The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(13)
She was midway through her copy run when the machine jammed. As her colleagues looked on, she commenced the humiliating dance of pushing buttons and clattering drawers. She was ready to unplug the machine from the wall when she was nudged aside by a woman with sculpted blond hair and boot-cut jeans whose pockets sparkled with dark glitter. Without looking at Molly, she pressed two buttons, opened a tray, pulled out the paper, pressed a third button, and set the copier humming once more.
“Thanks,” Molly said over the noise of the machine. “I hate these things.”
“You mustn’t let it see you scared,” the woman replied. Her eyes were very blue and her blouse very white, and her skin had the tanned, rind-like quality of a regular marathon runner. She stuck out her hand. “Gwen Thruwey. Advanced Algebra, Calculus AB.”
“Molly Nicoll.”
“You’re English, right?”
“I’ve got three sections of American Lit.”
Gwen nodded as though this merely confirmed what she’d read in Molly’s file. “Must be nice. I’m doing four sections of Advanced Algebra plus the one of Calculus and running the crew program. Why I say yes to these things, I’ll never know.”
“Wow. You must be exhausted.”
Gwen gave her a smile. “You don’t know the half of it.”
The next moment, Molly found herself in the unprecedented position of sitting beside the most popular person at the lunchroom’s most popular table.
“Everyone, this is Molly Nicoll,” Gwen announced. “She’s the English person taking over for Jane Frank. Nice of Jane to up and quit on us smack-dab in the middle of the school year.”
“Hello,” Molly said.
Gwen’s disciples were Jeannie Flugel, a salon blonde who taught World Cultures and Contemporary Social Issues; Allen Francher, a barrel-chested, unilingual lacrosse coach who’d been coerced into teaching French and Spanish 1; and Kristin Steviano, an Integrated Science teacher who looked like she’d just stepped off the Pacific Coast Trail, wearing a vaguely ethnic sweater and hiking shorts, although it was winter.
“You know how Jane left, right?” Jeannie said conspiratorially. “In the middle of first period, she bursts into tears, then runs straight to Katie Norton and says she’s never going back into that room. She never thought she could hate a child, but they made her do it, she said. They made her hate them.”
“I don’t know if I could hate my kids,” Allen Francher said, “but then again, if I were hit by a bus, they’d probably be thrilled.”
“I can’t believe that’s true,” Molly said.
“You wouldn’t believe a lot of what goes on around here.”
“What’s that saying?” Gwen asked. “The inmates are running the institution?”
Everyone laughed, so Molly did too. Kristin turned to her and shrugged. “Welcome to our weird little world.”
After several moments of conjecturing about Jane Frank—maybe she was clinically unbalanced; maybe her students had made fun of her mustache—the teachers moved on to discuss a reality TV show Molly hadn’t seen. What she gleaned from their conversation was that some contestants on the show appeared to be genuine and sweet, while others were competing “for the wrong reasons.”
“Just look at Alana H.,” Allen said. “It’s obvious she’s only in it for the fame.”
“She treats it like some kind of game.”
“Well, he’s not going to choose her. He couldn’t. He loves the other one.”
“Just wait,” Gwen said. “She’ll get him into the fantasy suite, and true love will go right out the window.”
“But no one really falls in love on those shows,” Molly cut in. “I mean, how could you? You’d have to be insane.”
No one responded. In the uneasy silence that fell over the table, Molly’s colleagues exchanged glances.
“About Alana H.,” Jeannie said, turning toward Gwen. “Did you hear, just last year she was trying to get a hosting job on Access Hollywood? There’s an audition tape going around online.”
“Well,” Gwen said, “that proves it.”
In this way, almost indiscernibly, the conversation moved forward without Molly in it. Molly felt herself shrinking, a figure on the platform as the train pulled away. The feeling was familiar. In elementary and middle school she’d been largely invisible. In an effort to be seen, she’d shown up to ninth grade with a new pixie haircut, a bold disaster: with her too-large eyes and too-wide nose, she had looked like an unpretty boy. For months afterward, wherever she went in her high school she’d heard giggling, whispering, directed at the newly bare nape of her neck. And she’d realized there was something worse than being ignored; there was being a target. By senior year, she’d grown her hair out, learned to walk with her head down, and made herself invisible again.
Molly’s colleagues fell silent. A new teacher had entered the lounge. The woman glided rather than walked, with chin slightly raised. Salt-and-pepper hair was cut squarely at her chin. She wore a midnight-blue sheath dress and brightly patterned silk scarf, and carried a slim leather folder that did not appear to have anything in it. Molly had glimpsed her before, settled on an outdoor bench with a salad and a book of Alice Munro short stories, as relaxed as if reclining on a beach.