The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(24)

Her mother’s phone rang and she stepped away to answer it.

Abigail stood in the doorway, weighing her power in the palm of her hand. It was the weight of a stone she could hurl at his head, watch it strike the thin skin at his temple, watch as he jolted and bled. He was right—she could ruin him.

What had Ms. Norton called it? Taken advantage. Crossed the line.

Yes, she had crossed over.





MISS NICOLL


Several weeks into the semester, Molly sat in her apartment with a round of Gatsby essays on her knees and an exhausted red pen in her hand.

The apartment was in fact a converted toolshed attached to the circa-1910 Mill Valley home of Justin and Julie Smythe-Brower, a pair of corporate lawyers with three towheaded children under six. It had a separate entrance she reached like a burglar, following a trail of slate stepping-stones around the main house. Its ceiling was low and its walls paneled in a glossy maple, giving the studio a vibe both groovy and claustrophobic, like a 1970s ski cabin or Scandinavian sauna. The single window’s glass was thick and warped; tawny spiders skittered over its sill. But she cherished it, because it faced onto a redwood grove, lush and dark—a view unattainable by even the most privileged people in the place where she was from.

Now, outside her window, the redwood grove had blackened and blurred. The fog dripped desultorily on her roof, pattering its wooden beams. She curled up in the corner of the love seat and draped her comforter around her shoulders. In a large house, on such a night, she might have felt her loneliness acutely, but the small apartment fit her perfectly. The family in the main house sent happy sounds across the yard, but these were almost imperceptible to her and not quite real, like a distant radio transmission.

Her students’ essays disappointed her: mediocre efforts peppered with one or two competent, if soulless, endeavors; two or three unmitigated disasters; and three or four thinly disguised plagiarisms from the Great Gatsby entry on Wikipedia. (Couldn’t they at least bother to change the font?) Where was the passion, the connection? How could they read a book like that and come away with nothing?

And yet: toward the bottom of the stack she found a paper that made her set her red pen down.





Calista Broderick


Period 1 English





Great Gatsby Essay


“I hate careless people.” This is what Jordan Baker says to Nick when they are driving together. Careless, what does it mean? The dictionary says, “Not giving sufficient attention or thought to avoiding harm. As in, ‘She had been careless and left the window open.’?” The truth is, everyone is careless. In Mill Valley, most people leave their doors and windows unlocked all the time. No one thinks anything is going to happen. No one thinks at all.

Here is something that I think about.

Let’s say your window’s open on a cold, damp, foggy day and a strange man happens to be walking down your street. He’s not even meaning to do anything, but he sees the sliver of open window and suddenly gets the idea, hey, there’s a nice little space to worm into. Why not. Let’s say he decides to open the window the rest of the way, then sucks in his stomach and slips inside. The house he’s slipped into is warm and cozy and he wants to see more of it. Let’s say he goes from the living room where there’s no one to the kitchen where it smells like bacon. A mom is there, cooking breakfast. She has her back to him and she can’t hear anything but the crackle of the bacon on the stove and the pan spitting hot grease on her hands that hurts in a way that she’s used to. She cooks this breakfast every Sunday. Let’s say her husband went out for bagels and her three kids are asleep in their rooms upstairs. They could sleep through a thunderstorm, or a 4.0 earthquake. (In fact, they have. They dream they’re on sailboats, carnival rides.) Let’s say the man is standing there in the kitchen, looking at this mom who has left the window open so carelessly, who has not “given sufficient attention or thought to avoiding harm.” The man thinks, Nobody ever cooked bacon for me. The man thinks, Well I’m here now, there’s a knife.

Let’s say it wasn’t actually the mom who left the window open. She isn’t a careless person, she is a mother, always shutting cabinet doors behind the dad who leaves them open for people to bang their heads on, always double-checking locks behind the kids who think locks are something the mom invented to nag them about, because none of their friends ever lock their doors. They live in Mill Valley, and most of them have never been anywhere else except for St. Barts and the Seychelles and Hong Kong and Vail, on vacation. They think, All the bad and interesting things happen in the East Bay or The City. Nothing happens here.

Let’s say it was the mom’s youngest kid, a girl. The girl was so small and meek and unspecial you’d never think she’d do anything that mattered. Let’s say the night before the man came, she was sitting by the open window, reading a poetry book. She liked to listen to the fog dripping through the trees, a sound that was softer than rain. She liked the fresh, minty smell of it—some of the trees were eucalyptus. On those nights with the fog in the valley everything outside smelled good, even the dirt on the ground. It smelled like things growing and she liked to be reminded of that, that even when the world was shit and she hated everyone in it, most of all herself, that there were still things growing, all the time, in the dirt beneath her feet. Let’s say she fell asleep with her book splayed open on her chest, then woke up hours later and stumbled to bed. Let’s say she left that window open, not all the way, but just enough.