In the classroom, Nick felt an uncommon flash of fear—was the proctor watching as he wrote Dave’s name and address on the lines provided, penciled in the bubbles underneath?
Nick set down his pencil and stretched. Elisabeth had taken the seat behind his, and he turned toward her as casually as he could, searching her face for some affirmation—a nod, a mouthed Don’t worry, anything—but she ignored him, hunching over her Scantron form, and with the heat of the proctor’s gaze on his neck he turned forward again, squinting thoughtfully at a poster of mitosis and meiosis. His leg trembled under the desk and he stilled it, consoled by the fact that the shaking leg was as Dave Chuian a gesture as he could have possibly invented, easily explained by the anxiety of an inept test-taker facing down the Scantron, that firing squad of small, blank circles.
“Please turn to Section One in your test booklets,” the proctor said.
Nick flipped the page.
Is it always advantageous to pay more attention to details than to the big picture?
He began to write. To focus, to settle into the rhythm of his breath and the sounds of pencils scratching, erasers squeaking, the world receding as he analyzed the words of Martin Luther King and the implications of the Holocaust for the fifty billionth time, all the while replicating Dave Chu’s precise, small, blockish print, letters that hovered just above the line—and then the exhilaration as he finished the essay and worked his way through the math, the reading, the grammar, as he witnessed the incredible blinking circuitry of his own brain as it picked out patterns and called up formulas, skimmed dense blocks of text, unveiled the logic in the grammar of the sentences, dismissed red-herring answers and pushed toward the right ones, and honestly, it was hard to believe people had to be taught how to do this—that what he had, at least Sarah always told him, was a gift from God.
—
She wasn’t exactly his girlfriend. She didn’t demand a label, she seemed perfectly at peace whether he made promises or not, and she always looked happy to see him.
She was in school for dental hygiene and knew all there was to know about brushing and flossing and the names and positions of the teeth and the techniques for scraping off years of plaque with a tiny metal hook. But she didn’t know about Nick’s Mill Valley life. What would he get out of telling her?
Because here was Mill Valley lately: It was his mom at work and the housekeeper at home, running her vacuum through the living room, Nick tripping over the cord on his way out the door, taking the Audi and cruising around Marin for some kid to sell to or some girl to hook up with. And silencing his phone because his dad kept calling—not wanting to know Nick, just wanting him to visit the new family like some fucked-up guest of honor.
Here was Mill Valley. A dream made up to make eight-year-olds happy. You could tell Nick his own childhood had been a dream, and he might have believed it. All those grand redwoods. Tree-smelling skies. The mountain looming at the end of Miller Avenue, creased with trees and pearly-misted, or teal under torn-cotton clouds. The rich hippies parading along the triangle of avenues, congratulating themselves for buying Priuses along with their Range Rovers and getting their overpriced organic oranges at Whole Foods. And all the kids believing this was life. Kids like Tristan Bloch thinking they needed to die because otherwise there was no way out.
Nick could understand that.