The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(38)

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The following morning, Molly avoided her teaching duties in the classic way—by asking her students to edit one another’s papers. This allowed her to sit at her desk, pretending to update her grade book as she watched the kids mill around the room. They flirted with each other, sent signals. The girls preened, the boys swaggered. They committed tiny acts of violence imbued with the promise of sex. Of course she had known, in the abstract, that they were sexual beings (she’d been a teenager not that long ago), but it disturbed her to think of them that way. Disturbed her to notice how Ryan Harbinger strutted over to Hannah Jones, squeezed the flesh of her arm to make her shriek. Calista Broderick tugged her hair to one side, exposing her suntanned neck to Jonas Everett. Wyatt Sanchez inked purple spirals on the wrist of Samantha Aster, who flushed with pleasure. Abigail Cress seemed to focus on her work, but even she was agitated by the room’s strange heat, thumping her bare legs beneath the desk. The girls were beautiful, the boys were beautiful. Even the ugly ones were somehow beautiful. Doug could have chosen any one of them.

They were also children. The depth and breadth of what they did not know astonished her. They’d mostly never heard of James Dean, Ronald Reagan, Virginia Woolf, Donald Rumsfeld, Bruce Springsteen, Rodney King. They were babies on 9/11. They loved to point out to her all the things they learned in school that they would not ever use, yet they had no idea what it was to be a grown-up person in the world, what one would use or not use in the span of a lifetime. Their lives had not even begun.

The peer edit did not last long. Ryan Harbinger derailed the lesson from the back row, hollering at Molly over his classmates’ heads: “You’re tight with Mr. Ellison, right?”

“Tight?” Molly asked.

“You hang out,” explained Steph Malcolm-Swann, who was in the desk next to Ryan’s, blackening her nails with a Sharpie.

Molly set aside her grade book. It was clear where they were going and even clearer that she shouldn’t go there with them. But it was also flattering and pleasing and, honestly, surprising that they should care about her private life. “Why are we talking about this?”

Ryan nodded knowingly, as though she’d let slip crucial information. “So you know he took off.”

“I know it’s time to continue with class.” She picked up her copy of Death of a Salesman and waved it at them. “Books, everybody?”

“Do you talk to him still?” Steph asked.

“I heard he got moved to a school in the city,” offered Hannah Jones, who was in the front row typing into her iPhone, thumbs uninterrupted.

“I heard he got fired,” said Amelia Frye.

“I heard he got wrapped,” said Ryan.

Steph put down her Sharpie. “He wasn’t fired, they made him quit.”

“Wrapped for what?” asked Jonas Everett, who seemed to have just woken up, from a middle row.

“You know what.” Ryan shook his fist and tongued his cheek, creating an obscene visual that made Molly feel queasy all over again.

“Baller,” Wyatt said, grinning.

The class laughed.

In the front row, Abigail Cress had taken out her own Salesman and was staring determinedly at its cover. Molly could see they’d hit a topic about which Abigail had none of her signature confidence. And for the first time, Molly liked her. She and Molly were together in their miserable discomfort, the only ones in the room who wanted the conversation to end.

Their common opponent was Ryan, who willed it to go on and on. “So, Miss Nicoll,” he said, stretching tanned arms over his head. “You and Mr. Ellison.”

“We saw you together,” Steph said, looking delighted and a little guilty.

“All those private lunches,” said Ryan.

Molly stood up and took her place at the whiteboard. “Okay, guys, that’s enough.”

“What’s he like?”

“Do you know where he went?”

“Did he tell you he was leaving?”

“No,” Molly said, a little too forcefully. The room was silent, and she realized that she had been hurt by this small slight, that he had not thought enough of her to tell her goodbye.

“That’s cold,” said Nick Brickston, aptly; she supposed that he had read it on her face. Nick had been silent to that point, lounging in his seat in the corner of the room, splaying his long legs under the desk.

“I’d like to move on, please,” Molly said.

Nick Brickston continued; the class turned to hear him. “All that time you hung out together? Then he just cuts out? You must be pissed.”

“Hella,” Ryan said.

Around the room were whispers and murmurs of assent. The kids had turned back to stare at her, with expressions both curious and pitying. Even Calista Broderick was watching her closely, her eyes unusually lucid, conveying something like compassion. Molly could see that it wasn’t going to stop. And she didn’t want to shut them down the way a typical teacher might—open dialogue was good for classrooms, and anyway there was kindness in their questions. Some buried thing within her, some long-subdued instinct, lunged for it. “Okay,” she said. She leaned against the whiteboard, hugging her book to her chest. “Yes, we were friends. No, he didn’t tell me he was going. Yes, it bothers me. Of course it does.”

“But do you know—” began Samantha Aster.