The Most Dangerous Place on Earth

by Lindsey Lee Johnson

  And then, one day at lunch, Molly went to the faculty lounge and discovered she could stop her dodging and hiding.

  “Just quit,” announced Gwen Thruwey. “No warning.”

  “And he’s actually gone?” asked Kristin Steviano.

  “Just like that?” asked Jeannie Flugel.

  “Just like that.”

  The teachers were blocking the mailboxes. They stepped aside for Molly, but went on gossiping as she reached for her pile of memos and paystubs.

  “Sleeping with a student,” Gwen said. “Can you believe it?”

  “Such a cliché,” said Jeannie. “You never think it happens in real life. I wonder what his wife thinks.”

  “He told me he was separated,” said Kristin.

  “Lacey is as much his wife as she ever was. She’s gorgeous, too. She goes to my gym.”

  “Can you imagine, being married to someone like him?”

  “But do you really think he did it?” Kristin asked.

  Gwen paused grandly. “I always knew there was something off about Doug Ellison. The way he looked at those girls.”

  As Molly listened, her heart was pounding in her chest. Now, at his name, there was a sickening feeling, a cool turning beneath her ribs. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  Gwen turned to face her. “Oh, Molly. You and Doug were so close. Surely you must know.” Gwen’s blue eyes stared through her, implicating Molly and her heap of papers in whatever crime Doug had committed, judging her, somehow, for the whole sleazy mess.

  “No” was all that Molly could manage to say. The bell rang, and lunch was over.

  —

  Hurrying into the hallway, Molly ran into Beth Firestein.

  “Are you all right?” Beth asked, lightly touching Molly’s arm. Beneath her manicured hand, Molly’s skin looked allergically splotchy and red. “You don’t look all right.”

  Under the elder teacher’s cool, intelligent gaze, Molly could not lie and could not tell the truth. “My kids are waiting,” she said, and pulled away.

  She went into the hall. Here the students were swarming. Their sounds were all around her, the squeaking of sneakers and the echoing clanging of lockers slammed shut. A hand-painted banner drooped overhead: FEAR, MADNESS, GREED—VALLEY DRAMA DEPARTMENT PRESENTS—TOM STOPPARD’S “DARK SIDE OF THE MOON.” And the world through which she moved seemed curiously loosened, unfastened—she grew dizzy in the crowd of faces, a stretch of mopped linoleum slippery beneath her feet, and she paused and pressed her palm against a locker to steady herself. Her heart went on hammering in her chest, a little wildly, and there was a trembling in her fingers and a lightness in her legs and a cold, dull weight at her core. The faces around her, baby-cheeked, pimple-spattered, belonged to kids she didn’t know. Her thought was a drumbeat:

  Which one?

  Which one?

  The kids went into classrooms; the classroom doors shut. Each one she passed had a small window at eye level, and past these portholes floated other teachers’ disembodied heads. Molly’s afternoon class was gathered outside her door at the end of the hallway, waiting to be let in. They huddled in circles or sat on the floor with their backs against the wall. Seeing them, she felt her body jangling with nerves as it had not since her first day. She had the feeling of one waiting in the wings to start a play, having forgotten every line. At Doug’s door she paused, peered through the porthole. Gwen was right, he was gone: his students milled among the desks, a substitute teacher flailed for attention. Molly recalled how Doug had greeted his students in the doorway every day, how he’d patted their backs and reached for their hands. It had charmed her. Now his desk was deserted and bare.

  For the rest of the afternoon, as her students buzzed around her, Molly scrutinized her relationship with Doug Ellison as if feeling for a slipped stitch. She remembered his novel, with its chauvinistic teacher and nubile student. It had disgusted her, but it was only a story, and to condemn a man based on fiction alone would be to betray her own principles. What about American Psycho? A Clockwork Orange? For God’s sake, Lolita?

  And there was the day she’d reached out to Calista Broderick—how strangely Calista had acted, how damaged she’d seemed. Was it possible—of course it was possible—that Calista had been the one?

  Soon another scene rose to Molly’s mind, one she’d previously tried to block out. Several weeks before, she and Doug had been finishing lunch when a few kids trickled into his classroom. The first among them was a tall, uncommonly beautiful girl, not her student, named Elisabeth Avarine. She’d settled in a back-row seat and stretched her arms over her head. She was somehow clumsy and graceful at once, like a colt staggering from the womb. Molly had openly stared; she just could not imagine how it felt to look like that. She’d turned to Doug and he was watching the girl too, curious and yet more than curious: hungry.

  —

  It was four o’clock when Molly got home, and the main house was undergoing its daily changing of the guard: the Range Rover in the driveway, the daytime nannies handing off to the evening staff, the children running inside to trade school clothes and backpacks for soccer shorts and flute cases. The nannies were hurrying the kids in Spanish, the kids responding in English and nonsense. The little one, Archer, stood on the front stoop in only his diaper, desperate not to put on his pants. “I don’t wanna go!” he was wailing. Then: “I don’t wanna stay!” Molly understood him. The world was such a wrong place—how could one go, how could one stay? She forced herself to smile and wave as she circled around to her studio, then let herself in and locked the door.

  The sight of the bed was more than she could stand. She went to the bathroom and ran the shower, undressed quickly, puddling her clothes on the floor, and stepped under the water. She shivered. Hot water needled her shoulders and back. But she wanted to be scalded—the best part of sunburn was peeling.

  Under the steaming water she tried to black out the images that came to her, of Doug and the girl—whoever it was. Calista? Elisabeth? Another student Molly didn’t know? How had he done it? Had he rented a room in some seedy hotel? Had he pulled her into the world of dusty ashtrays and sour sheets, cellophaned soap, hangers handcuffed to the rod? A Mill Valley girl would never have been in a place like that before. He would have opened her eyes to the unclean world, undone in one sordid night sixteen years of her parents’ careful tending.

  Molly knew what girls needed: he had told the girl he loved her. She must have thought she loved him too.

  She recalled how he’d twisted his hands in her hair, pressed her head toward the band of his boxers; how he’d stroked her neck while they kissed on her love seat; how he’d pulled her chair out in his classroom, its metal feet scraping the floor. Had he really thought he would get away with it? Cheating on his wife with Molly, with a sixteen-year-old child? Or—God—cheating on the child with her.

  —

  The following morning, Molly avoided her teaching duties in the classic way—by asking her students to edit one another’s papers. This allowed her to sit at her desk, pretending to update her grade book as she watched the kids mill around the room. They flirted with each other, sent signals. The girls preened, the boys swaggered. They committed tiny acts of violence imbued with the promise of sex. Of course she had known, in the abstract, that they were sexual beings (she’d been a teenager not that long ago), but it disturbed her to think of them that way. Disturbed her to notice how Ryan Harbinger strutted over to Hannah Jones, squeezed the flesh of her arm to make her shriek. Calista Broderick tugged her hair to one side, exposing her suntanned neck to Jonas Everett. Wyatt Sanchez inked purple spirals on the wrist of Samantha Aster, who flushed with pleasure. Abigail Cress seemed to focus on her work, but even she was agitated by the room’s strange heat, thumping her bare legs beneath the desk. The girls were beautiful, the boys were beautiful. Even the ugly ones were somehow beautiful. Doug could have chosen any one of them.

  They were also children. The depth and breadth
of what they did not know astonished her. They’d mostly never heard of James Dean, Ronald Reagan, Virginia Woolf, Donald Rumsfeld, Bruce Springsteen, Rodney King. They were babies on 9/11. They loved to point out to her all the things they learned in school that they would not ever use, yet they had no idea what it was to be a grown-up person in the world, what one would use or not use in the span of a lifetime. Their lives had not even begun.

  The peer edit did not last long. Ryan Harbinger derailed the lesson from the back row, hollering at Molly over his classmates’ heads: “You’re tight with Mr. Ellison, right?”

  “Tight?” Molly asked.

  “You hang out,” explained Steph Malcolm-Swann, who was in the desk next to Ryan’s, blackening her nails with a Sharpie.

  Molly set aside her grade book. It was clear where they were going and even clearer that she shouldn’t go there with them. But it was also flattering and pleasing and, honestly, surprising that they should care about her private life. “Why are we talking about this?”

  Ryan nodded knowingly, as though she’d let slip crucial information. “So you know he took off.”

  “I know it’s time to continue with class.” She picked up her copy of Death of a Salesman and waved it at them. “Books, everybody?”

  “Do you talk to him still?” Steph asked.

  “I heard he got moved to a school in the city,” offered Hannah Jones, who was in the front row typing into her iPhone, thumbs uninterrupted.

  “I heard he got fired,” said Amelia Frye.

  “I heard he got wrapped,” said Ryan.

  Steph put down her Sharpie. “He wasn’t fired, they made him quit.”

  “Wrapped for what?” asked Jonas Everett, who seemed to have just woken up, from a middle row.

  “You know what.” Ryan shook his fist and tongued his cheek, creating an obscene visual that made Molly feel queasy all over again.

  “Baller,” Wyatt said, grinning.

  The class laughed.

  In the front row, Abigail Cress had taken out her own Salesman and was staring determinedly at its cover. Molly could see they’d hit a topic about which Abigail had none of her signature confidence. And for the first time, Molly liked her. She and Molly were together in their miserable discomfort, the only ones in the room who wanted the conversation to end.

  Their common opponent was Ryan, who willed it to go on and on. “So, Miss Nicoll,” he said, stretching tanned arms over his head. “You and Mr. Ellison.”

  “We saw you together,” Steph said, looking delighted and a little guilty.

  “All those private lunches,” said Ryan.

  Molly stood up and took her place at the whiteboard. “Okay, guys, that’s enough.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “Did he tell you he was leaving?”

  “No,” Molly said, a little too forcefully. The room was silent, and she realized that she had been hurt by this small slight, that he had not thought enough of her to tell her goodbye.

  “That’s cold,” said Nick Brickston, aptly; she supposed that he had read it on her face. Nick had been silent to that point, lounging in his seat in the corner of the room, splaying his long legs under the desk.

  “I’d like to move on, please,” Molly said.

  Nick Brickston continued; the class turned to hear him. “All that time you hung out together? Then he just cuts out? You must be pissed.”

  “Hella,” Ryan said.

  Around the room were whispers and murmurs of assent. The kids had turned back to stare at her, with expressions both curious and pitying. Even Calista Broderick was watching her closely, her eyes unusually lucid, conveying something like compassion. Molly could see that it wasn’t going to stop. And she didn’t want to shut them down the way a typical teacher might—open dialogue was good for classrooms, and anyway there was kindness in their questions. Some buried thing within her, some long-subdued instinct, lunged for it. “Okay,” she said. She leaned against the whiteboard, hugging her book to her chest. “Yes, we were friends. No, he didn’t tell me he was going. Yes, it bothers me. Of course it does.”

  “But do you know—” began Samantha Aster.

  Molly flashed her palm. “None of us knows what really happened, do we?”

  In the silence that followed, Molly’s kids glanced uncomfortably at one another. Molly had the sudden, horrible thought that they did know—they walked the same halls and heard the same rumors; they had heard, and maybe passed on, every sordid detail. They knew who the girl was when Molly did not. She had the thought that now they were protecting her.

  Abruptly, in the front row, Abigail stood up. “I need the bathroom pass,” she said.

  “You know you don’t have to ask,” Molly told her, grateful for the interruption. She smiled meaningfully at Abigail while handing her the slip of purple paper. Poor girl, she thought, she seems so mature in so many ways, but she’s not ready for this.

  Abigail hurried out of the room.

  “That’s some fucked-up shit,” Nick Brickston said philosophically as Abigail left, returning them immediately to the topic of Doug.

  “That’s enough,” Molly told him, although she couldn’t disagree. And liked him just a little more for having said, so bluntly and efficiently, what she could not.

  THE ARTIST

  This was how Nick Brickston got away with it.

  Step One: Tell the client to register for the SAT at a distant location—a high school in San Francisco was best—where all would be anonymous.

  Step Two: Make a fake high school ID with his picture and his client’s name. His tools were few: iPhone camera, MacBook Pro with Photoshop, the laminating machine in his mom’s home office.

  Step Three: On test day, go to the school and wait. Flash the ID card and admission ticket. Keep the chitchat to a minimum, giving them no reason to ask questions.

  Step Four: Sign his client’s name on the line. (He studied each client’s handwriting, then mimicked it—he’d heard that when test officials suspected cheating, they’d analyze the writing on the essay portion, and this, he thought, was a stupid reason to get caught.)

  Step Five: Sit for the test. Open the booklet. Wait for the magic to start.

  —

  The essay test always came first. Nick told his clients ahead of time which historical and personal examples he planned to write about; that way, on the ride home, they could tell their parents how the test had gone and sound legit.

  His current client, Dave Chu, had been mystified by this. “But how do you know what the essay prompt will be?” he’d asked.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” Nick had said. “Doesn’t matter what it is. Any question they’re gonna ask, you can answer it using World War II and fuckin’ Martin Luther King. Then for the third example I tell a story, like how my little cousin Ricky got sick with cancer and how I helped him get through it and learned about the meaning of life or whatever. Trust me. The SAT eats that shit up.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Who?”

  “Your cousin. Ricky.”

  “There is no Ricky, man. The SAT doesn’t know that. Sympathy points.”

  Nick kept it casual with clients, but in truth he took pride in these essays, imagining the scorer who would read them: some apathetic English teacher, assessing essays on a Sunday for extra cash, would slog through the pile of asinine high school bullshit, growing bored, depressed, resentful even, before encountering Nick’s thoughtful, elegant prose and becoming, well, entranced. Nick knew the risks of standing out; he simply couldn’t help himself.

  —

  Nick was in seventh grade when his parents split up. Within a year, his dad had married someone else and bought her a big, sunny house in San Rafael, a few exits north on the 101 freeway. Right after that, he’d had new kids, twins, a boy and a girl with cherub faces and curly blond hair. They didn’t look like Nick or his big sister, Amy, who were tall and lean with dusky hair and
ink-drop eyes. They looked like the new wife.

  On the day his dad’s twins were born, Nick had gone to the hospital. In the private room, the new wife slept and Nick’s dad cradled the girl twin, Addison, smearing tears out of his eyes. A nurse handed the boy twin, Colson, to Nick. He balanced the baby’s body in his arms. Its eyes were closed, thin wet seams. It had flat cheeks furred with shimmery blond hairs, a Cheerio mouth, and a too-sweet reek, like buttermilk.

  Nick grinned. “He’s heavy,” he said to his dad, and then to the baby, “You been eating fuckin’ T-bones in there, bro?”

  The baby struggled. Trying for a better hold, Nick jostled its head by mistake and it made a mewling-kitten sound that quickly surged into a screech.

  “Hey, watch it!” Nick’s dad said. “Be careful with him!” Laying the girl twin in the nurse’s arms, he took the boy from Nick and hugged it to his chest, murmuring.

  “Whatever,” Nick said. He went to the window and slid down in a vinyl chair, plugged in his earbuds to listen to what looked like music but was actually words: an audiobook he’d found on iTunes.

  Selfishness was holy, the book said. The only way. Nick wondered about this. It felt true. His dad bounced baby Colson around the room, hunching to coo secrets in his ear, and Nick listened to The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand and swiped through the Instagram feed on his phone, waiting for something to catch his eye. Anything happening. Any excuse to get out of that room.