The Most Dangerous Place on Earth

by Lindsey Lee Johnson

“About Alana H.,” Jeannie said, turning toward Gwen. “Did you hear, just last year she was trying to get a hosting job on Access Hollywood? There’s an audition tape going around online.”

  “Well,” Gwen said, “that proves it.”

  In this way, almost indiscernibly, the conversation moved forward without Molly in it. Molly felt herself shrinking, a figure on the platform as the train pulled away. The feeling was familiar. In elementary and middle school she’d been largely invisible. In an effort to be seen, she’d shown up to ninth grade with a new pixie haircut, a bold disaster: with her too-large eyes and too-wide nose, she had looked like an unpretty boy. For months afterward, wherever she went in her high school she’d heard giggling, whispering, directed at the newly bare nape of her neck. And she’d realized there was something worse than being ignored; there was being a target. By senior year, she’d grown her hair out, learned to walk with her head down, and made herself invisible again.

  Molly’s colleagues fell silent. A new teacher had entered the lounge. The woman glided rather than walked, with chin slightly raised. Salt-and-pepper hair was cut squarely at her chin. She wore a midnight-blue sheath dress and brightly patterned silk scarf, and carried a slim leather folder that did not appear to have anything in it. Molly had glimpsed her before, settled on an outdoor bench with a salad and a book of Alice Munro short stories, as relaxed as if reclining on a beach.

  She stopped at the copy machine, over which Molly’s papers were strewn, and turned to ask the room, “Who belongs to these?”

  Molly stood up. “Sorry, let me take care of that.”

  “Beth, this is Molly Nicoll, our new English teacher,” Gwen called out from her seat. “She’s replaced Jane Frank. You remember the Jane disaster.”

  “Do I?” the woman asked.

  Gwen smiled tightly. “Molly,” she said, “this is Beth Firestein. She directs our AP English program.”

  “It’s great to meet you,” Molly said. She hurried over to Beth Firestein and offered her hand.

  Beth was petite, although she didn’t seem so. Straight bangs framed a heart-shaped face with features that were small and finely drawn: dark eyes winged by crow’s-feet, delicate ears, and a serious mouth. Her handshake was firm and dry. Molly noticed that her fingernails were manicured, shell pink, impeccable.

  “You are a fan of Lawrence,” Beth said coolly. Her eyes were on the handouts Molly had made—Lawrence’s “Give Her a Pattern,” an essay she intended to use as a launching point to discuss Gatsby and Daisy and the romantic ideal.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Conrad says that the novels of D. H. Lawrence are nothing but obscenities and filth.”

  Molly hesitated, gathering her papers. Finally she said, “If depicting women as real human beings is obscene, then I guess he is. But I think he’s wonderful. No one, except maybe Woolf, wrote more beautiful sentences.”

  “Yes,” Beth said, nodding. “You are right about that.”

  Molly beamed. Not since college graduation had her literary opinions been sought out and approved of.

  Beth withdrew a sheet of paper from her leather folder and began her copy run. “How are you settling in?”

  “All right, thanks. I had some trouble setting up my email account, but that’s the only glitch so far.”

  “Oh, I don’t do email.”

  “Aren’t we required to? In case our students need to get in touch with us?”

  Beth waved Molly’s question away; the question was a fly that annoyed her. She pulled another paper from her folder and placed it on the tray. “Where did you say that you studied?”

  “Fresno State,” Molly answered. “Where I grew up.”

  “And the Fresno schools aren’t hiring?”

  “I needed to try out a different place. I mean, I needed to be different.”

  Beth did not answer. As the machine hummed, spit out papers, she squared off the copies and slid them into her leather folder. Molly hugged her own bale of papers to her chest. She saw she had been too honest, revealed too much, as she always seemed to do.

  Finally Beth said, “It’s only geography, dear.”

  Molly nodded respectfully at this, but inside she bristled. If a person’s life could not change—if a person could not change—then what was the point of it all? Maybe Beth, admirable as she was, had been worn down by years of service, had grown complacent. Maybe Molly would remind her what was possible.

  —

  In the following weeks, Molly woke each day at six-thirty, arrived at school by seven-fifteen, checked her mailbox in the faculty lounge, made copies, and opened her classroom before the students arrived. She tested her lessons on her Period One class, which had become her favorite by virtue of being her first; she told many jokes that didn’t go over and a few that did; she paced madly in front of the whiteboard with the purple marker in her grip (like that line she loved from Eliot, “a madman shakes a dead geranium”); she scribbled. After her lectures she split the kids into discussion groups and then circled the room, weaving around the desks, pausing to rest a hand on a student’s shoulder, to lean down and listen in, to throw a question or opinion into the mix. At times she felt she and her kids were truly connecting: at times she felt they were understanding not just the books they were meant to be reading but Molly’s own secret heart, and she wanted to weep with joy. Just as often, there was defeat. There were times Molly heard herself lecturing about a passage, her voice sliding from authoritative to appreciative to rhapsodic, saw the smirks on the kids’ faces and felt as if she’d read her diary out loud. There were kids, like Abigail Cress, who seemed to have no love for learning yet badgered her constantly for A’s. There were kids, like Damon Flintov, who never, ever did their homework, no matter how many extensions she granted. There were kids, like Amelia Frye, who texted all through class, and believed her blind enough not to notice or callous enough not to care. Sometimes a student (Ryan Harbinger) would actually fall asleep, and Molly would feel responsible for having bored him, and also hate him and then hate herself for hating him. There were moments when all was calm and quiet, kids reading at their desks, and then the class would dissolve in laughter and she’d have absolutely no clue why. These moments would haunt her lonely weekends, would wake her in the silence of her studio apartment in the middle of the night. In some ways, her students knew so much more than she did, possessed vast, secret stores of information, codes and connections, that she felt helpless to understand. When she circled the room, she’d peer over their shoulders at the phones in their palms, catching flashes of photos and texts. What were they doing? she wondered. What lives were they living on those little screens?

  She spent the breaks cleaning up her classroom and listening to students’ excuses for the homework they did poorly or not at all, or traversing the campus on invented errands, mostly avoiding the faculty lounge. She ate lunch while marking papers at her desk, stayed after school to hear more excuses and requests, then hurried to the conference room for the various meetings to which she was called. Finally, at five or six in the evening, she drove home to resume what was without question the worst part of her job: the Sisyphean tasks of grading and emailing. After dinner of salad or soup at her kitchen counter, she graded assignments and quizzes for an hour or two, then logged in on the district-provided laptop to answer emails from her students and, more often, their parents, tutors, and educational consultants.

  Generally speaking, the parents were displeased. Their missives ranged from the mildly threatening to the openly incensed. They were annoyed about the homework—she gave too much or the wrong kind, or the directions were unclear or the deadlines were unreasonable. They were angry she’d forgotten which of her students had Individualized Education Plans and academic accommodations, and more than happy to send her their privately obtained, highly detailed psych reports and to educate her about the district’s legal obligations. They were uniformly certain that their kids deserved high grades:

  Hello Molly,
>
  My son Wyatt tells me you are new to town and to teaching. I’m sure it’s the same in Fresno but here we expect our students to perform at a certain level. If you have any questions please ASK, I like to be very involved with my son’s education.

  Good luck.

  Tessa Schuyler-Sanchez

  Dear Ms. Nicoll,

  I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job but this homework is really out of line. Three chapters in one week??? You know these kids have other classes too. Please be reasonable!!! Also I see my son Ryan Harbinger received a C+ on the reading response that he wrote for you about color themes in The Great Gatsby. He put a lot of time and effort into that assignment, and he is DEEPLY upset and heartbroken about the grade. I know you will reconsider.

  Cordially,

  Ellen Harbinger

  dear miss nicoll

  just wanted to let you know jonas will be unable to complete the essay due on friday as he has a very important game coming up for baseball and this will take all of his focus this week. jonas is a very gifted kid i’m sure you can see that and i’m sure you will understand and give him a pass on this. thx.

  kevin everett

  Her students, too, sent rambling emails that they never seemed to proofread:

  Hey Miss Nicoll,

  Sorry I don’t get this homework are we supposed to just free write about what we think or do we have to use quotes from the book? And if you said 3 pages does that really mean 3 or if we do 2 and a half is that OK because that’s really all I have to say? Or do you want me to add a bunch of random stuff in their to make it three?

  Also I was absent on Friday b/c I had to go skiing in Tahoe with my family, did I miss anything?

  Sincerely,

  Steph Malcolm-Swann <3

  When Molly had exhausted her patience for emails, she returned to grading, then reviewed her lesson plans for the following morning, when the whole routine would start again. She became accustomed to falling asleep with a pen in her hand, and slept without dreaming.

  —

  Molly was locking her room for lunch one day when she felt a strange hand cradling her elbow. She turned to find Doug Ellison, who taught government in the classroom next to hers. They had nodded to each other from across the hall but never spoken, and he seemed an enigmatic figure, avoiding other teachers, remaining with kids in his room during the lunches and breaks. He was probably ten years older than Molly, slender and slope-shouldered with thinning strawberry-blond hair. He seemed kind; she’d noticed him standing at his classroom door at the start of every period, greeting his students one by one.

  “Miss Nicoll, I presume? Doug Ellison.”

  “Molly. Nice to meet you finally.” She offered her hand.

  He took it. “I hope you didn’t dress up for my benefit.”

  Blushing, she glanced down at her outfit—a sage-colored sweater, pencil skirt, nylons, and heels. She shrugged. “I can see you didn’t dress up for mine.”

  Doug chuckled and hitched his jeans, which were held up by a frayed and braided leather belt. “Well played.”

  She smiled too. Then he asked her to join him for lunch.

  It was a friendship she hadn’t expected but was happy to fall into. Soon they were eating together most days, at his desk or hers, sharing the sandwiches and sodas and potato chips they toted in brown paper bags, a habit they’d both carried over from their own school days, while almost every one of their students bought lunch off-campus. She found that she liked him. He was someone of whom Bobbi, her father’s elderly secretary, would have said, “Bless his heart, he means well.” Despite his lame jokes and flirtations, Molly thought Doug Ellison did mean well. She liked how he shook his students’ hands before class, and the easy way he joked with them, even the awkward ones, in the hallway during break. She liked that he seemed, like her, to care more about kids than test scores, and more about fiction than friends.

  Soon they moved from commiserating about their work to talking about their lives. She told him that her father, who operated a small construction business out of their garage, had wanted Molly to stay home forever, to help run the business once she was, as he put it, “done with school”—as though her education were merely a tiresome childhood phase. She told him how every time she stepped into her father’s office and wove her way through dusty piles of his things, her lungs would start to close. How she’d calm herself by curling in a cracked vinyl chair and hiding inside the story of someone somewhere else. “Sitting around with her head in a book,” her father used to complain to Bobbi when Molly was right there beside her, thinking, If my mother had known how to do this, she wouldn’t have needed to leave.

  Doug told her that he was from the Central Valley too, the small town of Visalia. His mom was a teacher; his dad was a cop. His two older brothers were amateur wrestlers, or believed themselves to be, and when they were kids their favorite ritual was to wait until the smaller, weaker Doug had fallen asleep, then attack: while one held down his arms, he told her, the other would sit on his head, and he would lie helpless against the barrage of fists and knees and elbows—it was frankly impressive the way they would manage it, flattening him to the mattress and keeping him quiet while they pummeled his body and their parents slept soundly in their room down the hall. He’d learned, eventually, to prop a chair under his door handle, and to hide his favorite novels in the laundry hamper, lest his brothers find them and rip out their pages for sport. As a teenager, he’d found refuge at school, staying late to run track and edit the newspaper and practice the trombone, and when he’d earned a full-ride scholarship to Berkeley it had been as if the low, mold-speckled ceiling of his life had cracked open and sunlight had poured down. At Berkeley he had been happier than ever before or since. He’d majored in English, completing an honors thesis on the failure of the masculine ideal in The Sun Also Rises that was widely admired among his professors. Molly saw the value in Hemingway, she told him, but preferred the British modernists—Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf. Their novels were so mournful and musical; when she read, she felt the prose vibrating her body like song. She expected Doug would laugh at this confession, but he didn’t.

  He and his wife, Lacey, had recently separated—a secret, he said, that almost no one knew. He’d met her in a seminar the spring of his senior year, and married her six months after graduation. “She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever been with, and she loved me, and I didn’t want her to leave me, so I asked,” he said. “I remember feeling life was blowing by like a tornado and I needed to grab hold of something, anything I could. Our families came, we had a live band, a big cake, the whole nine. At the end of the night, I vomited in the bushes. That was the first time I disappointed her, definitely not the last.” Molly was amazed by how easily he opened up to her, the unflattering depths he was willing to plumb. She saw that his failed marriage was a tender subject that he still found hard to talk about, and she liked that he trusted her enough to tell her this. Most of all, she liked that the two of them could avoid the faculty-lounge cliques together and tell themselves it was a choice.

  THE LOVERS

  At seventeen, Abigail Cress knew she wasn’t beautiful. She wasn’t modelesque Elisabeth Avarine, trailed down Miller Avenue by grown men in Lexus sedans. She wasn’t even ordinary-pretty like Cally Broderick, her former best friend. Although black hair fell in glossy curls over Abigail’s shoulders, beneath it were small gray eyes and a thin sharp face and a nose that would have been too big on a boy. In her track uniform—a red sports bra stretched flat across her chest and silky blue shorts that ballooned around her hips—her body was skinny and hard as a coin.

  She believed unprettiness was something to atone for, so she made herself an A student, track captain, president of the Valley High chapter of the National Organization for Women, editor of the yearbook. She enrolled in Mr. Ellison’s class to prep for the June SAT, and on weekends wrote out careful, color-coded flashcards for the vocabulary words she didn’t know. She believed high sch
ool was easy: you just did the work. She believed love was bullshit, teenage boys idiotic. She made plans: Dartmouth for college, or another competitive school on the East Coast, where she believed she would fit in better than she ever could in Mill Valley, California. Where her life would click into focus and her unprettiness transform to specialness, or glamour.

  She shopped. Bluefly.com, Piperlime, Nordstrom, Saks. Her parents paid her credit card bill each month without comment. She accumulated stuff she didn’t even want. James Perse T-shirts ($65 each) and J Brand skinny jeans ($169). Tory Burch “Aaden” ballerina flats ($250). A Marc Jacobs “Eugenie” quilted-leather clutch ($495). She’d once spent $500 on black satin lingerie from Agent Provocateur just to see if they’d notice; while waiting for the package to arrive, she’d drifted to sleep each night to the image of her bedroom door bursting open in a flurry of outrage, her father’s gray suit rumpled, her mother’s black hair frizzed. But they’d never said a word about it. Her best friend, Emma Fleed, had seen it hanging in the closet with the tags still on and made such a big deal about it, Abigail had told her to take it all.

  She was grateful for Mr. Ellison: thirty-two years old, tall, with sloped shoulders and a barely noticeable paunch over his belt. When he taught, he wore striped dress shirts, Gap jeans, and a braided leather belt that had started to fray but held some special meaning for him—Abigail teased him about it once, offering to buy him a new one from Michael Kors or Ferragamo, and he pouted until she changed the subject. He wore square-rimmed glasses over his hazel eyes. His hair was strawberry-blond and thin and his face clean-shaven. There were little nicks of blood around his jawline and neck. His teeth were straight, his fingers freckled and strong. He had a degree in English literature from Berkeley, which was a hard school to get into, and his favorite book was A Confederacy of Dunces, written by some guy who’d killed himself before the book was published and won the Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Ellison talked about this story often, seeming to cling to it in a way that made no sense to her.