“Sorry,” she said. “Doug.” The word was ugly in her mouth; it reminded her of the pumpkin-colored freckles on his scalp that she’d noticed one night and had been trying not to see again.
“All clear,” he told her, and tugged her up by her hair.
“Ouch,” she said. “Jesus.”
He smiled. In the dark it was just a shape shifting on his face. “I didn’t really hurt you, did I?”
She turned to look out her window, but she was not on the view side and the road fell to blackness below.
After a moment she said, “My friends think I’m hooking up with this loser from Redwood I can’t even stand.”
“What do you tell them?”
“That my parents got me an SAT tutor and he, like, comes to my house every Friday night to quiz me. It’s the dumbest lie ever, I can’t really blame them for not believing.” She tugged at her shorts; the nylon of her track uniform clung uncomfortably to her thighs.
“You should study for the test,” he said. “It’s important.”
“Oh, are you going to tell me what’s important now?”
“Abigail. Sweetheart. It’s just that I’ve been through all this already. You can benefit from my experience.”
“Whatever,” she said. Her phone buzzed and she pulled it from her backpack. On the screen was a text from Emma:
Wut up beez. get ur ass up, im done w/dance class and im comming ovr!! xox
“When I was in high school, we didn’t have cell phones,” Mr. Ellison said wistfully. “We didn’t even have email. If you wanted to talk to your friend, you had to call their house and ask for them.”
“That sounds really fucking depressing,” she said, typing into her phone. “Emma wants to know what’s up. She wants to come over to my house.”
“What are you telling her?” he asked, his voice pitching upward so he sounded less and less like Mr. Ellison, more and more like Doug.
“I told her I’m sitting in a car in the dark with you and we just made out and you pulled my hair, and next we’re going to climb into the backseat and fuck like bunnies. Oh, and studying SAT words.”
“Please be serious. I don’t think you begin to understand the ramifications of this.”
“Ramifications,” she echoed. “That’s one.”
“It means consequences.”
“No shit.”
“I wish you wouldn’t swear.”
She rolled her eyes.
“You understand why you can’t talk to your friends about us. We discussed this.”
“I know,” she said.
“They think you’re just like them. They don’t want to think about how far beyond them you already are. And to your parents, you’ll always be a little girl.”
“Yeah, right,” she said, and was quiet. “I have been studying, you know. I’m not an idiot.”
“I believe you.”
“No, really. Quiz me.”
“Abby. I don’t want to—”
“Just do it. I’ll start. Unconscionable. Unrestrained by conscience. Unreasonable. Excessive.”
He smiled. “Egregious.”
“Egregious. Awful, terrible. Outstandingly bad.”
“Good,” he said. “Ubiquitous.”
“Too easy. Ubiquitous. Being everywhere at the same time.”
“Or appearing to be. Yes. Excellent.”
“Now you,” she said. “Ephemeral.”
“Ephemeral,” he echoed. “Transitory, or fleeting. Evanescent.”
“Vanishing from sight or memory. Short-lived. Convergence.”
He set his hand on her knee.
“Hedonistic,” she said. “Aesthetic. Intrepid. Perfidious. Parched.” He was Mr. Ellison again and she was kissing the words against his ear.
He pulled away from her. “What about your friend Calista? How do you know she hasn’t told?”
“She’s not my friend,” Abigail said, although in the bathroom she had thought, for a moment, maybe—
“Well then,” Mr. Ellison said, “probably she has.”
Abigail shook her head. “She’s not an idiot. She knows what would happen if she did.”
“What would happen to us, you mean. You have to talk to her.”
“You don’t have to freak the fuck out.”
“Don’t you realize what the school will do to me if they find out? Or don’t you care?”
When Abigail was silent, he went on. He said maybe she wanted the whole school to find out, maybe she didn’t love him as he loved her, maybe all this time she’d been planning to destroy him.
She squeezed his hand over the gearshift and without warning he began to cry. Little strangled sobs. If this was all out in the open, he said, it would be the weight of the world off his shoulders. But if Abigail left him, he would have to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.
When she told him how fucked up that was, he said he didn’t mean it. “I’m such an idiot,” he told her. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I thought my life was going to be….”
Abigail tried to listen, but in her palm her phone flashed with new texts from Emma, a rapid succession:
U dont answer ur phone??
OK im comming ovr anyway…
Dude where R U?!?
“I don’t deserve you,” Mr. Ellison said. “You should leave me. Forget I ever existed.”
Abigail set the phone in her lap. She lifted his hand and pressed her lips to his palm and the palm to her breast.
“No,” she said. “I love you. I don’t love anything as much as you.”
He seemed to calm then, and smiled as they kissed. But something shifted—for a few terrifying seconds she could not feel anything at all, and he was just another human body that was much too close to hers.
When her phone buzzed again, she pulled away and stared into the glowing screen.
OK fine, Emma’s text said. L8r.
Abigail started to text back, but Mr. Ellison took the phone from her hand. He said, “You know, if they find out, it’s my life that’s going to be ruined.”
She knew what he meant: divorce, unemployment, lawsuits, prison. Yet his statement felt unfair, even untrue. She felt there was much more for her to lose, and told him so, although when he challenged this, she stared into his hard eyes and had nothing to say.
—
When Mr. Ellison dropped Abigail at Starbucks later that night, he suggested they avoid each other until the rumors died down. At school she’d steer clear of his classroom except when absolutely necessary; they wouldn’t be seen flirting in the yearbook room or laughing in the hall. On weekends their lives would revert to what they’d once been. For her this meant weeknights and Sundays spent alone in her room, doing homework and eating takeout from D’Angelo’s and Sushi Ran, Saturdays shopping and going to parties with her friends. She went along with this scheme because she wanted to protect them both. But after only a week, she was called to Principal Norton’s office.
The room was small, a cubby on the ground floor of Stone Hall. It had the same yeasty smell that permeated the entire building, but here the odor mixed with the faint perfume of the fuchsia roses that Ms. Norton had scattered in hopeful bursts around the room. Ms. Norton had cropped auburn hair, warm brown eyes, a pixie nose, and mauve lipstick that might have been fashionable in 1995. Behind her wide birch desk she gave off, even to Abigail, the impression of a little girl playing Office. She was small, in a red skirt suit and low-heeled black pumps that looked like Naturalizers or some equally revolting brand advertised with words like “affordable” and “comfortable.” As she beamed at Abigail, waiting to begin the official business of the meeting, she levered her heels in and out of the pumps beneath the desk.
Abigail liked Ms. Norton and pitied her, given all she had to deal with at that school—crazy parents like Dave Chu’s who thought their mediocre son was God’s gift, juvenile delinquents like Damon Flintov who were always one bored afternoon away from setting the teachers’ lounge on fire.
But now she perched awkwardly in one of three chairs opposite Ms. Norton’s, heart pounding in her chest as she gave the vaguest possible answers to the principal’s inane questions about her AP classes and the upcoming SAT. Never in her life had Abigail been summoned to the principal’s office—but she knew why she was there now.
On the desk, Ms. Norton’s iMac was turned toward Abigail, cocked at an angle that allowed her to distract herself with scrolling photographs of the principal’s other life, that is to say her actual life. There were family photos in which she was, astoundingly, not the mother but the daughter, and Abigail realized she had no idea how old Ms. Norton actually was. She could be Mr. Ellison’s age, or closer to twenty-six or forty. In the photos, she sat in the shadows of two silver-haired parents, their hands on her shoulders, and then swam alone in a black one-piece, face obscured by a snorkeling mask, thighs abstracted in sapphire water. She posed in a strapless wedding dress, shoulders bared and a peacock-feather fascinator in her hair, its delicate white netting draped over her face as she smiled with mouth wide open, as if shocked by her own capacity for joy. These photos disturbed and unsettled Abigail. She had once run into Ms. Norton at the Mill Valley Health Club and felt actual physical discomfort, a twisting in her stomach, at the sight of the principal’s body in spandex shorts and sports bra, her belly crunching on the sweat-slicked mat. Abigail saw the irony in this revulsion, given her own situation, but the rules that governed student-teacher relationships were meant for other people, not for her.
Ms. Shriver, the secretary, opened the door behind Abigail. “The parents have had to drive in from the city,” she said. “They’re running late.” Some deranged helicopter set was swooping in to handle their kid’s latest hiccup, Abigail thought.
As the secretary shut the door, Ms. Norton sighed. She tapped her fingernails on the desk. “Well, it looks like we’ll have to get started just the two of us.”
“Wait, my parents are coming?” Abigail said. “Are you serious?” Fear surged through her, and yet the corners of her mouth were twitching up. The idea of not one but both of her parents leaving work in the middle of the trading day, extracting their cars from the parking garage and driving out of the Embarcadero, over the Golden Gate Bridge, and back into Mill Valley in order to meet with sweet Ms. Norton in this pathetic little office was so farfetched that the whole situation began to feel hilarious.
“Quite serious,” Ms. Norton said. “Abigail, I’m afraid there’s something we need to address.”
Abigail tried to focus on Ms. Norton’s face—she was usually excellent with administrators, appearing quietly respectful yet alert.
Ms. Norton pulled a sheet of paper from a desk drawer. After a second’s hesitation she laid it face-up on the desk. “Will you tell me what you know about this?”
Abigail caught her breath. It was a printout of the Photoshop picture Nick Brickston had posted on Instagram—Mr. Ellison as the naked David, herself as the girl with her hand on his crotch. “Where did you get that?” she asked. The account was supposed to be private.
“I know this is difficult,” Ms. Norton said. “You are such an excellent student, mature, clearheaded. Before proceeding with anything, well, public, I wanted to hear it from you. I feel we can speak as adults, Abby. I believe you will be truthful with me.”
As Ms. Norton spoke, she looked so distraught that Abigail did feel like the adult in the room—as if it were her job to protect Ms. Norton from the world’s harsh truths and not the other way around. “Sure,” she said.
“What is the nature of your relationship with Mr. Ellison?”
Abigail stared back into Ms. Norton’s eyes. But her mind went elsewhere, parsing the question the way she’d learned to parse reading comprehension questions on the SAT. The key word was “nature,” meaning character, type, temper, or the vast force that regulated everything in the physical world. That was it—a vast force had caught Abigail and Mr. Ellison, controlled them from the start.
Ms. Norton sighed. “Look, I shouldn’t tell you this. But I feel you need to know.”
“What?”
“Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard these kinds of rumors about Mr. Ellison. Nothing definitive, nothing has ever been proven. But if you are keeping secrets, if you are trying to protect him…” Her words hung in the air, and Abigail tried to make sense of them. Nothing had been proven? What had been alleged?
The office door opened and Abigail’s mother rushed into the room, her Ferragamo heels clicking furiously over the linoleum. She wore a sleek black suit and a Bluetooth headset that latched like an insect to the side of her face.
“You’re still not hearing me,” she said. “How many times do I have to go over this with you? Is it possible for a human animal to be more clear?” Then she clicked off the headset and tucked herself into the chair next to Abigail’s, brushing invisible lint from her skirt. “Hello, sweetheart,” she said, “Principal Norton. Please, tell me everything I’ve missed.” As she adjusted her hair, Ms. Norton slid Nick Brickston’s picture back into the drawer.
Abigail’s father entered next. He wore his usual charcoal suit with a starched dress shirt and the Burberry tie Abigail had bought him for his birthday last June. With one thumb he texted into an iPhone that gleamed darkly in his palm.
“Sorry I’m late, jam-packed day,” he said. He took the chair on the other side of Abigail, patted her knee. “So what are we doing here? That secretary wouldn’t tell me anything.” He pressed a button on his iPhone and laid it ceremoniously on the desk.
Abigail focused straight ahead, on Ms. Norton, who leaned forward in her chair as if to confide a secret. Nothing definitive. Not the first time.
“We are prepared to launch a full-scale investigation,” she said. “But I wanted to hear from Abigail first. To discern what is fact and what is fiction.”
Abigail’s parents turned and stared at Abigail like she was one of those picture puzzles at the Exploratorium, narrowing their eyes to see the hidden shape within.
“Investigate what?” her dad asked.
Ms. Norton stared at Abigail as if trying to unpeel her. “Has Mr. Ellison crossed the line with you, Abigail? You really must be truthful with us. Has he taken advantage?”
Abigail gripped the sides of her chair. She didn’t know what to say, but it didn’t matter because in that instant her parents accosted her from both sides.
“What does she mean, honey?”
“Which one is Mr. Ellison?”
“Abby-girl, what is she talking about? Did somebody hurt you?” Her father’s voice lowered and gentled. His small gray eyes mirrored her own and she wanted to say yes. She wanted to fold herself into his lap as she had not done since she was six and feel the power of his arms and his money and his ability to sue. She wanted to cry like a baby and tell him, Yes, it was all his fault. That horrible man. That teacher. And please hold me and love me and remember that I was your girl first.
Instead she lied. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Ms. Norton cocked her head. “Abigail, are you sure?”
Her father’s phone buzzed and shuddered on the desk and he made no move to answer it.
“Mr. Ellison is my teacher. That’s it,” Abigail said. “Plus he’s, like, super old. You actually think I would do something with him? I mean, talk about gross.” As she spoke, she hated herself for how the words sounded—the ditzy singsong of the syllables. She was thankful Mr. Ellison wasn’t there to hear it.
Abigail’s father exhaled. He reached over and squeezed her palm, a gesture meant probably to reassure her but which seemed to reassure himself: Abigail was the same predictable, reasonable daughter he’d always known. She was still a girl, not a woman, judgment sound and body undiscovered, whose desires—a collection of objects, pretty things—were easily paid for and contained. He wouldn’t have to think of her in any other way.
He released her hand. “Principal Norton, my daughter always tells the tr
uth. I think we’re done here.” He plucked his iPhone from the desk, and both he and Abigail’s mother stood up. Abigail stood too.
Ms. Norton nodded. She got up and walked around the desk and opened the office door to show them out. “Well,” she said, hesitating with one hand on the doorknob, staring at Abigail. “Thank you for coming in. I’m sorry to have taken your time.”
Abigail’s father was turning something over in his head. He said, “You know, Ms. Norton, I have lost half the workday, as has my wife”—Abigail’s mother nodded in solidarity—“but that’s fine. I don’t care about that. I’m just not sure what you were thinking here. Pulling my daughter out of class, accusing her? Like she’s some kind of juvenile delinquent?”
Ms. Norton closed the door again. She steepled her palms. “Mr. Cress, no one is accusing—”
“Where is this teacher, anyway? I’m just wondering. Why don’t you drag him in here for questioning?”
“I have spoken to Mr. Ellison.”
“And what does he say for himself?”
“His statements align with Abigail’s.”
“He denies it?”
“Yes.”
“I want to talk to him.”
“I don’t think that would be a wise course of action at this time—”
“I don’t see why not. I’m here already.”
Ms. Norton looked miserable, out of her depth; Abigail almost felt sorry for her. “I’m sorry, Mr. Cress. If Abigail said nothing happened, if she is telling us the truth—”
“Of course she’s telling the truth,” Abigail’s mother said. “Do you know our daughter at all? She doesn’t even care to date boys her own age. The fact that she even has to hear about something like this—”
“Get your things, Abigail, we’re going,” her father said, and opened the door himself.
Ms. Norton trailed them to the hallway, prattling uselessly. “Let’s no one leave angry,” she said. “I feel we should pause for a moment, reflect…” Abigail couldn’t believe the principal was so naïve as to think everything would be so easy to fix, like “I Statements” were actual problem-solving strategies and not just the nonsense that the Conflict Mediation Club posted on its Facebook page.
The Most Dangerous Place on Earth Page 7