The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(15)

Generally speaking, the parents were displeased. Their missives ranged from the mildly threatening to the openly incensed. They were annoyed about the homework—she gave too much or the wrong kind, or the directions were unclear or the deadlines were unreasonable. They were angry she’d forgotten which of her students had Individualized Education Plans and academic accommodations, and more than happy to send her their privately obtained, highly detailed psych reports and to educate her about the district’s legal obligations. They were uniformly certain that their kids deserved high grades:

Hello Molly,

My son Wyatt tells me you are new to town and to teaching. I’m sure it’s the same in Fresno but here we expect our students to perform at a certain level. If you have any questions please ASK, I like to be very involved with my son’s education.

Good luck.

Tessa Schuyler-Sanchez

Dear Ms. Nicoll,

I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job but this homework is really out of line. Three chapters in one week??? You know these kids have other classes too. Please be reasonable!!! Also I see my son Ryan Harbinger received a C+ on the reading response that he wrote for you about color themes in The Great Gatsby. He put a lot of time and effort into that assignment, and he is DEEPLY upset and heartbroken about the grade. I know you will reconsider.

Cordially,

Ellen Harbinger

dear miss nicoll

just wanted to let you know jonas will be unable to complete the essay due on friday as he has a very important game coming up for baseball and this will take all of his focus this week. jonas is a very gifted kid i’m sure you can see that and i’m sure you will understand and give him a pass on this. thx.

kevin everett



Her students, too, sent rambling emails that they never seemed to proofread:

Hey Miss Nicoll,

Sorry I don’t get this homework are we supposed to just free write about what we think or do we have to use quotes from the book? And if you said 3 pages does that really mean 3 or if we do 2 and a half is that OK because that’s really all I have to say? Or do you want me to add a bunch of random stuff in their to make it three?

Also I was absent on Friday b/c I had to go skiing in Tahoe with my family, did I miss anything?

Sincerely,

Steph Malcolm-Swann <3



When Molly had exhausted her patience for emails, she returned to grading, then reviewed her lesson plans for the following morning, when the whole routine would start again. She became accustomed to falling asleep with a pen in her hand, and slept without dreaming.

—

Molly was locking her room for lunch one day when she felt a strange hand cradling her elbow. She turned to find Doug Ellison, who taught government in the classroom next to hers. They had nodded to each other from across the hall but never spoken, and he seemed an enigmatic figure, avoiding other teachers, remaining with kids in his room during the lunches and breaks. He was probably ten years older than Molly, slender and slope-shouldered with thinning strawberry-blond hair. He seemed kind; she’d noticed him standing at his classroom door at the start of every period, greeting his students one by one.

“Miss Nicoll, I presume? Doug Ellison.”

“Molly. Nice to meet you finally.” She offered her hand.

He took it. “I hope you didn’t dress up for my benefit.”

Blushing, she glanced down at her outfit—a sage-colored sweater, pencil skirt, nylons, and heels. She shrugged. “I can see you didn’t dress up for mine.”

Doug chuckled and hitched his jeans, which were held up by a frayed and braided leather belt. “Well played.”

She smiled too. Then he asked her to join him for lunch.

It was a friendship she hadn’t expected but was happy to fall into. Soon they were eating together most days, at his desk or hers, sharing the sandwiches and sodas and potato chips they toted in brown paper bags, a habit they’d both carried over from their own school days, while almost every one of their students bought lunch off-campus. She found that she liked him. He was someone of whom Bobbi, her father’s elderly secretary, would have said, “Bless his heart, he means well.” Despite his lame jokes and flirtations, Molly thought Doug Ellison did mean well. She liked how he shook his students’ hands before class, and the easy way he joked with them, even the awkward ones, in the hallway during break. She liked that he seemed, like her, to care more about kids than test scores, and more about fiction than friends.

Soon they moved from commiserating about their work to talking about their lives. She told him that her father, who operated a small construction business out of their garage, had wanted Molly to stay home forever, to help run the business once she was, as he put it, “done with school”—as though her education were merely a tiresome childhood phase. She told him how every time she stepped into her father’s office and wove her way through dusty piles of his things, her lungs would start to close. How she’d calm herself by curling in a cracked vinyl chair and hiding inside the story of someone somewhere else. “Sitting around with her head in a book,” her father used to complain to Bobbi when Molly was right there beside her, thinking, If my mother had known how to do this, she wouldn’t have needed to leave.

Doug told her that he was from the Central Valley too, the small town of Visalia. His mom was a teacher; his dad was a cop. His two older brothers were amateur wrestlers, or believed themselves to be, and when they were kids their favorite ritual was to wait until the smaller, weaker Doug had fallen asleep, then attack: while one held down his arms, he told her, the other would sit on his head, and he would lie helpless against the barrage of fists and knees and elbows—it was frankly impressive the way they would manage it, flattening him to the mattress and keeping him quiet while they pummeled his body and their parents slept soundly in their room down the hall. He’d learned, eventually, to prop a chair under his door handle, and to hide his favorite novels in the laundry hamper, lest his brothers find them and rip out their pages for sport. As a teenager, he’d found refuge at school, staying late to run track and edit the newspaper and practice the trombone, and when he’d earned a full-ride scholarship to Berkeley it had been as if the low, mold-speckled ceiling of his life had cracked open and sunlight had poured down. At Berkeley he had been happier than ever before or since. He’d majored in English, completing an honors thesis on the failure of the masculine ideal in The Sun Also Rises that was widely admired among his professors. Molly saw the value in Hemingway, she told him, but preferred the British modernists—Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf. Their novels were so mournful and musical; when she read, she felt the prose vibrating her body like song. She expected Doug would laugh at this confession, but he didn’t.