Mike thought for a long time what to write in Sarah’s yearbook. It wasn’t her in particular; he thought for a long time what to write in any yearbook. It didn’t help that she was having no trouble writing in his; her fat space-filling letters ran together into paragraphs, wide like rivers. It didn’t help that a cloying smell of raspberry shampoo clung to her pages, that she had doodled anime characters in the spaces between the signing, that her girl friends had put lots of exclamation marks in their messages.

He wrote, You were vital to our lab group’s success (because that was the only place he really knew her from), then erased “vital” and put “essential”, then erased “essential” and put in “instrumental” in skinny letters, like the length of the word would make up for the lack of length of his message. Then he thought, maybe he should have been more vague, because she wasn’t instrumental, not really, just punched numbers in the calculator and doodled intricate vinework in her lab notebook.