Tristan wrote:

“Mill Valley was so Beautiful that some of the fancy people decided to stay forever.  They forgot about the City.  When the Earthquake happened in the year 1906 San Francisco all fell down anyway.  It was ridiculous!  Because the houses were made out of clay!  The fancy people did not want their homes to crash around their heads and kill their families.

The thing about Mill Valley was that nothing bad would happen there.  They built their houses out of wood.”

Ryan opened his laptop, peered into the webcam’s tiny eye.  His body in the bedroom filled the small square in the corner of the screen.  Amazing how his world could be compressed in this way—how small it was, how insignificant.

Grinning, he tilted the screen until it cut off his head.  Above the elastic line of the little-boy briefs his mom insisted on buying him, his torso, slim and tan from an early-summer surge at Stinson Beach, looked alien.  Looked beautiful, and it was like watching a stranger strut around a room that once was his.

Every day, she wrapped her feet in tape and lambswool.  Still, they swelled.  Corns formed between her toes.  In time, the corns became ulcerous and burst, seeping yellow pus.  Her toenails thickened.  Skin hardened in the nail beds.  Sometimes, a toenail broke off and the exposed skin cracked, dark blood pooling in the pink silk of her toe shoe.  Bunions formed and bruised, sometimes blackened.  The skin blistered.  The joints of the toes inflamed.  Once, she broke a metatarsal in the middle of a recital—a crack, a flare of pain—but this did not stop her from dancing.  Nothing could.

When Damon managed to go six weeks without getting into any shit, his parents decided to give him back the BMW.

“Not give, lend,” his mom said, like there was a difference when he was their only kid left and everything they had would come to him eventually.

His mom was a first-grade teacher, and she liked to use her little-kid voice on him, like she was helping him sound out a word.  It made him want to punch the wall, except he didn’t do shit like that anymore.

She could be a surgeon, maybe.  She wasn’t sure about the school part, but could see herself slicing into a body, in search of the source of the pain.  She’d specialize in heart surgery: crack the sternum to open the bones, reveal the jumping, fist-sized muscle meaty and red.

She loved that this human machine could be opened, examined.  Could be held in the palm of a hand. Revealed, repaired, even replaced, encased in its jewel box of bone and sewn closed, and the person’s whole life would be different.  All her old problems would cease to exist.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Nick said. “Any question they’re gonna ask, you can answer it using World War Two and fuckin Martin Luther King. Trust me. Then for the third example I tell a story, like how my little cousin Ricky got sick with cancer and how I helped him get through it and learned about the meaning of life or whatever. The SAT eats that shit up.”

“Is he all right?”

“Who?”

“Your cousin. Ricky.”

“There is no Ricky, man. The SAT doesn’t know that. Sympathy points.”

“You don’t have to remember everything I say,” Mr. Ellison told him. “Just write down what feels important.”

Dave stared back.  This was ridiculous advice.  How was he supposed to know what was important?  Maybe in math class these distinctions could be made—here are the relevant formulas, here are the steps to solve the equation—but in English, everything was random.  Even the rules were not rules.  Mr. Ellison would say, “Here are the rules about commas,” and then, five minutes later, “But remember—when it comes to writing, there are no rules!”

These contradictions were slowly driving Dave insane.  He had written them all in his meticulous notes.  Criss-crossed the pages with arrows, underlines, exclamations that were inadequate to express the madness in his head.

When she craned her neck to see Mr. Ellison, he smiled a gentle, closed-mouth smile.  Tucked her head back down and vised his arms around her.  His heart was kicking at her ear.  It was a human heart.  It was not a teacher.  It did not know or care about the yearbook or the SAT.  It belonged to her.

Cally understood that Ryan was too busy to care about things like novels or handwriting or the volatile feelings of girls.  He was captain of the baseball team, and in the hot afternoons of late spring she and Abigail would go out in their skinny-strap tank tops and miniskirts to watch him play.  They’d lounge, singe their thighs on the bleachers.  When Cally’s bra strap fell down her arm, she wouldn’t bother to hitch it up.  She’d already been dress-coded three times that quarter, but she wouldn’t care.  She would train her eyes on Ryan who was bigger than everything, tracing the lines of his body against the green blare of grass, and when she closed her eyes at night she’d be able to keep seeing him, an afterimage burned onto the insides of her eyelids, her very own personal beautiful thing.

Did Ms. Flax know about the note?  Maybe she’d told him to write it.  Teachers like her were always encouraging hopeless kids like Tristan to inject themselves into the social scene with ridiculous gestures—declarations of love, blind stabs at friendship—as if middle school were a safe haven in which to conduct these experiments when in fact it was the most dangerous place on Earth.