The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(18)
Because there was no place for them in town, Abigail and Mr. Ellison began to take drives together. He picked her up behind the Dumpsters at Starbucks and drove her up Mount Tamalpais toward Stinson Beach or Bolinas Ridge. They parked on the desolate edges of cliffs or in groves of eucalyptus that shuddered in the fog. They touched hands, and talked. They talked forever. He opened her with questions, eased his way in. Until one day she made the move. So for the rest of their relationship they would be able to say that she’d started it.
He was her first. They did it in the cramped backseat of his hatchback or took a picnic blanket from the trunk and lay down in the car’s grassy shadow. She was always on top, his hands clamped around her hips. She liked to see his face, his grateful silence and closed eyes, and then to lean down and press her cheek against his neck and feel the throb of a pulse that needed only her. In the same moment, she liked to imagine herself pulling away from him, fleeing, and all the pretty things he’d say to call her back. She stayed, arched back, and told him that she loved him. He said he loved her too, collapsing his hand inside her dark nestle of hair, gripping until it pulled the skin from her skull and releasing, kissing the tip of her ear. Her ears were beautiful, he told her, small and white as shells, which she’d always known was true, but which no one else had ever noticed.
They traded fantasies. He would quit his job and follow her to college, perhaps enroll himself, go for a Ph.D. as he had always planned to do; she would forget college and live with him instead, learning to cook and to iron, making his apartment her whole world.
He loved her. She knew he had a wife, but thought that was just one of the names we put on people. She had a brother she hadn’t talked to in six months, and parents she wasn’t sure were in or out of town. Only she and Mr. Ellison were real.
—
One afternoon in mid-March, Abigail and Mr. Ellison sat side by side at a computer in the yearbook room, editing a fall sports layout. They crossed pinkies over the mouse, and then, for one second forgetting what their love story would look like to the rest of the world or that the rest of the world even existed, she kissed him.
They parted, and Abigail turned to see Cally Broderick, her former best friend, standing in the doorway. Cally stared for a moment, then fled.
Abigail found her in the girls’ bathroom. Unlike the remodeled sections of the school, this room showed its hundred years, with walls of dull white tile and floors of scuffed linoleum. A chemical stench overwhelmed the smells of human beings. A mirror, slashed by lipstick and black marker, stretched the length of four porcelain sinks smeared with yellow soap. There was one frosted, crosshatched window painted shut. On the far wall hung a battered metal tampon dispenser that, as far as Abigail knew, no Valley High girl had ever deigned to touch. Beside it, an ancient hand dryer, turned on and abandoned, roared air into the empty space, then exhausted itself. Two stall doors were open; a third was shut.
In a clatter of metal Cally emerged from the closed stall and, without looking at Abigail, walked to a sink and turned her hands under the water.
Abigail went to the sink beside Cally’s. In the mirror Abigail’s eyes looked charcoal under the fluorescent lights, her skin aged and gray.
“You can’t tell anyone,” she said over the stream of water. Her voice echoed off the tile, and she glanced over her shoulder. “Seriously.”
Cally stared back. Her wide-set hazel eyes were glossy and pink, and Abigail thought not for the first time that this was not the same girl that she’d loved in eighth grade. They’d gone to different elementary schools but met in sixth-grade homeroom, and for a period of two years and nine months they were inseparable. They’d spend hours in Abigail’s bedroom, sometimes with Emma Fleed, eating junk food or sneaking her older brother’s beer or painting each other’s toenails or watching YouTube videos or Facebooking or curling up together on her bed and combing fingers through each other’s hair and laughing and laughing and laughing about nothing at all. When Abigail allowed herself to think about this time, she knew it was the happiest she’d ever been. Emma was Abigail’s best friend now, and Abigail loved her but not in the same way. Everyone knew that Emma was more devoted to dance—she was training for Juilliard or someplace like it—than to any friendship.
In the months after what happened in eighth grade, Cally had stopped coming to Abigail’s after school. In high school, she’d started to call herself Calista. She’d let her hair grow to her waist; the tips faded from honey brown to blond, and the ends split. Instead of wearing designer clothes that they’d shopped for together, Cally would come to school in ripped jeans and peasant tops from the Salvation Army, or flowery dresses with men’s vests and shoes. On sunny days she often wore no shoes at all. These changes had made Cally cooler to some people—her new friends were Alessandra Ryding and the Bo-Stin slackers, hippies’ kids who were bused to Valley High from Bolinas or Stinson Beach—but as far as Abigail was concerned, Cally had transformed herself into an alien.
Cally shut off the faucet and shook the water from her hands. “He’s old,” she said.
“He’s thirty-two.”
“He’s our teacher.”
“He’s different.”
“Are you having sex with him?”
Abigail was silent.
“What is he, like, a child molester?” Cally said. “What’s wrong with him that he can’t find someone his own age?”