The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(57)
Around the table, the other teachers complained about school board politics, lamented the price of real estate, and marveled at the massive engagement ring of Gwen Thruwey, whose fiancé had just been made partner at a venture capital firm in the city.
“Well, we knew he wasn’t a teacher!” joked Tom Pritchard, and everyone roared. There was nothing these teachers enjoyed more, Molly thought, than laughing bitterly at their own poverty.
She drank. Around her the conversation veered toward the faculty’s second favorite topic: the insanity of Mill Valley parents. These parents, said Allen Francher, somehow managed to be not only entitled, intrusive, and demanding, but also negligent. Some of them seemed delusional about their kids’ abilities, added Jeannie Flugel. In other words, they were incapable of seeing what pieces of shit their own children could be, said Tom. Worst of all, said Gwen, these parents treated teachers like they were not even professionals, as if they were in the category of babysitters and maids.
“Well,” Molly said, almost to herself, “maybe we are.” She heard too late the buttery slip of the wine on her tongue, and felt heat rise in her face as the entire table of teachers turned toward her.
“What did you say?” Gwen asked, leaning over a plate of focaccia to glare.
Molly gripped her wineglass, which felt slick and enormous in her hand. “I don’t think it matters, that’s all, what we call ourselves. What we are doing is very, I don’t know, elemental.”
“I am a professional person,” Gwen said, and the table nodded in assent. “An educator. I don’t know what you call yourself.”
“That’s not what I meant, exactly.”
“What exactly do you mean?” Jeannie asked. “You don’t seem to think very highly of your own job.”
“I just don’t think…,” Molly said carefully, and paused. She set down her glass and worried the stem. “I don’t think you’re going to get through to kids if you look at things that way.”
Tom Pritchard chuckled. “You don’t think, huh?”
“No wonder no one respects teachers the way they should.” Gwen gestured toward Molly with open palms, as if toward an exasperating child. “There’s attitudes like this coming into the schools.”
“Calm down, Gwenny. Have some more wine.”
“Shut up, Bill.”
“Hold on, everybody.” Tom Pritchard raised his hand, then swabbed his goatee with his napkin as they waited. “I want to hear more of what our young Miss Nicoll has to say. Molly, how long have you been teaching again?”
“It’s my first year,” Molly said.
He nodded. “So, proceed. You were educating us about how to get across to our kids.”
“I’m not trying to educate anyone,” Molly said. Her blush had steadied, although cold sweat chilled her neck beneath her hair. “I’ve just found that the most important thing, I mean the way I deal with my kids, is to try to reach them on a deeper level. To really connect. To understand them in the context of their whole lives, in and out of the classroom, even the parts we’d rather not see.”
“And I suppose their test scores aren’t important,” Gwen said. “Whether or not they learn how to read.”
“Preparing them for college,” Jeannie added.
“Of course that stuff matters,” Molly insisted, drawing courage from the compliment Nick Brickston had given her. She’d broken through: the kids liked and trusted her the way they could not like or trust these other teachers, and she knew them in ways these teachers could not. “But you have to look at the bigger picture.”
In the silence that followed this declaration, the teachers glanced around the table at one another. Some were smirking, while others merely shook their heads. Katie Norton frowned at her penne. Tom Pritchard fingered his goatee. Gwen Thruwey turned to whisper into Jeannie Flugel’s ear; Jeannie nodded righteously in response. Then the table turned away from Molly and toward another topic, and within her the old, eighth-grade feeling flared: she was standing on the platform, she was shrinking to a speck. And yet, remarkably, she didn’t care. She did not even care that at the other end of the table, Beth Firestein had set down her martini and had fixed on her a cool, evaluative stare. It seemed like so long ago that she’d run into Beth after having learned the truth about Doug Ellison, even longer since they’d met at the copy machine, Beth so chic and commanding, Molly so eager and insecure. Molly had been a different teacher then, a different person.
Two hours later the dinner was over. It had started to rain. Molly sat in the front seat of her car, warm and slightly dizzy from the wine. She rolled down the window so the air would clear her head. Through her open window she watched middle-aged couples stroll arm in arm and covered convertibles cruise. Fog drifted over the town square, and redwood trees nodded beneficently overhead. The only sounds were the drops of the rain, the clip-clop of boots on the sidewalk, and the whispers of the European engines passing by. What a strange thing, to grow up in this place as her kids had. This lavish peace was their entire world; this was all there was.
THE RIDE
Damon Flintov booked it when he heard the sirens wailing.
Damon was buzzed, but it wasn’t that far from Elisabeth Avarine’s house in the canyon to his on the other side of town. Mill Valley was tiny and he knew these roads practically by heart—could drive them with his eyes closed. He stayed calm while everybody panicked, jumping into random cars.