After Tristan had jumped, the middle school teachers had cried and asked one another why. Tristan’s mom had started wearing Anti-Bullying Awareness ribbons around town, and Nick’s more earnest classmates had taken to wearing them too, each as shiny and ineffectual as a bit of Christmas tinsel. They’d made the kids write journals and stories and essays on the topic—Tell us your feelings! Express yourself!—as if the answer to a crisis was more homework. For the first assignment, Nick had written the truth: that the eighth-grade boys were only acting sorry to get out of trouble, and the girls enjoyed making a drama of grief, sobbing and smearing their mascara for Tristan when they were really only thinking of themselves—Did I have something to do with this? What if this happened to me? And that none of them—not the students, not the teachers, except Ms. Flax—had wanted to deal with the kid when he was alive. When Nick’s social studies teacher, Ms. Lamb, had read this, she’d sent him to the principal’s office and called his mom in for a meeting. At the meeting, Nick was interrogated by the teacher, the principal, and the counselor, while his mom sat by sighing and rubbing her temples. And afterward, driving home, she’d told him, “I don’t need this, Nick, honestly. Right now this is the last thing I need.”
For the next assignment, Nick wrote a satirical story about Tristan Bloch as an angel in some vague, nondenominational Heaven, spilling grace upon Mill Valley and teaching all the eighth-grade kids to love one another and cherish life, “because all our souls are equal and connected through the generous and life-giving spirit of Mother Earth, just like we learned this year in the Native American Unit in Social Studies.” Ms. Lamb gave him an A and pinned the story to the wall.
It was around this time—Tristan’s death, Nick’s parents’ divorce, the specific hell of middle school—that Nick gave up the Gifted track. He began to treat school like a joke, or a game, because he saw that that was what it was: a game that kids could win or lose.
Tristan Bloch, for one, had lost. What made Nick different from Tristan was that he’d found a way to escape. He knew he couldn’t do it out in the open, in front of everyone, in a town like Mill Valley—he wouldn’t get ten steps out of his mom’s house before someone pulled him back and set him up with some extremely expensive aura-cleansing therapy. No, he had to find a trapdoor somewhere.
First, he escaped in the one place he knew he wouldn’t see anyone from school: the Fiction Room of the Mill Valley Public Library. There, as redwood branches brushed the windowpanes, he read everything his teachers didn’t assign. (For what they did assign, that was why God invented SparkNotes.) Now he escaped by hopping a bus into the city—through the Headlands and over the Golden Gate Bridge and he was there, everywhere and nowhere. Anonymous. There, he could build his real life; freed from the tyranny of perfection, he could begin to be himself.
—
Sarah had long russet hair that trailed into his mouth when they lay in spoons on piles of blankets and rugs on the floor. Her eyes were the color of mint. Pale and clear. Wide open.
They’d met on Valencia Street three months before. The day was windy, fog scudding across the sky. He walked down the street in slim dark jeans, a black T-shirt and hoodie. The hoodie was two sizes too big, but he liked the bulk it lent him. Hunching against the wind, he pulled the hood over his head. But in the moment he saw Sarah, the wind whipped back, stirred his hair and shocked his ears.
She was passing out flyers on the street. Although she was short, her body looked curvy and full under an oversized apple-red sweater and two pink and gold scarves that wound in loose cowls around her neck. Her hair was tangled and her cheeks pink from the slaps of the wind. The papers in her hand were small and bright and she was giving them away. Smiling in earnest and walking up to people on the street, extending offerings to those who passed pretending not to see her or turned their heads to roll their eyes and smirk. No matter how many people walked by, she continued to smile with clean, white teeth.
Behind her stood a dingy, white-box building with colored paper flags strung over the threshold; the flags twisted in the wind and smacked against the edges of the door. A sign above read, HIS UNIVERSAL LOVE MINISTRIES. As Nick approached, the door opened, and yellow light spilled onto the street, along with the hum of people mingling inside. But Sarah was outside, alone.
Nick pulled his hood over his head. He’d been harassed by plenty of Jesus freaks in the city before, and wasn’t in the mood to be indoctrinated. He fingered the plastic earbuds that he wore looped around his neck so he could slip them in at a moment’s notice, block out the noise of the world. Sped up to pass her so he wouldn’t have to be another asshole turning her down. He was that asshole, but didn’t, for some reason, want her to know.
But she reached out to him, catching the edge of his sleeve. Her touch was slight, a small bird finding footing.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Can I ask you something?” When she spoke, there was the smallest something wrong with it, a hint of a childhood lisp—it should have annoyed him but didn’t. She gazed up at him and he noticed the daubing of freckles on her nose and over the tops of her cheeks. She said, “Are you happy?”
“What?”
“There is love all around you. You don’t have to be alone.”
Nick searched her face for a hint that she was messing with him, but her eyes were wide open, her gaze unwavering. “Are you serious?”
She smiled. “Why don’t you come inside? There’s coffee. And cookies, I think.”
“Oh, fuck. Hold up. We talking Oreos? Or some, like, cardboard Nilla Wafer shit?”
She laughed, tilting her head back. The curve of her neck was creamy white. “I’m Sarah,” she said. That lisp again. Her hands, as she took his and led him into the white-box church, were precise and small and soft, and he told himself, She’s blazed or crazy, walk away, but something within him that was deeper than cynicism and deeper than embarrassment and deeper than fear said, Stay.