Ignoring Ms. Norton, Abigail and her parents hurried down the hallway toward the exit. The fluorescents formed a tunnel of light. Abigail’s father’s phone buzzed again, and this time he sped ahead to answer it.
Abigail’s mother walked close beside her, pressing at the small of Abigail’s back. They were silent except for the clicks of her mother’s heels, which echoed through the hall. She wore the same Chanel perfume she’d worn forever; its jasmine mixed with the sharp scent of the damp silk blouse beneath her suit and Abigail could not remember the last time she’d been close enough to her mother’s body to smell this smell.
Mr. Ellison’s classroom was the fifth door on the left. Three doors from where they were. The door was open.
Abigail slowed her steps. She could run back to Ms. Norton’s office, lead her parents down a different hall—but no, it was too late. Mr. Ellison’s voice carried far. He was talking to someone—a boy. What was he saying?
As they came closer, she recognized the voice of Dave Chu. It sounded desperate.
Mr. Ellison was reassuring him about something. He was gentling his voice the way he used to do for her. And suddenly she hated Dave, who still got to be soothed by Mr. Ellison, who still got to believe in love and teachers the way that she did not.
When they reached the classroom, she stopped.
Seeing her, Mr. Ellison stood up behind his desk; his chair scraped the floor. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple jumping in his throat. With arms by his sides, he clenched and unclenched one fist. It was the hand with his wedding ring, the silver titanium he’d let her weigh in her palm that first night in his car, to let her feel how light it was. How insubstantial. How he could slide it off and on and off again. Facing her in his blue striped shirt and jeans, his square-framed glasses and stupid braided belt, he was all the layers of the man she knew. He was Mr. Ellison and Doug and Mr. Ellison again.
She wanted to run to him, to claim him. She wanted him to claim her, to tell her parents all the wonderful things about her that they had never bothered to know, things she herself had not known, that she could be not only smart and self-sufficient but loving and kind and sweet—even, in the right light, beautiful.
But the main thing, the important part, was how he looked at her. The rash of shame on his cheeks. His worried brow. His fear. Not the fear of what might have happened to her, not the fear even of losing her, which he’d professed so many times, his freckled head rolling in her lap, but the fear of getting caught. And she understood, or rather felt, that everything Ms. Norton hinted at was true.
Love is love. What did it mean?
“Abigail?” he said, and his voice tore on the edge of her name. “Did you need something?”
“Abby?” her mother said. “Honey, who is this? Is this him?”
Abigail shook her head. Her brain strained to catalog, organize, everything he’d ever done or said. Real: When he pulled her hair, and the shivers down her body made her gasp. Not Real: When he told her, You’re the one I didn’t realize I was waiting for. You’re a miracle, Abby, you’re mine. Now his eyes begged her to leave and she told herself, Nothing he has ever done or said to you, none of that happiness, was as true as this is.
Her mother’s phone rang and she stepped away to answer it.
Abigail stood in the doorway, weighing her power in the palm of her hand. It was the weight of a stone she could hurl at his head, watch it strike the thin skin at his temple, watch as he jolted and bled. He was right—she could ruin him.
What had Ms. Norton called it? Taken advantage. Crossed the line.
Yes, she had crossed over.
MISS NICOLL
Several weeks into the semester, Molly sat in her apartment with a round of Gatsby essays on her knees and an exhausted red pen in her hand.
The apartment was in fact a converted toolshed attached to the circa-1910 Mill Valley home of Justin and Julie Smythe-Brower, a pair of corporate lawyers with three towheaded children under six. It had a separate entrance she reached like a burglar, following a trail of slate stepping-stones around the main house. Its ceiling was low and its walls paneled in a glossy maple, giving the studio a vibe both groovy and claustrophobic, like a 1970s ski cabin or Scandinavian sauna. The single window’s glass was thick and warped; tawny spiders skittered over its sill. But she cherished it, because it faced onto a redwood grove, lush and dark—a view unattainable by even the most privileged people in the place where she was from.
Now, outside her window, the redwood grove had blackened and blurred. The fog dripped desultorily on her roof, pattering its wooden beams. She curled up in the corner of the love seat and draped her comforter around her shoulders. In a large house, on such a night, she might have felt her loneliness acutely, but the small apartment fit her perfectly. The family in the main house sent happy sounds across the yard, but these were almost imperceptible to her and not quite real, like a distant radio transmission.
Her students’ essays disappointed her: mediocre efforts peppered with one or two competent, if soulless, endeavors; two or three unmitigated disasters; and three or four thinly disguised plagiarisms from the Great Gatsby entry on Wikipedia. (Couldn’t they at least bother to change the font?) Where was the passion, the connection? How could they read a book like that and come away with nothing?
And yet: toward the bottom of the stack she found a paper that made her set her red pen down.
Calista Broderick
Period 1 English
Great Gatsby Essay
“I hate careless people.” This is what Jordan Baker says to Nick when they are driving together. Careless, what does it mean? The dictionary says, “Not giving sufficient attention or thought to avoiding harm. As in, ‘She had been careless and left the window open.’ ” The truth is, everyone is careless. In Mill Valley, most people leave their doors and windows unlocked all the time. No one thinks anything is going to happen. No one thinks at all.
Here is something that I think about.
Let’s say your window’s open on a cold, damp, foggy day and a strange man happens to be walking down your street. He’s not even meaning to do anything, but he sees the sliver of open window and suddenly gets the idea, hey, there’s a nice little space to worm into. Why not. Let’s say he decides to open the window the rest of the way, then sucks in his stomach and slips inside. The house he’s slipped into is warm and cozy and he wants to see more of it. Let’s say he goes from the living room where there’s no one to the kitchen where it smells like bacon. A mom is there, cooking breakfast. She has her back to him and she can’t hear anything but the crackle of the bacon on the stove and the pan spitting hot grease on her hands that hurts in a way that she’s used to. She cooks this breakfast every Sunday. Let’s say her husband went out for bagels and her three kids are asleep in their rooms upstairs. They could sleep through a thunderstorm, or a 4.0 earthquake. (In fact, they have. They dream they’re on sailboats, carnival rides.) Let’s say the man is standing there in the kitchen, looking at this mom who has left the window open so carelessly, who has not “given sufficient attention or thought to avoiding harm.” The man thinks, Nobody ever cooked bacon for me. The man thinks, Well I’m here now, there’s a knife.
Let’s say it wasn’t actually the mom who left the window open. She isn’t a careless person, she is a mother, always shutting cabinet doors behind the dad who leaves them open for people to bang their heads on, always double-checking locks behind the kids who think locks are something the mom invented to nag them about, because none of their friends ever lock their doors. They live in Mill Valley, and most of them have never been anywhere else except for St. Barts and the Seychelles and Hong Kong and Vail, on vacation. They think, All the bad and interesting things happen in the East Bay or The City. Nothing happens here.
Let’s say it was the mom’s youngest kid, a girl. The girl was so small and meek and unspecial you’d never think she’d do anything that mattered. Let’s say the night before the man came, she was sitting
by the open window, reading a poetry book. She liked to listen to the fog dripping through the trees, a sound that was softer than rain. She liked the fresh, minty smell of it—some of the trees were eucalyptus. On those nights with the fog in the valley everything outside smelled good, even the dirt on the ground. It smelled like things growing and she liked to be reminded of that, that even when the world was shit and she hated everyone in it, most of all herself, that there were still things growing, all the time, in the dirt beneath her feet. Let’s say she fell asleep with her book splayed open on her chest, then woke up hours later and stumbled to bed. Let’s say she left that window open, not all the way, but just enough.
When the mom is lying bloody on the kitchen floor and her bright insides are staining the linoleum, when the man has been hauled off to prison to spend his life thinking about something he hadn’t even known he’d do, when the dad has had to learn to shut the kitchen cabinets on his own, and when the kids have woken up on the third day without their mom, on the fourth and the fifth and the seventeenth day, the twenty-fifth and the thirty-seventh, and realized as if for the first time that she is never, never going to barge into their rooms to wake them up again—the question is, when all of this has happened and you’re looking for someone to blame, who is it going to be?
The point of this paper is: Jordan Baker is right. I hate careless people too.
Calista’s essay was not technically an essay. How could Molly impose on it a teacher’s judgment or brand it with a grade? It was a missive tossed over the transom, or a secret sent through a chink in the stone wall between them, like promises whispered by Pyramus and Thisbe. The girl was trying to reach someone; the someone was Molly.
From the first day, when she’d seen her reading poetry rather than paying attention, Molly had guessed that there was something special in Calista Broderick. She was gratified to be proven right. Now that she knew, she could help Calista, mold her talent and encourage her interests, bring her books from the library and train her to organize her ideas into paragraphs, papers. She’d once read a report in National Geographic about the largest caves on Earth, in China, each so large that it was like its own world. Maybe Calista’s mind—maybe Molly’s own—was like this. An immense space, at once apart from the world and embedded within it, a secret place that was strange and dark and vast enough to make its own weather.
The story was metaphorical, had to be—murder simply wasn’t done in Mill Valley. Maybe something else had happened to Calista’s mom. Maybe Calista feared or, in the reckless destructiveness of teenage desire, wished it would.
Molly remembered this intensity of feeling. At sixteen she’d spent her days walking in circles, warm wind carrying dust over the sidewalk to rasp in her lashes, and with it the smell of the Central Valley, of sun-baked manure and smog. The houses on her street were stuccoed, pale as ghosts, alike except for the details meant to convey the illusion of personal taste—a square or curved front door, a pewter or copper light fixture, a trim of white or brown or cornflower blue. Around the community (for “community” was what they called it) wrapped a high cinder-block wall. There were so few colors there, no tall trees—as a teenager she’d felt alien and alone with her Bob Dylan T-shirts and her Doc Martens rip-offs and the claustrophobic rage that she could not explain to anyone, because her sister was little and her father was working and her mother was gone and there was no clear reason why she should be in any particular moment so furious, so bored.
The next day, Molly was sitting down at her desk for lunch when Calista floated past her open door in a white cotton dress and white woven sandals. She was alone.
“Calista?” Molly called. “Come in. I want to talk to you.”
Calista hesitated. Molly understood. As a kid, she’d clung to doorways too; she’d liked the safety they offered, the option of being neither in nor out, neither here nor there. But then Calista came inside, and slid into a chair opposite Molly’s. She wouldn’t look at Molly, quite. She wouldn’t commit to looking anywhere. Molly glanced back over her own shoulder but there was nothing—just the whiteboard, blank, with rectangles of fluorescent light reflecting off its surface.
“Your Gatsby paper,” she said. “There were some interesting ideas in there, really compelling stuff.”
“Really?” In Calista’s face Molly detected a flicker of interest, or hope.
“Definitely. But the thing is, it was more a stream of consciousness than an essay. Did you realize that?”
Calista crossed her arms and gazed vaguely away. Molly saw the error she had made. She said carefully, “What happens in this story, is it something you worry about? Something happening to your mother?”
“What do you mean?” Calista said.
Molly paused. “You know, my mother left when I was twelve.”
“You don’t know where she is?”
“No,” Molly said. This wasn’t strictly true. Her mother had never stopped sending her emails and postcards, even misguided birthday gifts, from the various cities she passed through: L.A. and Portland and Austin and Vegas, Nashville and even New York. Molly accepted these scraps of love but sent nothing in return. And her mother continued to roam, hunting for something she’d probably never find. She wondered if it had been worth it.
“My mom almost died,” Calista said suddenly. She reached out to skim her hand along the edge of the desk. “Breast cancer. I was in middle school. It was like, we kept waiting for her to die, but she just kept getting worse and worse. That’s what no one tells you, how slow it is. It takes forever, and eventually you just want it to be over with, one way or the other.”
Calista had never before uttered so many words in a row in Molly’s presence. Molly’s heart quickened; she stopped herself from reaching for the hand that trembled just slightly on the other side of the desk. “I’m so sorry, Calista. That must have been so hard on you.”
Calista shrugged. “It’s okay, she got better. It was weird, though. No one told me she was going to die, and no one told me she was going to live.”
There was nothing to say to this, other than: “It must have been a great relief, to have everything back the way it was.”
At that, Calista’s eyes shifted into focus. Her irises were startling, stippled with gold. She said, in a voice that was cynical and strangely weary, weary of Molly, weary of all the adults in the world who could not, or would not, understand her, “Nothing ever goes back.”
What did it mean? Molly wanted Calista to believe she’d been right to confide in her, to know that she saw her. But communicating with Calista Broderick was like shouting through a block of ice. If only Molly could find the right thing to say, she might break the ice and release the girl from herself. She set her elbows on the desk, leaned in. “You are such a perceptive, intelligent person, Calista. You could do anything you set your mind to, but I see you just floating along. Why not try?”
Calista looked down at her arm, where green marker spiraled over the skin like a tattoo gone rancid with time. Her hair, long and wavy, fell across her cheek and hid most of her face. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Molly wanted to take the girl in her arms and soothe her, tell her she should know how lovely she was, how rare. She wanted to buy her a sweater, a copy of The Awakening, and a fortifying meal. She wanted to be a person in her life with the power to do any of these things. But she could think only of what her own father used to say to her when he found her incomprehensible: Is that all you have to say for yourself? Because she could not say this, she said nothing, and could only sit by, helpless, as the moment closed. They were back where they’d started: teacher and student, nothing more.
—
Molly had been teaching for six weeks when Damon Flintov vanished from her class. Principal Norton delivered the news in a hushed hallway encounter one morning in mid-February: the boy had some legal troubles and would not be returning for some time. Molly was not to discuss this situation with anyone. She was to move the class forw
ard without him.
As soon as Molly walked into class that morning, she saw this command would be impossible to heed. Her kids launched straight into gossip.
“Drugs,” Steph Malcolm-Swann announced. “They arrested him at some party.”
“He’s not arrested, he’s in rehab,” said Jonas Everett.
“Just because his dad made a deal with the judge,” said Amelia Frye. “Otherwise, who knows.”
“Lockdown for life,” Wyatt Sanchez said mournfully.
“Real,” said Steph.
“Oh my God, no one gets life in prison for drug possession,” said Abigail Cress. “Plus he’s a juvenile. Don’t be retarded, you guys.”
And suddenly they were competing for Molly’s attention, sitting up in their desks, shouting over one another to share their rumors and theories, asking what she thought. She wasn’t supposed to discuss it, and they were delaying the commencement of classwork, but she didn’t mind. It was clear the kids knew far more about whatever had happened to Damon than she did. And there was a magic in it. Somehow the loss had forged a bond, and Molly felt the thrill of being one of them, if only for those twenty minutes, as interested as they in all the dirty details and as willing to be distracted.
It was only later, grading quizzes in her empty classroom after school, that she was brought down by a tugging sadness. It was strange: during the time that she had known him, Damon Flintov had consistently provoked and annoyed her. He’d tapped, he’d banged. He’d dismantled office supplies and drawn on desktops. During Silent Reading he would click his pen again and again, artillery fire, and when she asked him to stop, click on with heightened aggression. He’d plug in earbuds and play his music loud enough to send an angry, steady buzzing through the room. One day, out of nowhere, he jumped up, said, “Fuck this,” and stomped into the hall. (Molly stood, baffled, in his wake.) On other days he showed up grinning but reeking of marijuana, gazing at her with bloodshot eyes—she was ashamed to admit that she preferred him this way. Now he was gone. His father’s money might have saved him from a blemished record, but what had happened was more disturbing: the vanishing of Damon Flintov had been conducted with terrible swiftness and efficiency. His absence was a scandal to the kids, a relief to the adults. Molly herself was relieved. It was like Damon had been settled in a rowboat in the dark of night, pushed out to sea. Without him, his world went on. As Molly’s world did, back home in Fresno, without her.
The Most Dangerous Place on Earth Page 8