The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(46)
“Amelia, I’m sorry. I know it’s not what you wanted. But we can talk about how to make the paper better. I can even help you plan a rewrite, and you can turn it in again for extra credit. How’s that?”
This offer seemed only to refresh Amelia’s anguish—she squeezed her eyes shut and let out a new string of sobs. “I’m…so…stressed…out.”
“It’s going to be okay, I promise.”
“But it isn’t okay. Everything is fucking terrible. I got in a fight with my best friend and she’s still so pissed at me. And I didn’t even do anything wrong.”
“Oh,” Molly said.
“And I’m never going to get into UCLA, my SAT score is fucking pathetic and my grades suck this semester and I don’t even know why, and I can’t show a C to my parents, they’ll flip their shit, they’re such fucking assholes!” Here she paused to breathe. Molly could see where acne bloomed beneath her makeup; a frenzied pink mottled her cheeks. She looked up at Molly with red and smeary eyes, and in a voice that was startling in its softness asked, “You know?”
Molly did not know, yet she did. Somehow, without exactly meaning to, she had slipped into a real, human moment with Amelia Frye. All she knew for sure was that she did not want to lose it.
“You know what?” she said. “Forget it. I can see you really tried here.” She pulled a pen from the desk drawer, crossed out the C+ on Amelia’s paper, and wrote a B in its place.
Seeing this, Amelia transformed: she stopped sniffling, her skin calmed, her eyes brightened. “Oh my God! Really?”
Molly smiled back. “Life is hard enough, right?” She reached across the desk and touched Amelia’s hand.
It had been a risky impulse, but the girl didn’t flinch. “Thank you,” she said, giving Molly a broad and genuine smile. “This is totally going to save my life.”
That night, Amelia Frye sent Molly a friend request on Facebook. Molly received the request over email—she hardly ever visited the site. The few photographs of her there, posted by her sister, were almost embarrassingly benign: she posed stiffly at her college graduation, forked cake at her niece’s birthday party. By contrast, Amelia’s page was crowded and alive. There were photos of her from every imaginable area of her life. She was there as a baby, sitting between young, attractive parents in a field of wild lupine. As a toddler she screamed with shut eyes, clenching a doll’s neck. At eight or nine she made a clamshell with her tongue. At twelve, strapped to a snowboard on a chairlift, she grinned, swung her feet over the white void below. At thirteen she flexed her palm at the camera. More recent pictures showed her stretched by a backyard swimming pool in a chevron-print bikini, grinning in a pile of her peers on an overstuffed couch, and posing in black satin with a lime lawn behind her, narcissus blooms tumbling over her wrist, wearing a practiced, closed-mouth smile. There were status posts and links to videos and comments and comments on the comments that were posted. And there were glimpses of Molly’s other students—Abigail Cress in the track-and-field team photo, Nick Brickston in the background of a party.
After a moment’s hesitation—was there something in her contract about this?—she accepted Amelia’s request.
—
Driving home one stormy Friday afternoon, Molly noticed the lanky figure of Nick Brickston under a redwood tree in the 7-Eleven parking lot. There was an elegant slump to his shoulders, a large black backpack at his feet.
She rolled down her window and shouted to him through the rain.
He acknowledged her with a quick but perceptible lift of his chin, which she took as a welcoming sign. She waved until he slung his backpack on one shoulder and came to her passenger window. His face was glistening. His skin looked slightly bluish in the rain. Water was dripping off his San Francisco Giants cap and drenching his hoodie and backpack. She worried, briefly, about the well-being of his books.
“What are you doing out here?” she said. “Let me give you a ride.”
“That’s okay.”
“You can’t stay out in this. I couldn’t live with myself.” She reached across and unlocked the passenger door. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”
Nick opened the door. “You sure?” he asked, glancing with uncharacteristic anxiousness over his shoulder.
She felt a flicker of paranoia—was someone watching them?—but covered it with a smile. “Get in.”
Nick shrugged off his backpack and folded into the car. The pack was a brick at his feet, his knees high. He must have been over six feet. He didn’t seem this tall in her classroom—but then, he was usually confined to a wrap-around desk, she on her feet at an appropriate distance.
“Do you want to toss that in back?” Molly asked, pointing to the backpack. She glanced in the rearview and immediately regretted the offer—evidence of her humanity was strewn with embarrassing abandon over the backseat: a Target circular with cut-out coupons, a potato chip bag spilling crumbs, a sports bra.
“It’s all good,” he said.
“So, where are we going?”
“Into the labyrinth,” he said, and pointed her into Sycamore Park.
The maze of narrow streets was drenched and gray, the sidewalks bare except for a smattering of mothers who were bundling their children into European SUVs. The rain drummed the roof of Molly’s Honda and shuddered down the windows. The heater whooshed hot air at their feet, intensifying the smells of his soaked cotton hoodie and cigarettes and her damp hair, her too-sweet shampoo, candy-apple, bought on sale.