The Most Dangerous Place on Earth

by Lindsey Lee Johnson

  Even in January, the classroom was crowded, clamorous, and hot. Sunlight pulsed through tall arched windows at the back, intensifying the stew of smells—pencil shavings, whiteboard marker, old food and young bodies. Teenagers filled five rows of five desks each. The first row was populated, unsurprisingly, by girls. To Molly Nicoll, they betrayed no hints of the awkward vulnerability, the blushing, blemished, essential discomfort with self, that had plagued her own teenage years: rather, they slouched in their seats, dangled legs over chair-arms like gymnasts, and typed into their phones with agile, furious thumbs. They wore tasteful makeup, and blouses with skinny jeans, or logoed fleece jackets and yoga pants. Their eyes flashed up at Molly, questioning whether she had anything remotely interesting to offer—and judging, presumably, that she did not, they returned to their small screens. Behind these girls was the co-ed hubbub of the middle rows, and in the back were boys—with sideswept hair and polo shirts and boat shoes, or buzz cuts and hoodies and giant, gaudy sneakers—who talked or yelled or threw small objects back and forth or stared out the windows or slept. They were juniors, six or seven years younger than Molly herself—a gulf of time and experience that seemed suddenly impassable.

  Nevertheless, from the front of her new classroom she addressed them, waving her arm in the manner of a desperate hitchhiker:

  “Hi, everyone! Hello? Can we quiet down, please?”

  The students hushed and looked her way, and she felt a swell of tenderness toward them—They listened! They liked her! And yet she was unnerved. Her own teachers had given her theory and pedagogy, heuristics and state standards. They had not told her how to stand before these privileged, unfamiliar faces, feeling in her tight blazer and wool trousers as foreign and enormous as she had when she was a teenager herself.

  She was twenty-three years old, recently graduated and newly credentialed, and until a week ago had never lived anywhere but her father’s cramped, two-bedroom ranch house on the outskirts of Fresno, in the nowhere place between beige strip mall and brown farmland.

  “My name is Miss Nicoll,” she began, glad that she’d rehearsed. “I’m really excited to meet you. I understand your teacher had to leave kind of suddenly. That must have been hard for you guys.” The students did not blink. She pressed on. “We’ll pick up where Ms. Frank left off. We’re going to look at great works of American literature, and discuss some social and historical themes that these works explore. I’m looking forward to hearing your ideas in class and reading the essays you’ll write at home. And if you ever have any questions or concerns, I hope you’ll talk to me. My classroom door is always open.” As if to prove this openness, Molly beamed a smile around the room.

  It was impossible to tell how much of her message, if any, was reaching the students. But they seemed, if not inspired, willing to go where she would take them, and for that she was grateful. She ran through the roll quickly, remembering what names she could, then uncapped a pen and wrote in large, looping letters across the whiteboard: The American Dream.

  “What is the American Dream?” she asked them. “What do American authors have to say about it? And what does it mean to us today? These are the questions we’re going to explore.”

  The front row nodded; the others stared. Several girls took out sheets of lined paper and wrote The American Dream across the top, then looked up at her for more. Finally a hand crept up in the front row. Its owner, Amelia, had rapidly blinking eyes and a frown of bangs over her forehead.

  “Yes?” Molly asked hopefully.

  Amelia looked at her phone and recited, “The American Dream refers to the equal opportunity for every American to achieve success through ingenuity and hard work.”

  Molly had been warned about this: apparently the modern teenager preferred to live outside of knowledge, or to skim along its edges by way of Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, and the basic Google search. She nodded. “Okay, yes. Thanks. Can we put the phones away for a minute? What I want to know is, what does it mean to you?” Again they said nothing, merely shifted in their seats. “What are some things that one would aspire to achieve or attain?”

  “Good grades?” guessed a girl in the front.

  “A Lambo?” asked a boy in the second row.

  “Maybe a personal assistant?” another girl offered. “Who follows you around all the time and, like, does stuff for you?”

  “A private jet!” called a back-row boy, and another sang out:

  “Fly like a G6!”

  The class laughed, the room relaxed. Molly said, “So we’re thinking of lots of material things. That’s interesting. How about a safe home? A rewarding career?”

  “Obviously,” said Amelia.

  “Now, do you think every American has the opportunity to have these things?”

  “If they get a job,” said a boy in the middle.

  “Well…” Molly had been trained not to lecture her students, but to use the Socratic approach, questioning them until they reached true insights on their own. In theory this approach was noble; in practice it was a little exhilarating and a little terrifying, like steering her subcompact through a storm. “What kinds of jobs are available to most people?”

  “Whatever kind,” Amelia said with a shrug. “If you want something, you just have to go for it.”

  “I don’t know what Ima do, but I’ll be successful at it,” a back-row boy called out, apropos of nothing.

  “I’m gonna be a lawyer,” said another. “They make bank.”

  “You know you have to know how to read to get that job, right?”

  “Ha-ha. Shut up, chach.”

  “Okay, that’s enough.” Molly took a breath and began again. “We seem to be a little unsure about the state of the American Dream today. That’s fine. That’s good! Let’s continue thinking about this as we look at Fitzgerald’s critique of the Dream in his era. You all have your Gatsbys, right?” Before more could be said, she split the students into groups and asked them to locate a relevant passage in chapter one. Soon the classroom hummed with conversations, the front-row girls tugging the rest along. It felt like a minor miracle. Engaged with the literature, the students must have been feeling what Molly had felt in the rare unlonely moments of her childhood: when discussing Gatsby in an English class, or reading Jane Eyre by flashlight, the gears of her life would click into place, the lock release, and she would be revealed, simply and wholly herself. But after five minutes, the groups began to dissolve—books were down, phones were out, boys were stabbing one another with pencil ends. She quieted them.

  “Now, I need one person from each group to tell us about the ideas you’ve come up with. Who’d like to go first?”

  At the front of the room, a girl raised her hand and stood up. She was skinny and short, with a governess face (narrow, gray-eyed) and a gorgeous riot of black curls.

  “Yes, thank you?” Molly said.

  “Abigail.”

  “Thank you, Abigail. What did you guys come up with?”

  Abigail explained that she’d finished reading the book over winter break and so was prepared to speak beyond the first chapter. Before Molly could stop her, the girl launched into a monologue explaining the problematic revisioning of the American Dream in the twentieth century as related to the parties at Gatsby’s mansion. She spoke with the uninspired authority of a SparkNotes entry, projecting dutifully to the room in a voice that never wavered or changed in pitch, pointing out precisely the passages that any English teacher would have chosen, making exactly the arguments that any college English major would make. Her own group members watched her, impressed and perplexed by all the ideas they’d supposedly discussed. The rest of the class clutched their iPhones resentfully or rested their chins on their fists.

  At last Molly had to interrupt her: “Excellent, Abigail. Thank you so much. Why don’t I read one of those passages out loud, so we can all see what you’re saying about the rise of materialism?”

  Abigail shrugged and returned to her seat. The room exhaled. At the w
hiteboard, Molly opened her book and began to read. She loved to read aloud, the way the words, pronounced, surrounded and sheltered her:

  “By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos, and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.”

  She was deep into the rhythms of the language, almost forgetting the twenty-five kids who were watching her, when the banging began. Startled, she paused, then continued more forcefully, but the banging grew louder, and soon threatened to overtake the cheerful timbre of her voice.

  In the back row, a pale, burly boy was kicking the leg of his desk. He wore an oversized T-shirt of cherry red and a matching flat-brimmed cap. His eyes were wide and the blue of bathwater; a silver stud gleamed above each eyebrow; his thick lips curled in a sneer. It was the absolute worst possible scenario that the offending noise should come from him.

  “What’s that tapping?” Molly said finally.

  Instantly—it felt instant—the banging was louder. Relentless.

  “Can whoever’s doing that please stop?” she asked.

  He did not stop.

  She was gearing up to confront him—day one was too soon for an enemy, especially an enemy like him—when Abigail set down her Gatsby and spun to the back of the room. “God, Damon, would you shut the fuck up? What is wrong with you?”

  “The fuck is wrong with you?” the boy hurled back.

  Energy stirred in the room, the excitement palpable, and now a second boy, Ryan something, jumped eagerly into the fray. “Yeah, Abigail,” he said, his tone twisting her pretty name into an insult, “why do you gotta be such a bitch?” He and Damon laughed together, in a hard, unbridled way.

  “Fuck you both,” Abigail said calmly, and picked up her iPhone with all the graceful disdain of a French film star palming a cigarette.

  Molly shouldn’t have allowed foul language in class—Maintain at all times a learning environment of positive language and mutual respect. But in truth she admired the girl. She raised her hand. “Hey, guys? Can we all calm down, please, and watch our language?”

  This failed to impress Abigail, who rolled her eyes and continued to text. Damon and Ryan smirked in satisfaction, and the rest of the class turned reluctantly back to their books. Molly pressed on with the lesson. When she dared to look at Damon once more, he was disemboweling a red Swingline stapler. He glared at her. She had the sense he might spring forward to stab or staple her where she stood, and her toes curled painfully inside her tight and pointed heels.

  This was when she noticed the girl who’d been sitting beside him all along. She was the only girl in the back row. She looked like a lost soul from Haight-Ashbury: wavy hair, placid face, gauzy top, cutoff jeans. Her feet were flip-flopped. Her desk was bare but for a single book spread open. The book was too thin to be Gatsby. Molly guessed it was poetry, something appealing to teenage girls. Dickinson? Plath? The girl was reading, fingering the pages. This simple act made Molly smile—here, finally, was something to relate to, a familiar gesture in a foreign land.

  —

  Valley High was prettier than public school had any right to be: it resembled a small university, with various halls all stuccoed Creamsicle-orange, generously windowed, and radiantly trimmed. Out front, iron gates embellished with scrollwork cordoned a manicured lawn from the street. At the center of campus, the clock tower—a century old, timelessly tasteful, with art deco numerals and narrow arched windows—posed against the cerulean sky.

  This was Mill Valley, which Smithsonian magazine had recently declared the Fourth Best Small Town in America. The town itself—fewer than five square miles nestled below Mount Tamalpais and Muir Woods—had been a vacation destination for elite San Franciscans at the turn of the twentieth century and a haven for hippies after the Summer of Love. In 1970 it was made famous by its theme song, “Mill Valley (That’s My Home).” Performed by Rita Abrams, a pigtailed, orange-muumuued schoolteacher, and her fourth-grade class, the song was recorded by a local producer and played on the radio nationwide. As Abrams’s song chirpily described, Mill Valley’s beauty was extravagant. The town was endowed with not only green mountains and gold hillsides, but also redwood forests, canyon waterfalls, wetland preserves, the Pacific Ocean, and the San Francisco Bay. And people paid for this extravagance—by 2013 the average home price had soared well north of a million dollars. It felt worlds away from Fresno, from whence Molly had fled the moment she was offered the sudden, mid-year position at Valley High.

  —

  The faculty lounge turned out to be an arena of cliques not unlike the cafeterias of Molly’s youth. There were the advisers to the much-lauded drama program, who huddled together to plan their student shows. There were the would-be science fiction writers, who sat around a table in their short-sleeved dress shirts and black jeans, conversing in their own pop-cultural code. There were the older, tenured teachers who cruised in and out just to check their mail, never making eye contact lest they be asked to join a committee; in their own minds they were already retired.

  The room itself smelled of bag lunches. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Three large windows overlooked the front lawn, but their blinds were tilted to block most of the sunlight and slice the view of students walking by. There were laminate tables, molded plastic chairs, a droning refrigerator, and a crumb-speckled microwave. In one corner, a kind of faux living room had been arranged, with an aged armchair and abused vinyl sofa, a lunar scar where its cushion had been gashed and sewn. Wooden mail cubbies lined one wall, and wedged beside them was the copy machine, where at lunch on the Friday of her first week Molly stood making handouts for Monday’s class.

  She was midway through her copy run when the machine jammed. As her colleagues looked on, she commenced the humiliating dance of pushing buttons and clattering drawers. She was ready to unplug the machine from the wall when she was nudged aside by a woman with sculpted blond hair and boot-cut jeans whose pockets sparkled with dark glitter. Without looking at Molly, she pressed two buttons, opened a tray, pulled out the paper, pressed a third button, and set the copier humming once more.

  “Thanks,” Molly said over the noise of the machine. “I hate these things.”

  “You mustn’t let it see you scared,” the woman replied. Her eyes were very blue and her blouse very white, and her skin had the tanned, rind-like quality of a regular marathon runner. She stuck out her hand. “Gwen Thruwey. Advanced Algebra, Calculus AB.”

  “Molly Nicoll.”

  “You’re English, right?”

  “I’ve got three sections of American Lit.”

  Gwen nodded as though this merely confirmed what she’d read in Molly’s file. “Must be nice. I’m doing four sections of Advanced Algebra plus the one of Calculus and running the crew program. Why I say yes to these things, I’ll never know.”

  “Wow. You must be exhausted.”

  Gwen gave her a smile. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  The next moment, Molly found herself in the unprecedented position of sitting beside the most popular person at the lunchroom’s most popular table.

  “Everyone, this is Molly Nicoll,” Gwen announced. “She’s the English person taking over for Jane Frank. Nice of Jane to up and quit on us smack-dab in the middle of the school year.”

  “Hello,” Molly said.

  Gwen’s disciples were Jeannie Flugel, a salon blonde who taught World Cultures and Contemporary Social Issues; Allen F
rancher, a barrel-chested, unilingual lacrosse coach who’d been coerced into teaching French and Spanish 1; and Kristin Steviano, an Integrated Science teacher who looked like she’d just stepped off the Pacific Coast Trail, wearing a vaguely ethnic sweater and hiking shorts, although it was winter.

  “You know how Jane left, right?” Jeannie said conspiratorially. “In the middle of first period, she bursts into tears, then runs straight to Katie Norton and says she’s never going back into that room. She never thought she could hate a child, but they made her do it, she said. They made her hate them.”

  “I don’t know if I could hate my kids,” Allen Francher said, “but then again, if I were hit by a bus, they’d probably be thrilled.”

  “I can’t believe that’s true,” Molly said.

  “You wouldn’t believe a lot of what goes on around here.”

  “What’s that saying?” Gwen asked. “The inmates are running the institution?”

  Everyone laughed, so Molly did too. Kristin turned to her and shrugged. “Welcome to our weird little world.”

  After several moments of conjecturing about Jane Frank—maybe she was clinically unbalanced; maybe her students had made fun of her mustache—the teachers moved on to discuss a reality TV show Molly hadn’t seen. What she gleaned from their conversation was that some contestants on the show appeared to be genuine and sweet, while others were competing “for the wrong reasons.”

  “Just look at Alana H.,” Allen said. “It’s obvious she’s only in it for the fame.”

  “She treats it like some kind of game.”

  “Well, he’s not going to choose her. He couldn’t. He loves the other one.”

  “Just wait,” Gwen said. “She’ll get him into the fantasy suite, and true love will go right out the window.”

  “But no one really falls in love on those shows,” Molly cut in. “I mean, how could you? You’d have to be insane.”

  No one responded. In the uneasy silence that fell over the table, Molly’s colleagues exchanged glances.