He was the yearbook adviser. He edited her write-up of the drama program, and she liked to watch as he scrolled red pen across the page, striking through lazy phrases, lassoing commas that had no place.
She liked to watch him pace around the yearbook room in the afternoon light. The walls were cream, and the ancient windows, arched and warped, sealed them in a golden heat. The building, Stone Hall, was over a hundred years old and always smelled like something baking. It was her favorite place.
—
Mr. Ellison asked for her number at the beginning of junior year, in case important yearbook issues arose.
In September and October, their texts were strictly business: When is football article due?? and Editorial mtg Tues 3pm.
Their dialogue evolved gently, slowly. By November: What r u up to? She’d text, In pjs in bed still studying, just enough to make a picture in his mind. By January he’d begun to text her deeper questions:
What do you care about?
I don’t know. Grades I guess. College. Beating my sprint time. Making the best yearbook ever!!
Is that your answer?
What do u mean?
I don’t believe you. I think there is more.
Maybe…do u rly want to know?
What do you want?
Why r u asking?
What have you never told anyone else?
I don’t know.
Tell me.
Ok. Here’s something. I’ve always hated summer. Since I was a kid. I’m already dreading it.
I thought kids were supposed to love the summer? No homework, slip-n-slide, hot dogs, &etc.
Exactly. All year there’s hw and tests and so much to do u can’t even think, then one day a bell rings and it’s like stop everything, go outside, here’s this piece of plastic and some nasty boiled meat on a bun, time to have FUN!
I’m not sure I understand. I want to.
There’s too much time. U just float around in it like a speck. Sleep in. Hang out. Watch tv. Go online. Go to the beach. Get burned. Eat shitty fast food u don’t even like. What’s the point?
Is that what you do? Or, what do *you* do with all that time?
Nothing…think.
:) What do you think about?
U don’t really care abt this do u?
I care about you.
It’s stupid. Just…Is there something more to me than all this stuff I’ve been given? What if there’s not?
Talk to me, he wrote. Tell me a secret.
—
One afternoon in early February, Mr. Ellison took Abigail into the clock tower to research a yearbook article about the school’s history. Students weren’t allowed up there, but she was an exception.
He unlocked the door and guided her through the dusty dark to a steep wooden staircase. She began to climb, cobwebs clinging to her wrists and hair. She coughed. Mr. Ellison followed, his breathing heavy in the close space.
Finally she climbed out onto splintered floorboards, blinking in the sudden light. The belfry was a small, square room with arched windows that had looked dollhouse-sized from the ground but now revealed themselves to be enormous. It no longer held actual bells; to mark the hours, the secretary played a recording of bell-like sounds that had been donated by the class of 1978.
Mr. Ellison emerged behind her, and bent to catch his breath. After several uncomfortable seconds he straightened and smiled at Abigail, wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm.
“I can see why people don’t come up here much,” he said.
“Yeah,” she agreed, pulling a sticky string of cobweb from her hair. But she was interested. She began to circle the room, running her hand over the scribbled yellow walls. Paint flaked and powdered in her palm. The walls said:
THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE IS NOT HATE BUT IN-DIFFERENCE.
DEFY THE LAWS OF TRADITION.
DROP ACID NOT BOMBS.
It was afternoon, and sunlight slanted through the windows. Directly below them, on the school’s gated front lawn, kids sat cross-legged on the grass or sprawled dramatically across one another’s laps. They looked like toys. The sun made their skin gleam like plastic; their backpacks were comically small. Above them, and farther out, were rooftops, treetops, an azure sky that softened and blanched as it stretched past the Bothin Marsh and over the bay to San Francisco. The city’s white and ash-gray towers shadowed to slate against the sky. At the waterfront, the rectangles of the Embarcadero Center skyscrapers, where her parents worked—her mother managing stock portfolios on the thirty-second floor and her father trading futures on the thirty-eighth—stood clearly against the horizon, but she couldn’t make out the details of windows or stories or lights.
Mr. Ellison moved behind her, reaching over her shoulder to point to the city. His body pressed heat against her back. “Isn’t it strange,” he said, “how close it is and yet how far away?”
“We can see the world,” she said, “we’re just not allowed to touch it.”
“You’re allowed to do anything you want to do,” he told her.
She smiled. At the same time terror licked up her spine and made her neck begin to sweat beneath her hair. She wanted to turn and look at him, but didn’t.
Outside, a bird’s small head bulleted toward them—thudded against the window. Abigail shrieked and jumped. Mr. Ellison steadied a hand on her hip. The bird reeled back and disappeared.
Heart pounding, Abigail peered out the window to see where it had gone—was there any chance it lived? She shouldn’t have cared, and yet she did, intensely. Pressing her cheek to the sun-warmed glass, she saw it, a pigeon, lying side-splayed on the roof like something sleeping. Its gray eyes glossed open. Its belly shaded by the protective fold of a wing. Abigail flinched. Turned away from the window, and into Mr. Ellison’s arms.
She pressed herself against him, her cheek to his chest. His cotton dress shirt lay soft against her skin. He smelled unexpectedly like sandalwood, and she realized that he had anticipated this moment—in his bathroom that morning, he’d stepped towel-wrapped from the steaming shower, shaved his face, swiped deodorant through the hair under his arms like it was any other day, but in the last instant he had paused, thought of this moment, her, Abigail, and dabbed his neck and wrists with this cologne.
When she craned her neck to see him, he smiled a gentle, closed-mouth smile. Tucked her head back down and vised his arms around her. His heart was kicking at her ear. It was a human heart. It was not a teacher. It did not know or care about the yearbook or the SAT. It belonged to her.
—
Through the rest of the winter, their problem was simple: they had nowhere to go. His apartment was off-limits. He had a wife—Abigail had seen her pacing the aisles of Mill Valley Market—with smooth, nut-colored hair and high cheekbones, a ballet neck and a Pilates body. She would wander around with nothing in her basket but a jar of organic lingonberry preserves and a square of dark chocolate, as though the abundance of actual food overwhelmed her. Abigail wanted to feel bad for Mrs. Ellison, she seemed so sad and lost, but she was too beautiful to sympathize with.
Because there was no place for them in town, Abigail and Mr. Ellison began to take drives together. He picked her up behind the Dumpsters at Starbucks and drove her up Mount Tamalpais toward Stinson Beach or Bolinas Ridge. They parked on the desolate edges of cliffs or in groves of eucalyptus that shuddered in the fog. They touched hands, and talked. They talked forever. He opened her with questions, eased his way in. Until one day she made the move. So for the rest of their relationship they would be able to say that she’d started it.
He was her first. They did it in the cramped backseat of his hatchback or took a picnic blanket from the trunk and lay down in the car’s grassy shadow. She was always on top, his hands clamped around her hips. She liked to see his face, his grateful silence and closed eyes, and then to lean down and press her cheek against his neck and feel the throb of a pulse that needed only her. In the same moment, she liked to ima
gine herself pulling away from him, fleeing, and all the pretty things he’d say to call her back. She stayed, arched back, and told him that she loved him. He said he loved her too, collapsing his hand inside her dark nestle of hair, gripping until it pulled the skin from her skull and releasing, kissing the tip of her ear. Her ears were beautiful, he told her, small and white as shells, which she’d always known was true, but which no one else had ever noticed.
They traded fantasies. He would quit his job and follow her to college, perhaps enroll himself, go for a Ph.D. as he had always planned to do; she would forget college and live with him instead, learning to cook and to iron, making his apartment her whole world.
He loved her. She knew he had a wife, but thought that was just one of the names we put on people. She had a brother she hadn’t talked to in six months, and parents she wasn’t sure were in or out of town. Only she and Mr. Ellison were real.
—
One afternoon in mid-March, Abigail and Mr. Ellison sat side by side at a computer in the yearbook room, editing a fall sports layout. They crossed pinkies over the mouse, and then, for one second forgetting what their love story would look like to the rest of the world or that the rest of the world even existed, she kissed him.
They parted, and Abigail turned to see Cally Broderick, her former best friend, standing in the doorway. Cally stared for a moment, then fled.
Abigail found her in the girls’ bathroom. Unlike the remodeled sections of the school, this room showed its hundred years, with walls of dull white tile and floors of scuffed linoleum. A chemical stench overwhelmed the smells of human beings. A mirror, slashed by lipstick and black marker, stretched the length of four porcelain sinks smeared with yellow soap. There was one frosted, crosshatched window painted shut. On the far wall hung a battered metal tampon dispenser that, as far as Abigail knew, no Valley High girl had ever deigned to touch. Beside it, an ancient hand dryer, turned on and abandoned, roared air into the empty space, then exhausted itself. Two stall doors were open; a third was shut.
In a clatter of metal Cally emerged from the closed stall and, without looking at Abigail, walked to a sink and turned her hands under the water.
Abigail went to the sink beside Cally’s. In the mirror Abigail’s eyes looked charcoal under the fluorescent lights, her skin aged and gray.
“You can’t tell anyone,” she said over the stream of water. Her voice echoed off the tile, and she glanced over her shoulder. “Seriously.”
Cally stared back. Her wide-set hazel eyes were glossy and pink, and Abigail thought not for the first time that this was not the same girl that she’d loved in eighth grade. They’d gone to different elementary schools but met in sixth-grade homeroom, and for a period of two years and nine months they were inseparable. They’d spend hours in Abigail’s bedroom, sometimes with Emma Fleed, eating junk food or sneaking her older brother’s beer or painting each other’s toenails or watching YouTube videos or Facebooking or curling up together on her bed and combing fingers through each other’s hair and laughing and laughing and laughing about nothing at all. When Abigail allowed herself to think about this time, she knew it was the happiest she’d ever been. Emma was Abigail’s best friend now, and Abigail loved her but not in the same way. Everyone knew that Emma was more devoted to dance—she was training for Juilliard or someplace like it—than to any friendship.
In the months after what happened in eighth grade, Cally had stopped coming to Abigail’s after school. In high school, she’d started to call herself Calista. She’d let her hair grow to her waist; the tips faded from honey brown to blond, and the ends split. Instead of wearing designer clothes that they’d shopped for together, Cally would come to school in ripped jeans and peasant tops from the Salvation Army, or flowery dresses with men’s vests and shoes. On sunny days she often wore no shoes at all. These changes had made Cally cooler to some people—her new friends were Alessandra Ryding and the Bo-Stin slackers, hippies’ kids who were bused to Valley High from Bolinas or Stinson Beach—but as far as Abigail was concerned, Cally had transformed herself into an alien.
Cally shut off the faucet and shook the water from her hands. “He’s old,” she said.
“He’s thirty-two.”
“He’s our teacher.”
“He’s different.”
“Are you having sex with him?”
Abigail was silent.
“What is he, like, a child molester?” Cally said. “What’s wrong with him that he can’t find someone his own age?”
Abigail pushed aside the disconcerting thought, and what it implied—that there was something wrong with her. She said, “You don’t have to be so fucking judgmental.”
“You’re fucking seventeen years old.”
“So are you,” Abigail said.
“I’m not fucking an old, child-molester teacher who can’t find someone his own age.” Cally turned and punched the hand dryer to life, and they waited through the white noise without speaking. What was there to say? Would Cally keep quiet if she understood what Mr. Ellison meant to Abigail? How their relationship wasn’t what it seemed? There was the messy business of sex, yes—there was Abigail’s shame the first time Mr. Ellison discovered her open and wet, and the sticky embarrassment of condoms, how she’d hidden her face in her hands as he ripped open the package and shielded himself, how he had pushed into her body and she’d bitten her lip till it bled, how even now, when they made love, she had to ride the wave of pain until it crested to pleasure, and how sometimes, if he was too hurried or she too distracted, it never did, and she felt him come with a dry awareness that disturbed them both—there was all of this, yes, but all of this was not the point. There was something greater holding them together, some force that seemed to shift each time she tried to name it.
As the hand dryer faded to silence, Cally crossed to the door. With her palm on the handle, she turned. “He’s married, right?” she said. “Doesn’t that bother you, like, at all?”
“He loves me,” Abigail insisted. “Love is love.” These were Mr. Ellison’s words, and she hated how they sounded when she said them: generic, babyish.
“Seriously?” Cally said. And she left Abigail alone.
—
By April, Abigail was haunted by the fear that Cally Broderick had exposed them. Conversations seemed to halt when she entered the girls’ bathroom—but she could have been imagining this. Kids whispered to each other when she entered Mr. Ellison’s SAT class after school—but they could have been talking about anything. In Miss Nicoll’s class, Ryan Harbinger and Nick Brickston would smirk at her, but then they’d always enjoyed antagonizing her. Cally—Calista—continued to avoid her altogether, because she was guilty for spreading rumors, or angry about their fight, or stoned. As Miss Nicoll read aloud in first-period English, Abigail would stare down the cover of her Gatsby—the starry blue, the leonine eye—and turn the question over in her mind. On the one hand, Cally had no loyalty or love for Abigail, their best-friendship having ended years before; on the other, it seemed unlike Cally to spread rumors out of malice, especially after the way she’d fallen to pieces over Tristan Bloch. No, Abigail decided, Cally wouldn’t tell. She wouldn’t dare.
Then Nick Brickston posted the picture on Instagram.
Nick had been in the Gifted track with Abigail through elementary and middle school—she suspected he was smarter than she, although his insistence on treating school as one long practical joke made it impossible to know for sure. Regardless, his Photoshop skills were unimpeachable. In the picture, Mr. Ellison’s head, cut from a yearbook staff photo, topped the naked statue of David; Abigail, cut from a track-and-field action shot in sports bra and shorts, ran toward him, her outstretched hand cupping his crotch. Nick had faded the Frankensteined photo to an even black-and-white, neutralized the background, shaved the space around each of Abigail’s fingers so they melded seamlessly into the stone flesh of the David. It looked uncannily real. Even Mr. Ellison’s face—eyes blinked shut, grin
wide open—projected an ecstatic release that Abigail recognized.
She replied with a comment: You guys are so fucking IMMATURE.
—
“We have to deal with this, Abigail. This Instagram thing. What are we going to do about it?”
“Nick Brickston is an asshole.”
“But have you—I mean, is there any way he really knows?”
“I haven’t been texting him my deepest secrets, if that’s what you mean.”
“Please calm down. I’m only asking.”
“I am fucking calm,” she said, and hugged her ribs. For a moment they were quiet, staring at the dark road ahead.
It was Friday night. Abigail had met Mr. Ellison at the Dumpsters behind Starbucks, and he’d driven them up to Mount Tamalpais State Park and parked his black hatchback on the dirt shoulder of the highway.
They were past the city limits. Here, houses were distanced by acres. Hikers found shelter when the sun set. There were no streetlamps, just the road that twisted through the mountain’s curves and deer that skittered across the road in threes and telephone poles that leaned into the sky. Redwood and oak and madrone trees were black masses hovering at the edges of the road. Below them, Mill Valley twinkled blithely, the soft darkness of greenery punctuated by the bright lights of people at home. Like her parents, who were already sleeping, living as they did by New York hours. Her friends who were doing homework, or not. The San Francisco Bay was a slick strip between the valley and the city; the moon dipped its silver trail over the water. But the mountain was black.
Headlights veered into the dark car, and Mr. Ellison shoved her toward the floor. “Whoopsy daisy,” he said.
“What the fuck, Mr. Ellison?” But she was yelling into cheap upholstery that stank of polyester and Corn Nuts. She’d suggested he get a new car, one with working heat and air and soft, dove-gray leather seats like her own Mercedes E-Class, but he had only laughed.
Now his fingers tightened on her skull. “Don’t call me that, remember?”
The Most Dangerous Place on Earth Page 6