The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(41)

“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.

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.