The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(12)
She was deep into the rhythms of the language, almost forgetting the twenty-five kids who were watching her, when the banging began. Startled, she paused, then continued more forcefully, but the banging grew louder, and soon threatened to overtake the cheerful timbre of her voice.
In the back row, a pale, burly boy was kicking the leg of his desk. He wore an oversized T-shirt of cherry red and a matching flat-brimmed cap. His eyes were wide and the blue of bathwater; a silver stud gleamed above each eyebrow; his thick lips curled in a sneer. It was the absolute worst possible scenario that the offending noise should come from him.
“What’s that tapping?” Molly said finally.
Instantly—it felt instant—the banging was louder. Relentless.
“Can whoever’s doing that please stop?” she asked.
He did not stop.
She was gearing up to confront him—day one was too soon for an enemy, especially an enemy like him—when Abigail set down her Gatsby and spun to the back of the room. “God, Damon, would you shut the fuck up? What is wrong with you?”
“The fuck is wrong with you?” the boy hurled back.
Energy stirred in the room, the excitement palpable, and now a second boy, Ryan something, jumped eagerly into the fray. “Yeah, Abigail,” he said, his tone twisting her pretty name into an insult, “why do you gotta be such a bitch?” He and Damon laughed together, in a hard, unbridled way.
“Fuck you both,” Abigail said calmly, and picked up her iPhone with all the graceful disdain of a French film star palming a cigarette.
Molly shouldn’t have allowed foul language in class—Maintain at all times a learning environment of positive language and mutual respect. But in truth she admired the girl. She raised her hand. “Hey, guys? Can we all calm down, please, and watch our language?”
This failed to impress Abigail, who rolled her eyes and continued to text. Damon and Ryan smirked in satisfaction, and the rest of the class turned reluctantly back to their books. Molly pressed on with the lesson. When she dared to look at Damon once more, he was disemboweling a red Swingline stapler. He glared at her. She had the sense he might spring forward to stab or staple her where she stood, and her toes curled painfully inside her tight and pointed heels.
This was when she noticed the girl who’d been sitting beside him all along. She was the only girl in the back row. She looked like a lost soul from Haight-Ashbury: wavy hair, placid face, gauzy top, cutoff jeans. Her feet were flip-flopped. Her desk was bare but for a single book spread open. The book was too thin to be Gatsby. Molly guessed it was poetry, something appealing to teenage girls. Dickinson? Plath? The girl was reading, fingering the pages. This simple act made Molly smile—here, finally, was something to relate to, a familiar gesture in a foreign land.
—
Valley High was prettier than public school had any right to be: it resembled a small university, with various halls all stuccoed Creamsicle-orange, generously windowed, and radiantly trimmed. Out front, iron gates embellished with scrollwork cordoned a manicured lawn from the street. At the center of campus, the clock tower—a century old, timelessly tasteful, with art deco numerals and narrow arched windows—posed against the cerulean sky.
This was Mill Valley, which Smithsonian magazine had recently declared the Fourth Best Small Town in America. The town itself—fewer than five square miles nestled below Mount Tamalpais and Muir Woods—had been a vacation destination for elite San Franciscans at the turn of the twentieth century and a haven for hippies after the Summer of Love. In 1970 it was made famous by its theme song, “Mill Valley (That’s My Home).” Performed by Rita Abrams, a pigtailed, orange-muumuued schoolteacher, and her fourth-grade class, the song was recorded by a local producer and played on the radio nationwide. As Abrams’s song chirpily described, Mill Valley’s beauty was extravagant. The town was endowed with not only green mountains and gold hillsides, but also redwood forests, canyon waterfalls, wetland preserves, the Pacific Ocean, and the San Francisco Bay. And people paid for this extravagance—by 2013 the average home price had soared well north of a million dollars. It felt worlds away from Fresno, from whence Molly had fled the moment she was offered the sudden, mid-year position at Valley High.
—
The faculty lounge turned out to be an arena of cliques not unlike the cafeterias of Molly’s youth. There were the advisers to the much-lauded drama program, who huddled together to plan their student shows. There were the would-be science fiction writers, who sat around a table in their short-sleeved dress shirts and black jeans, conversing in their own pop-cultural code. There were the older, tenured teachers who cruised in and out just to check their mail, never making eye contact lest they be asked to join a committee; in their own minds they were already retired.
The room itself smelled of bag lunches. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Three large windows overlooked the front lawn, but their blinds were tilted to block most of the sunlight and slice the view of students walking by. There were laminate tables, molded plastic chairs, a droning refrigerator, and a crumb-speckled microwave. In one corner, a kind of faux living room had been arranged, with an aged armchair and abused vinyl sofa, a lunar scar where its cushion had been gashed and sewn. Wooden mail cubbies lined one wall, and wedged beside them was the copy machine, where at lunch on the Friday of her first week Molly stood making handouts for Monday’s class.