for people who weren’t afraid to stomp on others to get there. It was almost confusing that people liked him just for being himself. He wasn’t always the smartest, but he made up for it in selflessness and understanding.

Those were the same virtues he tried to instill in his younger sisters. He had three of them, all wildly different from him and each other. He wanted to do right by them. His parents set perfect examples, of course, but he wanted to set a good one for them as well. Besides, he figured it would be good practice for when he had a family of his own. His sisters got annoyed at him sometimes, claiming he acted like a third parent, but he was also somebody they could come to when they needed advice they were too nervous to ask their parents about. He also knew how to have fun when the occasion called for it.

He figured he was lucky. Nothing bad had ever happened to him. Both his parents were still alive, and together. He and his siblings were healthy. They lived in an apartment that had room for all of them. His parents had kept the same jobs since he was born, and they usually had enough money left over at the end of the month for extra things. He’d seen the ways that other people around the district, and it hurt to see how much people could suffer.

He decided he was going to do something good for the people around his neighborhood. He started waking up early on Saturdays to prepare meals for the neighbors who didn’t always have them. He had menus made in his head— chicken and squash vegetables one week, a cheese rice dish the next, some sort of chocolate dessert whenever he had extra time to make one. He hand delivered the foil trays to every person and spent as much time talking to them as possible. He knew there was an unfair societal shame in needing help, and he didn’t want anybody to feel like they didn’t matter.

He figured it was nothing to give up one day of his week to help others. Besides, the other six days of the week still belonged to him. He became known around the neighborhood for his meal deliveries. The attention made him a bit nervous, but he liked having the camaraderie with everybody. He liked greeting people as he walked to school, sharing conversations during the deliveries, feeling like a trusted member of the community. Sometimes, someone would try to pay him for the food, and he always refused. He wasn’t in this for any sort of money. He was in it because it was the right thing to do.