The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(21)
Abigail tried to listen, but in her palm her phone flashed with new texts from Emma, a rapid succession:
U dont answer ur phone??
OK im comming ovr anyway…
Dude where R U?!?
“I don’t deserve you,” Mr. Ellison said. “You should leave me. Forget I ever existed.”
Abigail set the phone in her lap. She lifted his hand and pressed her lips to his palm and the palm to her breast.
“No,” she said. “I love you. I don’t love anything as much as you.”
He seemed to calm then, and smiled as they kissed. But something shifted—for a few terrifying seconds she could not feel anything at all, and he was just another human body that was much too close to hers.
When her phone buzzed again, she pulled away and stared into the glowing screen.
OK fine, Emma’s text said. L8r.
Abigail started to text back, but Mr. Ellison took the phone from her hand. He said, “You know, if they find out, it’s my life that’s going to be ruined.”
She knew what he meant: divorce, unemployment, lawsuits, prison. Yet his statement felt unfair, even untrue. She felt there was much more for her to lose, and told him so, although when he challenged this, she stared into his hard eyes and had nothing to say.
—
When Mr. Ellison dropped Abigail at Starbucks later that night, he suggested they avoid each other until the rumors died down. At school she’d steer clear of his classroom except when absolutely necessary; they wouldn’t be seen flirting in the yearbook room or laughing in the hall. On weekends their lives would revert to what they’d once been. For her this meant weeknights and Sundays spent alone in her room, doing homework and eating takeout from D’Angelo’s and Sushi Ran, Saturdays shopping and going to parties with her friends. She went along with this scheme because she wanted to protect them both. But after only a week, she was called to Principal Norton’s office.
The room was small, a cubby on the ground floor of Stone Hall. It had the same yeasty smell that permeated the entire building, but here the odor mixed with the faint perfume of the fuchsia roses that Ms. Norton had scattered in hopeful bursts around the room. Ms. Norton had cropped auburn hair, warm brown eyes, a pixie nose, and mauve lipstick that might have been fashionable in 1995. Behind her wide birch desk she gave off, even to Abigail, the impression of a little girl playing Office. She was small, in a red skirt suit and low-heeled black pumps that looked like Naturalizers or some equally revolting brand advertised with words like “affordable” and “comfortable.” As she beamed at Abigail, waiting to begin the official business of the meeting, she levered her heels in and out of the pumps beneath the desk.
Abigail liked Ms. Norton and pitied her, given all she had to deal with at that school—crazy parents like Dave Chu’s who thought their mediocre son was God’s gift, juvenile delinquents like Damon Flintov who were always one bored afternoon away from setting the teachers’ lounge on fire. But now she perched awkwardly in one of three chairs opposite Ms. Norton’s, heart pounding in her chest as she gave the vaguest possible answers to the principal’s inane questions about her AP classes and the upcoming SAT. Never in her life had Abigail been summoned to the principal’s office—but she knew why she was there now.
On the desk, Ms. Norton’s iMac was turned toward Abigail, cocked at an angle that allowed her to distract herself with scrolling photographs of the principal’s other life, that is to say her actual life. There were family photos in which she was, astoundingly, not the mother but the daughter, and Abigail realized she had no idea how old Ms. Norton actually was. She could be Mr. Ellison’s age, or closer to twenty-six or forty. In the photos, she sat in the shadows of two silver-haired parents, their hands on her shoulders, and then swam alone in a black one-piece, face obscured by a snorkeling mask, thighs abstracted in sapphire water. She posed in a strapless wedding dress, shoulders bared and a peacock-feather fascinator in her hair, its delicate white netting draped over her face as she smiled with mouth wide open, as if shocked by her own capacity for joy. These photos disturbed and unsettled Abigail. She had once run into Ms. Norton at the Mill Valley Health Club and felt actual physical discomfort, a twisting in her stomach, at the sight of the principal’s body in spandex shorts and sports bra, her belly crunching on the sweat-slicked mat. Abigail saw the irony in this revulsion, given her own situation, but the rules that governed student-teacher relationships were meant for other people, not for her.
Ms. Shriver, the secretary, opened the door behind Abigail. “The parents have had to drive in from the city,” she said. “They’re running late.” Some deranged helicopter set was swooping in to handle their kid’s latest hiccup, Abigail thought.
As the secretary shut the door, Ms. Norton sighed. She tapped her fingernails on the desk. “Well, it looks like we’ll have to get started just the two of us.”
“Wait, my parents are coming?” Abigail said. “Are you serious?” Fear surged through her, and yet the corners of her mouth were twitching up. The idea of not one but both of her parents leaving work in the middle of the trading day, extracting their cars from the parking garage and driving out of the Embarcadero, over the Golden Gate Bridge, and back into Mill Valley in order to meet with sweet Ms. Norton in this pathetic little office was so farfetched that the whole situation began to feel hilarious.