The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(56)

—

After, shards of mirror glittered on the cheetah carpet.

Puddles of malt liquor soaked into the floor.

Her mom’s clothes had been rifled, tossed like streamers, stretched over strangers’ bodies, torn. Some had been stolen. She had no proof of this last. She just knew.

“Be careful, there’s glass,” a voice said.

She looked up. Dave Chu was there. He knelt beside her.

She nodded. She started to cry. As Dave leaned closer, something shifted, and she fell into his arms. She did not even think.

His arms hesitated. His heartbeat accelerated against her ear. Then he hugged her to him. Her eyelashes matted and wetted his neck.

“It’s so stupid,” she said. “I thought someone would thank me.”

“It’s not stupid.”

“My mom comes home tomorrow. There’s no way to hide this. She’ll see it, she’ll see everything.”

“She’ll forgive you,” he said.

Then they heard the sirens coming, a plaintive cry that echoed through the canyon, hurtling closer and closer to where they were.

“I’ll stay with you,” Dave said. “Don’t worry, okay?”

Elisabeth cried. She did not know what she would tell the police, and she did not know what her mom would do. Maybe she’d be furious. Maybe she’d be proud. Maybe she’d blame all the others. Or maybe she’d realize that Elisabeth was the one who made this happen, who let the function grow and morph into a beast that would not stop until it tore this house apart.





MISS NICOLL


“Miss Nicoll? Miss Nicoll? Molly?”

Molly awoke to find Nick Brickston staring down at her. She lay stretched across her classroom’s vinyl couch, where she’d intended to rest for only a moment at the start of her free period. Now the afternoon sun streamed through the open window, bringing with it the scent of oranges rotting in the heat.

Nick Brickston cleared his throat; she sat up hastily. She was intensely aware of her untucked blouse and twisted skirt, the crust in her lashes, the staticky frizz of her hair. How long had he been standing there?

She sat up. “Nick, hi. I was just resting my eyes. What’s up?”

“I just came to say hey.” He sat down beside her on the sofa, creaking the vinyl; Molly tugged at her hem. For a moment they sat quietly together, the sun on their shoulders. Nick drummed his thumb on the vinyl. From there, the whiteboard looked very far away, Molly’s cursive small and frenzied. Finally he said, “Oh, sorry about that reading-response thing you wanted me to do. Was that important? I could make it up if you want.”

“Sure,” she said, before realizing she didn’t actually care. “I mean, no. It wasn’t important. I know you’ve done the reading.”

“Cool.”

“But look,” she said, “next time, if you need an extension or something, just text me.” They exchanged numbers. Then they were silent. She waited for him to go, but instead he turned to her and said:

“I was thinking about something you brought up in class the other day.”

“Really? What?”

“You told us everything we see is a signifier for something else. Something deeper. Like, the word tree signifies a tree, and the word itself changes how we think about the thing. Right? What did you call it?”

“Semiotics.”

“Yeah.” He leaned toward her. His eyes were dark and flashing, his breath tobacco-spiced. “Like, if we call someone a student, how does that change how we think about them? If we call someone a teacher, what does that mean?”

“Well, what does it mean?”

“It’s crazy if you think about it, how arbitrary it is.” His enthusiasm startled her; it transcended the cool in his voice. She recalled this thrill, its promise—when in high school her own English teacher had read from A Room of One’s Own, and she’d realized that there was another way to see the world than how the Nicoll family did, an entirely different way to be. Now she had passed on this promise to Nick Brickston. Who knew what he would do with it? He shifted closer to her on the couch. “I mean, you’re a teacher, and because of that we’re supposed to think of you a certain way. But Ms. Thruwey’s one too, and you guys aren’t even on the same planet.”

“What are you saying?”

“She’s a teacher, but you’re just Molly. A person you can, like, have a conversation with. Like one of us.”

Molly couldn’t help but smile at this. She wondered at the accidental power of this gangly teenage boy—how he knew to say what she most wanted to hear. “Nick, that might be the kindest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Thank you for telling me the truth,” she said.

—

That weekend, Molly’s attendance was required at the spring semester faculty dinner hosted by Principal Norton.

At the restaurant downtown, Molly chose a seat toward one end of the long, narrow table that stretched down the center of the dining room. The table was white-clothed and spotlit. Her chair was hard. Around her, everyone did just as expected, the teachers interrogating their appetizers, the servers pulling corks. How dull it was, how safe it felt. No one here would break a glass, or hurl a napkin, or empty the salt shaker on someone else’s head, or jump up and curse and storm out. Even the odors behaved themselves: gentle aromas of garlic and wine, traces of high-priced perfume. It made her throat itch. At the opposite end of the table, Beth Firestein, sipping a martini, looked equally bored.