The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(19)
Abigail pushed aside the disconcerting thought, and what it implied—that there was something wrong with her. She said, “You don’t have to be so fucking judgmental.”
“You’re fucking seventeen years old.”
“So are you,” Abigail said.
“I’m not fucking an old, child-molester teacher who can’t find someone his own age.” Cally turned and punched the hand dryer to life, and they waited through the white noise without speaking. What was there to say? Would Cally keep quiet if she understood what Mr. Ellison meant to Abigail? How their relationship wasn’t what it seemed? There was the messy business of sex, yes—there was Abigail’s shame the first time Mr. Ellison discovered her open and wet, and the sticky embarrassment of condoms, how she’d hidden her face in her hands as he ripped open the package and shielded himself, how he had pushed into her body and she’d bitten her lip till it bled, how even now, when they made love, she had to ride the wave of pain until it crested to pleasure, and how sometimes, if he was too hurried or she too distracted, it never did, and she felt him come with a dry awareness that disturbed them both—there was all of this, yes, but all of this was not the point. There was something greater holding them together, some force that seemed to shift each time she tried to name it.
As the hand dryer faded to silence, Cally crossed to the door. With her palm on the handle, she turned. “He’s married, right?” she said. “Doesn’t that bother you, like, at all?”
“He loves me,” Abigail insisted. “Love is love.” These were Mr. Ellison’s words, and she hated how they sounded when she said them: generic, babyish.
“Seriously?” Cally said. And she left Abigail alone.
—
By April, Abigail was haunted by the fear that Cally Broderick had exposed them. Conversations seemed to halt when she entered the girls’ bathroom—but she could have been imagining this. Kids whispered to each other when she entered Mr. Ellison’s SAT class after school—but they could have been talking about anything. In Miss Nicoll’s class, Ryan Harbinger and Nick Brickston would smirk at her, but then they’d always enjoyed antagonizing her. Cally—Calista—continued to avoid her altogether, because she was guilty for spreading rumors, or angry about their fight, or stoned. As Miss Nicoll read aloud in first-period English, Abigail would stare down the cover of her Gatsby—the starry blue, the leonine eye—and turn the question over in her mind. On the one hand, Cally had no loyalty or love for Abigail, their best-friendship having ended years before; on the other, it seemed unlike Cally to spread rumors out of malice, especially after the way she’d fallen to pieces over Tristan Bloch. No, Abigail decided, Cally wouldn’t tell. She wouldn’t dare.
Then Nick Brickston posted the picture on Instagram.
Nick had been in the Gifted track with Abigail through elementary and middle school—she suspected he was smarter than she, although his insistence on treating school as one long practical joke made it impossible to know for sure. Regardless, his Photoshop skills were unimpeachable. In the picture, Mr. Ellison’s head, cut from a yearbook staff photo, topped the naked statue of David; Abigail, cut from a track-and-field action shot in sports bra and shorts, ran toward him, her outstretched hand cupping his crotch. Nick had faded the Frankensteined photo to an even black-and-white, neutralized the background, shaved the space around each of Abigail’s fingers so they melded seamlessly into the stone flesh of the David. It looked uncannily real. Even Mr. Ellison’s face—eyes blinked shut, grin wide open—projected an ecstatic release that Abigail recognized.
She replied with a comment: You guys are so fucking IMMATURE.
—
“We have to deal with this, Abigail. This Instagram thing. What are we going to do about it?”
“Nick Brickston is an asshole.”
“But have you—I mean, is there any way he really knows?”
“I haven’t been texting him my deepest secrets, if that’s what you mean.”
“Please calm down. I’m only asking.”
“I am fucking calm,” she said, and hugged her ribs. For a moment they were quiet, staring at the dark road ahead.
It was Friday night. Abigail had met Mr. Ellison at the Dumpsters behind Starbucks, and he’d driven them up to Mount Tamalpais State Park and parked his black hatchback on the dirt shoulder of the highway.
They were past the city limits. Here, houses were distanced by acres. Hikers found shelter when the sun set. There were no streetlamps, just the road that twisted through the mountain’s curves and deer that skittered across the road in threes and telephone poles that leaned into the sky. Redwood and oak and madrone trees were black masses hovering at the edges of the road. Below them, Mill Valley twinkled blithely, the soft darkness of greenery punctuated by the bright lights of people at home. Like her parents, who were already sleeping, living as they did by New York hours. Her friends who were doing homework, or not. The San Francisco Bay was a slick strip between the valley and the city; the moon dipped its silver trail over the water. But the mountain was black.
Headlights veered into the dark car, and Mr. Ellison shoved her toward the floor. “Whoopsy daisy,” he said.
“What the fuck, Mr. Ellison?” But she was yelling into cheap upholstery that stank of polyester and Corn Nuts. She’d suggested he get a new car, one with working heat and air and soft, dove-gray leather seats like her own Mercedes E-Class, but he had only laughed.