Hey Dylan man,

I guess you might've had TAPSs this day, I don’t really know, but remember when Willis came out of the locker room wearing his shorts as his shirt and his gym shirt wrapped around his ass, and Hanish made us run fifteen laps to the backstop after Willis came up to him during stretches and asked if he was doing it right. I’ve got this real problem laughing now whenever Willis raises his hand in class. Coach made Bryce run to the post office yesterday in the snow because he couldn’t find any stamps anywhere. I guess the only thing that’s new since you’ve been gone is that Coach has this metal rod strapped around his ankle now. You’ll see it in person, but it’s this load-bearing column supporting his hankering ass upright. And I know now for certain he can’t do a single push-up because we were stomping our shoes outside yesterday after cajun rugby and he asked me to come over and pick up this pine cone off the ground for him. I think, municipally, if Arthur’s dad still wants to be mayor here, he needs to promise the people of Sheffield that Coach will not be allowed to drive anymore. Somehow this rod makes it even louder when he’s walking around. We rolled the ping pong tables outside yesterday during lunch and I heard him coming down off the bleachers and it was the sound of skyscrapers having sex.

Dylan man, I do wonder what you’ve been doing this last week. I wonder if you’ve left the city and gone fishing at all. Today was class pictures and I’m not sure what they’re gonna make you do when we’re all back. John Matthew says he’s gonna try and slip in an entire two-page spread into the yearbook dedicated to your suspension and how funny it was. Somehow—and I’ve been thinking about it and I still don’t know how—he managed to get a picture of it all that night it happened and he’s been hiding it from us. He says after break he’s gonna show it to you first for approval and then take it down to the Museum of Modern Art to start negotiations.

I guess nobody told you this yet either but right when you left that tremendous guy Ethan Powell won the writing prize we talked about. He’s getting dinner with Tobias Wolff after break. He says Chef Ray’s letting him choose whatever dish he likes, but he’s gonna let Toby Wolff pick instead out of the generosity of his heart, so long as it's orange juice without pulp and steak cooked through. He wrote this poem, I cannot imagine this house clean without me. It was about dragging his father’s old wheelchair from the garage, and cleaning the metal bars with baking soda after his mother broke her leg trying to ride her childhood bike. And it went on and on about what cooking he learned to do for the first time in front of the stove, and how sad he was he couldn’t call his grandmother up anymore to try and read the handwriting on her old French recipe cards. I cannot imagine this house clean without me. My god, he’s a treat—he’s a real hygienist, Ethan Powell. Last year we went to his dorm after Quiz Bowl to try and write some questions and there was a bottle of urine on his bookshelf. I was deemed well-read enough to sit at his desk and I saw an old sock wrapped around the bulb of his lamp. When I asked him about it, he said the naked light was hurting his eyes whenever his roommate was sleeping and he was sitting at his desk at 3 am, working on sonnets. He said he either had to start reading Joyce and Eliot outside under the moonlight or find a way to make the light dimmer. The only thing I’ve ever seen this guy bring in and out of the bathroom before is this bar of soap the size of a communion wafer.

Other than that, I don’t know. I think a single math equation right now could kill me. It feels like every mirror I stand in front of seems to fog as soon as I wanna shave. The other day Sommers started class late because he had this cardboard tube from the post office and it took six guys and a broken yardstick to help him rip it open. Apparently, his mother and his wife and two kids and even his dog I think are on vacation and they sent him this huge rolled-up goddamn poster of The Death of Marat from some museum and he tacked it up behind his desk. It looked so sad seeing him put it up there, I’m fearful now what the final’s gonna look like. And now whenever he’s in the bathroom or bent over at his desk trying to read our handwriting we get first class seats of this old man bathing.

I think I’m gonna go to bed tonight for thirty minutes and then set my alarm. I’ll let you know how that goes. It might be good for me to add a few more prayers to my vocabulary. I really wanna learn how to meditate in the middle of the night whenever I’m sleeping and my pillow falls on the floor. I don’t know who’s keeping score, but I’m praying to god things go well tomorrow, and then I’ll convert to Buddhism and pray to another god, and then see how long I can keep that going. I’ve got this psych test tomorrow at the ass crack hour. I couldn’t tell you a single goddamn lobe of the brain. All I do right now is write Allison letters. David told me not to say it, and especially not to her, but I swear to god I love her. Her name is a spoken signature. It’s hard to write letters to someone you call almost every night but talking to her on the phone is easier than breathing sometimes. She told me once she ordered ribs on a first date and all I really know anymore is that she takes up every part of my brain.

Dylan, man, I hope you’re getting some rest. If you still wanna make that film I’ll learn some lines and we can shoot on the lake like you wanted. Or we could do that thing you said where we shoot coverage of Evan getting ready in the morning and being late to class and then eating a huge breakfast and splice that together with footage of the Boston Philharmonic rehearsing on opening night. We’ll call.

My handwriting looks worse than ever. It looks like I learned what handwriting was two days ago. Hanish has stamps in his desk now, I think I’ll send this out in the morning.

The best everything man,

Maxwell

“It’s empty?” she said. “How long have you been back?”

“Since Wednesday,” he said. “Since Wednesday night.”

“—And you don’t even have eggs, Dylan?” she said. “Here—.”

Emma called the waiters to bring the menus back. “I’ll order some more food,” she said.

St. John’s cut him loose a week and a half early, right before break.

That morning in the apartment Dylan woke to the sound of heavy traffic outside. Usually he slept through class and the movies and morning alarms but Tuesdays and Thursdays this semester he didn’t need one. His roommate Maxwell slept with this toothbrush on his bedside and woke up at 5 am twice a week to run laps around the lake with JROTC. Maxwell held the record for the most push-ups done in a minute while being spanked and sat on, and on those mornings he used to whisper sorry to Dylan a dozen times over and feel for his shoes in the dark.

Dylan poured cereal and fed the cats and thought things over again. His mother wasn’t back until the 20th, he knew that. She called once, and she knew everything, which meant that he had two days of vacation left. She said nobody had told his father yet, not even her, and she wasn’t planning on it either. He was supposed to tell him himself. One of the last times Dylan called his father he got a package from the mailroom on his birthday a week later with a camera inside. The last time he thought about calling his brother was the first day of class last semester. He leaned against the phone outside Madame Chaouche’s class with a paper towel to his lip. He needed to know exactly how to explain in French that he’d accidentally cut himself with a safety razor that morning, but Madame heard him pacing the hall and told him to take his seat.

Dylan washed a spoon from the sink and thought about Emma for dinner that night. He parted the wooden hangers in the linen closet. The day he left school he almost missed the last coach leaving Sheffield and all he packed were his good loafers and his bad loafers, his nice khakis, the Christmas gift for his mother that Chef Ray helped him wrap in the dining hall, some of the old books and letters he kept and also the clothes he wore to the station. Somewhere in there too was his paddle with the tape around the handle. He brought it even though he knew it was gonna be about a month before he played ping pong again with someone who could really serve the ball well, someone like Logan or Maxwell or Elliott even, when Elliott wasn’t tired after practice and slumped down on the common room couch.

At home he was bored, constantly, even more than in school. Emma said she could do lunch in an hour. They met at both their mother’s favorite restaurant in the city.

“...And you’re not gonna tell me what happened?” she said.

“It was a lot more formal than I thought,” he said. “I was completely underdressed…But basically they called me in and asked me if I wanted to be suspended, and I said I yes—.”

“Dylan, stop” she laughed.

“-And then we all shook hands and they walked me to the bus stop and gave me season tickets to the MET.”

“Can I at least have an idea?” she said.

“It’s stupid,” he said.

“What was it?”

“It was just stupid,” he said. “—The entire thing. It’s such a joke. But I’m so happy it happened now, my memoir’s gonna start with this.”

After lunch the waiter brought them a plate of orange slices with the check. Emma was three months younger than Dylan but she was a real adult in college already and studying psychology and sociology and movies. She’d been employed since she was thirteen in her mother’s yoga studio with large, south-facing windows and a three-foot tall doll house in the waiting room. She unbuttoned the inner pocket of her coat to reach for her wallet and she stepped down quite lovingly on Dylan’s loafers underneath the table. They left the restaurant and held hands twelve blocks to the skating rink in the park.

“I don’t think you ever showed me those pictures,” Emma said, “From the lake when you didn’t wanna get your hair wet.”

“I’ll ask my roommate to send them,” he said. “They’re somewhere in the dorm.”

He had them lying in his desk drawer, about three-quarters of them too hopeless and blurry to even look at. He had almost missed the Sheffield coach because he dropped his camera in the snow and the back door popped open. He thought about wrapping it in toilet paper and ribbon and leaving it on Maxwell’s pillow.

In the photo of Emma that moved between the pages of every half-read book Dylan carried around, you could count, distinctly, all six delicate legs on the golden honeybee brooch pinned to her sweater.

The zamboni made its way across the ice. A line was forming for hot chocolate and the music was loud and Emma helped Dylan tie his skates.

“Emma, if we met tomorrow, and nothing’s changed except I don’t know you, and you don’t know me, and we’re in some Byzantine lecture, or in some small French class, and you laugh at one in every three of my jokes like usual—you’re telling me—.”

“—Well obviously I’d find you attractive,” she said. “But I don’t know. I don’t know at all.”

Emma once taught him how to ride a bike at St. John’s, in the parking lot behind the library after their schools’ Fall mixer, and he had never been in so much pain or so out of breath from just smiling and laughing before.

The two of them bought groceries that night and walked back to her place so she could show him how to cook an egg. In the foyer Emma said she knew she was gonna start crying sometime that night. It happened after Dylan asked her in the elevator whether it’s polite manners for the person to the left of you or for the person to the right to help you cut your steak at a dinner party if you’re in a full body cast. He’d never seen her cry before. He helped her take her boots off. They sat down and she told him about how many times they’d called and he had no idea she was sitting down in the hall of her dorm and covering the receiver and wiping her eyes, ready to pull the fire alarm if a single human being saw her in such a state like that.

He never showed her Maxwell’s letter. And he never got to tell her that on the night he got pulled over with Maxwell and Caleb and John Matthew in the backseat of Mr. McGuirk’s car, when the cop asked him to step outside and follow the tip of a pen with his eyes, and asked him what it was he ate for lunch that day and dinner and at what times, he burst into laughter. Dylan explained to him, almost fatherly, that he hadn’t eaten anything other than broth for the past week because he was heavenly distraught over a beautifully talented writer named Emma Roberts, who, by the unfair topspin of a tennis ball, was already in college, and who would often write dialogue on her palms once she ran out of space on the paper napkins in her coat pockets or on the backs of receipts she dug from the bottom of her bag.

Mr. McGuirk had about a dozen library books in his trunk he was gonna gift wrap and hand out to his homeroom before break and Dylan wanted to hand the officer one for safekeeping.

It was a quick and easy shot to Dylan’s heart, even if it stood dead center in a jungle, beating under the shade of banana leaves. It is not uncommon for Coach Hanish to have to yell Dylan’s last name in the middle of badminton to get his attention, or for Dylan to forget the score during ping pong and throw a game entirely. He might remember, somewhere, deep in the back of his brain, Emma lifting her pinky finger while bringing an espresso cup to her lips. Or Emma saying that she and a few other girls from the Westover School always skipped the annual two-mile run in January and camped in the middle of the woods. They hid sandwiches under a pile of navy sweaters, and took turns sitting on a wicker basket full of wine bottles when the forest floor felt too cold. Every time, she said, they listened to the wind and knew exactly when to head back and walk straight to the dining hall for apple cider next to the fireplace.