The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(30)

Mr. Ellison said, “The most important strategy is Process of Elimination.” Mr. Ellison was about to explain this (Dave’s mechanical pencil hovering over the page, his fingers vibrating with anticipation), but then he forgot because Abigail Cress was asking about the word hedonistic.

“So, would you call that a negative-tone word or a positive-tone word?” she asked, crossing and uncrossing her skinny legs. Mr. Ellison chuckled, although what Abigail said was plainly not funny.

Dave knew that he was missing something. He wrote:

To Google: is hedonistic good or bad?

Mr. Ellison said, “A second strategy is to follow the checklist for grammar questions.” He pounded the whiteboard with capital letters, blood-red:

1. SUBJECT VERB AGREEMENT.

2. PRONOUN ERROR.

3. PARALLELISM.

4. ADJ—

From the hallway came a racket: the thunder of feet and laughter and the smack of something heavy hitting the floor. Dave stopped writing. Mr. Ellison went to the classroom door and opened it: there were Cally Broderick and Alessandra Ryding, crouched on the linoleum where a backpack’s contents had spilled.

Dave watched the back of Mr. Ellison’s head. The teacher was still for a moment, and when he spoke it was not in his classroom boom but a voice that was smaller, startled:

“Calista Broderick? What are you doing out here?”

Cally came slowly to her feet, pushed her overgrown hair behind her ears, and glared. She was nothing like the girl Dave remembered from middle school, the type who’d care about something practical and normal like the SAT. Dave was the exact same person he had been in eighth grade, seventh grade, fifth grade, third grade, just with larger polo shirts and sneakers. What had happened to her?

Cally said, “Nothing, Mr. Ellison. Sorry.” But she didn’t sound sorry at all.

Alessandra Ryding got up from the floor and sidled beside Cally, a woven backpack dangling from her shoulder. Alessandra was willowy and olive-skinned and president of the HIV Awareness Club. Dave couldn’t help but wonder how often she had sex—he guessed it was often—and with who. She was even flirting with their teacher: “Calista’s a bad, bad girl, Mr. Ellison,” she said. “Do you think she should be punished?”

Alessandra collapsed in laughter. Cally elbowed her ribs. Dave couldn’t see Mr. Ellison’s face, but the teacher shifted on his feet. This startled Dave. It made him remember with sudden, embarrassing vividness the Photoshopped picture of Mr. Ellison and Abigail Cress that Nick Brickston had posted on Instagram. In the picture, Mr. Ellison was naked and his eyes were closed and Abigail was in her track outfit, touching him right there. To this point, Dave had mostly ignored the rumors that Mr. Ellison and Abigail were doing it, thinking such things only happened in the movies. But now he wondered.

“Mr. Ellison?” Hannah Jones called out. “I have a question? About this modifier thing?”

Mr. Ellison cleared his throat. “Ladies, why don’t you move along? Your peers are trying to learn something here.”

Alessandra answered for them both—“Peace and love, Mr. E.”—and the girls carried on together down the hall.

Mr. Ellison sighed and shut the classroom door. With the interruption, he seemed to have forgotten about the rest of the grammar checklist. Instead he replied to Hannah, mentioning something called a “dangling modifier.” This relaxed him, and he began to chuckle. He said, “Dangling modifiers are the funniest parts of grammar. You’ll see.”

Dave wrote:

Mr. Ellison thinks that there are funny parts of grammar.

Google this. Google everything.

—

Dave sat at his mother’s wide glass dinner table and vocabulary swam in his brain. They weren’t words to him yet, only letters jumping in and out of line.

Mr. Ellison had said, “Make a picture for each word—this is how we remember what we read.” As Dave chewed string beans and watched his father slice into a steak—his father’s eyes dark under heavy eyelids and speckled brows, hair a peppered gray—his brain struggled to conjure pictures for the Hundred Most Commons. But all he saw was Mr. Ellison’s bald spot as he pounded nonsense on the whiteboard, Abigail Cress’s foot tapping in her track shoe because it was all so easy for her, and Elisabeth Avarine glowing, silent, in the sun at the back of the room.

“You are distracted again,” his father said. “Why?” The knife in his hand jabbed toward Dave. An exclamation point.

Dave shrugged. “Tired, I guess.”

His father’s eyebrows narrowed. “You are not yourself.”

His mother, in her chair between them, laid her fork on the glass table with a deliberateness that seemed rehearsed. She turned to Dave. “David Alexander, have you been doing ecstasy and raves?” she asked, pushing her black swoop of hair out of her eyes. “Your parents are not stupid. We’ve heard what goes on at that school.”

Dave laughed. He had never even touched a cigarette or tried a sip of beer. When had he ever had time for such things?

His parents took this laughter as proof there was something wrong with him. His father said, “What are these teachers teaching you? This disrespect.”

His mother said, “This is not the boy I raised.”

“I don’t know what we’re paying these teachers to do,” his father said. “Has Mr. Ellison graded your practice SAT yet?”