The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(20)

Now his fingers tightened on her skull. “Don’t call me that, remember?”

“Sorry,” she said. “Doug.” The word was ugly in her mouth; it reminded her of the pumpkin-colored freckles on his scalp that she’d noticed one night and had been trying not to see again.

“All clear,” he told her, and tugged her up by her hair.

“Ouch,” she said. “Jesus.”

He smiled. In the dark it was just a shape shifting on his face. “I didn’t really hurt you, did I?”

She turned to look out her window, but she was not on the view side and the road fell to blackness below.

After a moment she said, “My friends think I’m hooking up with this loser from Redwood I can’t even stand.”

“What do you tell them?”

“That my parents got me an SAT tutor and he, like, comes to my house every Friday night to quiz me. It’s the dumbest lie ever, I can’t really blame them for not believing.” She tugged at her shorts; the nylon of her track uniform clung uncomfortably to her thighs.

“You should study for the test,” he said. “It’s important.”

“Oh, are you going to tell me what’s important now?”

“Abigail. Sweetheart. It’s just that I’ve been through all this already. You can benefit from my experience.”

“Whatever,” she said. Her phone buzzed and she pulled it from her backpack. On the screen was a text from Emma:


Wut up beez. get ur ass up, im done w/dance class and im comming ovr!! xox



“When I was in high school, we didn’t have cell phones,” Mr. Ellison said wistfully. “We didn’t even have email. If you wanted to talk to your friend, you had to call their house and ask for them.”

“That sounds really fucking depressing,” she said, typing into her phone. “Emma wants to know what’s up. She wants to come over to my house.”

“What are you telling her?” he asked, his voice pitching upward so he sounded less and less like Mr. Ellison, more and more like Doug.

“I told her I’m sitting in a car in the dark with you and we just made out and you pulled my hair, and next we’re going to climb into the backseat and fuck like bunnies. Oh, and studying SAT words.”

“Please be serious. I don’t think you begin to understand the ramifications of this.”

“Ramifications,” she echoed. “That’s one.”

“It means consequences.”

“No shit.”

“I wish you wouldn’t swear.”

She rolled her eyes.

“You understand why you can’t talk to your friends about us. We discussed this.”

“I know,” she said.

“They think you’re just like them. They don’t want to think about how far beyond them you already are. And to your parents, you’ll always be a little girl.”

“Yeah, right,” she said, and was quiet. “I have been studying, you know. I’m not an idiot.”

“I believe you.”

“No, really. Quiz me.”

“Abby. I don’t want to—”

“Just do it. I’ll start. Unconscionable. Unrestrained by conscience. Unreasonable. Excessive.”

He smiled. “Egregious.”

“Egregious. Awful, terrible. Outstandingly bad.”

“Good,” he said. “Ubiquitous.”

“Too easy. Ubiquitous. Being everywhere at the same time.”

“Or appearing to be. Yes. Excellent.”

“Now you,” she said. “Ephemeral.”

“Ephemeral,” he echoed. “Transitory, or fleeting. Evanescent.”

“Vanishing from sight or memory. Short-lived. Convergence.”

He set his hand on her knee.

“Hedonistic,” she said. “Aesthetic. Intrepid. Perfidious. Parched.” He was Mr. Ellison again and she was kissing the words against his ear.

He pulled away from her. “What about your friend Calista? How do you know she hasn’t told?”

“She’s not my friend,” Abigail said, although in the bathroom she had thought, for a moment, maybe—

“Well then,” Mr. Ellison said, “probably she has.”

Abigail shook her head. “She’s not an idiot. She knows what would happen if she did.”

“What would happen to us, you mean. You have to talk to her.”

“You don’t have to freak the fuck out.”

“Don’t you realize what the school will do to me if they find out? Or don’t you care?”

When Abigail was silent, he went on. He said maybe she wanted the whole school to find out, maybe she didn’t love him as he loved her, maybe all this time she’d been planning to destroy him.

She squeezed his hand over the gearshift and without warning he began to cry. Little strangled sobs. If this was all out in the open, he said, it would be the weight of the world off his shoulders. But if Abigail left him, he would have to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.

When she told him how fucked up that was, he said he didn’t mean it. “I’m such an idiot,” he told her. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I thought my life was going to be….”