The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(10)
Finally Tristan’s mother stepped back and the janitor clipped the lock with bolt cutters; the hollow clang made Cally gasp as if it were her own dark heart being cut. She stopped herself from crying out. It seemed wrong to go through someone’s locker, even if they were dead. She expected Tristan to trudge around the corner and shout at them to get out, which, after all, would have been his right.
Tristan’s mother opened the locker, and as the adults peered in to assess its secrets, a rush of origami cranes, red and blue and green and gold and silver, paper wings rustling, tumbled forth and floated to the floor.
“It’s just a bunch of paper,” the janitor said. He and Principal Falk looked at each other and then at Tristan’s mother, as if waiting for an explanation.
“Calista Broderick,” Ms. Flax said flatly. “Shouldn’t you be in class?”
Cally had come too close. Words dried up in her throat like leaves.
“Well? What are you waiting for?” said Ms. Flax.
Cally knew that she was going to be found out, Ms. Flax was going to expose her—but then again, that would be a kind of blessing. She stepped closer to Tristan’s mother. “Mrs. Bloch? I just wanted to say. I’m sorry.”
Clutching a silver crane, Tristan’s mother gazed back at her. Her eyes, small and watery blue like Tristan’s, asked, Who was this girl, what was this effusion of beautiful paper, what did any of it mean?
The newspaper said that Tristan had left no note.
“Calista,” Tristan’s mother said. “Yes. Tristan mentioned you. You were a friend to him—he never said it, exactly, but I could tell.” She smiled. The sudden light in her face was strange and hard to look at. Did she not realize that Cally was the girl Tristan had written to? Did she not care? “Thank you,” she said.
What Cally felt then was more than guilt or sadness. It was like the pleasure-pain that Abigail had shown her, a connection that cut you and thrilled you, a sharp, exquisite opening.
She smiled back at Tristan’s mother. And understood:
She thought he had a friend.
Junior Year
MISS NICOLL
Even in January, the classroom was crowded, clamorous, and hot. Sunlight pulsed through tall arched windows at the back, intensifying the stew of smells—pencil shavings, whiteboard marker, old food and young bodies. Teenagers filled five rows of five desks each. The first row was populated, unsurprisingly, by girls. To Molly Nicoll, they betrayed no hints of the awkward vulnerability, the blushing, blemished, essential discomfort with self, that had plagued her own teenage years: rather, they slouched in their seats, dangled legs over chair-arms like gymnasts, and typed into their phones with agile, furious thumbs. They wore tasteful makeup, and blouses with skinny jeans, or logoed fleece jackets and yoga pants. Their eyes flashed up at Molly, questioning whether she had anything remotely interesting to offer—and judging, presumably, that she did not, they returned to their small screens. Behind these girls was the co-ed hubbub of the middle rows, and in the back were boys—with sideswept hair and polo shirts and boat shoes, or buzz cuts and hoodies and giant, gaudy sneakers—who talked or yelled or threw small objects back and forth or stared out the windows or slept. They were juniors, six or seven years younger than Molly herself—a gulf of time and experience that seemed suddenly impassable.
Nevertheless, from the front of her new classroom she addressed them, waving her arm in the manner of a desperate hitchhiker:
“Hi, everyone! Hello? Can we quiet down, please?”
The students hushed and looked her way, and she felt a swell of tenderness toward them—They listened! They liked her! And yet she was unnerved. Her own teachers had given her theory and pedagogy, heuristics and state standards. They had not told her how to stand before these privileged, unfamiliar faces, feeling in her tight blazer and wool trousers as foreign and enormous as she had when she was a teenager herself.
She was twenty-three years old, recently graduated and newly credentialed, and until a week ago had never lived anywhere but her father’s cramped, two-bedroom ranch house on the outskirts of Fresno, in the nowhere place between beige strip mall and brown farmland.
“My name is Miss Nicoll,” she began, glad that she’d rehearsed. “I’m really excited to meet you. I understand your teacher had to leave kind of suddenly. That must have been hard for you guys.” The students did not blink. She pressed on. “We’ll pick up where Ms. Frank left off. We’re going to look at great works of American literature, and discuss some social and historical themes that these works explore. I’m looking forward to hearing your ideas in class and reading the essays you’ll write at home. And if you ever have any questions or concerns, I hope you’ll talk to me. My classroom door is always open.” As if to prove this openness, Molly beamed a smile around the room.
It was impossible to tell how much of her message, if any, was reaching the students. But they seemed, if not inspired, willing to go where she would take them, and for that she was grateful. She ran through the roll quickly, remembering what names she could, then uncapped a pen and wrote in large, looping letters across the whiteboard: The American Dream.
“What is the American Dream?” she asked them. “What do American authors have to say about it? And what does it mean to us today? These are the questions we’re going to explore.”