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cover of Prehistoric Future , a man who didn’t seem to get older from photograph to photograph. At some point in my childhood, he had gotten a little weather-beaten, a little bald, and then stayed that way, sometimes tanned and sometimes needing a shave, just back from Brazil or a conference in Copenhagen. Through the years his image smiled out at all of us, people who didn’t know as much as he did.
    â€œThat’s what he said,” my dad agreed. “Hey, we’re going butterflying on the Peninsula this weekend, don’t forget.” He had been wanting to show me the Serra Skipper, an orange-and-white butterfly of the Hesperidae family, native to three acres of serpentine outcropping along the San Andreas Fault.
    My careless attitude toward the test was a front. I had been studying every night, keeping quiet about it, English grammar and the U.S. Constitution and those workbooks, how to annihilate the Graduate Equivalence Degree exam.
    â€œYou’ll call me,” he said.
    Perky but commanding, the way he always is, telling me not to let him down.

F OUR
    I took the dust cover off my computer while Bea sat there, the television sound turned to a murmur.
    When the machine was running the screen reported that I had one message. I never knew what Perry was going to tell me. I had imagined the Northwest to be a rainy, mossy region, but Perry gave me the impression that it was a place so booming no one had time to send E-mail.
    â€œSecond day of kayak lessons,” read Perry’s message. “Might switch back to canoe. My coach is brain-dead.”
    â€œYou ought to be used to brainless teachers,” I messaged back, “having grown up in Oakland.” We treated communication as Ping-Pong, pretending distance didn’t exist. But our humor was getting heavy handed, and where we used to like the same movies and laugh about the gaffes announcers made on television, the tone of our E-mail was drifting.
    No use waiting for Perry to reply—he would be playing handball or renting an all-terrain vehicle. I turned off the computer. The molted husk of a scorpion, a Sculpted Centroides, resembled a living, glittering creature beside a rolled-up pair of gym socks.
    Taped to a corner of the desk was a snapshot of Perry holding a model we had worked on when we were in junior high, a Fokker triplane the Germans used in World War I. Perry was smiling, wind mussing his brown hair, the oversized wooden model almost too much for one person to cradle in his arms.
    â€œYou were terrible at math a year ago, Zachary,” Bea was saying, tilting her head out of habit, the way she used to keep the hair from cascading before her eyes. Hair grows about six inches a year.
    And yet she was still Bea, gazing at me and thinking about me as she studied my attitude, the way I put my hands into my pants pockets and challenged her to give me any advice. She made a little questioning look: what makes you think you’ve mastered quadratic equations now?
    â€œMy dad wished me luck,” I said. Meaning: why don’t you?
    Sometimes I wish I had another name. All through elementary school there were several Zack’s, and in fourth grade I told my teacher to call me by my middle name, David. Notes would come home from school, David excels at soccer but needs encouragement in reading. My mother put on her padded shoulders—they were in style then, and she had a closet full of line-backer jackets—and marched off to stare down Mrs. Faber, who afterward tried not to call my name at all.
    I followed Bea at a distance, out of the house, down the front yard. All that long walk down the corridor from junior English and across the parking lot no one had accosted me, no one had said good-bye, Zachary Madison, good luck with your life. I had gone to the library the next day, before I told my father, and spent a whole morning hunting down how to get a degree without finishing high school—a GED. Never