The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(79)

Still Beth Firestein did not look at Molly. She didn’t say a word.

Molly stared back at Katie Norton—her gamine haircut, her cheerleader face—and struggled to untangle the maddening grammar of principal-speak: the convoluted scramble of ambiguous vocabulary, the passive construction that obscured any meaning. She still had no idea what this meeting was for, and she wondered if Katie and Beth somehow didn’t know about the weekend’s events—if her colleagues were really that clueless. Finally she asked, “Have I done something wrong?”

“No one’s here to place value judgments,” the principal said.

“I don’t understand,” Molly said.

“Katie,” Beth Firestein said, raising her hand, “why don’t you let me take it from here?” And Molly watched, amazed, as the principal nodded and stood and ceded her own office to Beth Firestein, shutting the door quietly behind her.

Without speaking, Beth took the papers she’d been holding and laid them out, one by one, across the desk. Molly froze. They were screenshots from Facebook, arrayed like evidence, but not the kids’ posts. Hers.

Molly had known in the abstract that her online comments were public, yet she’d believed that what she and her kids had shared there, like what they had shared in her classroom, was protected somehow. It seemed perfectly obvious but had simply never occurred to her that a person like Beth Firestein would have the means, or even the inclination, to so easily access the students’ world—a world it had taken Molly months to penetrate.

“What you’ve done here is highly inappropriate,” Beth said. “You know that.”

Molly stared at the papers, unable to speak.

“We all feel for the girl who was hurt.” So Beth did know. Her tone was calm and measured; she might have been describing the casualties of Gettysburg or the famine of some distant country, a tragedy too far away to feel. When the trouble was here, it was all around them.

“Emma Fleed is her name,” Molly said.

“It’s clear you were affected by her situation.”

“I’m still affected. We’re all affected, aren’t we?” Molly heard her voice grow strident but didn’t care. “She’s one of our kids. So what are we going to do to help her?”

“Molly, listen to me now,” Beth said levelly. Her eyes were luminous and dark. “These are not your kids. These are your students. Last year they were someone else’s, next year they’ll be gone. You can’t be their mother. You certainly aren’t their friend. You are the person who gives them grades. And if you go on caring for them in this way, you won’t survive.”

“But isn’t it our job to care?”

Beth smiled, pityingly. “Of course not. It’s our job to teach.” When Molly didn’t answer, Beth went on. “I’m going to tell you something that might help you. Several years ago, I was convinced to assist with a tutoring program at the middle school, one of these feel-good endeavors meant to help eighth graders prepare for the rigors of high school. I worked there once or twice a week after school, sitting one-on-one with students and attempting to wring educational value from the insipid assignments their English teachers gave out for homework. It was a dreary project. The lessons were tedious. The students were not quite people yet, not quite cooked. Their problem was not that they were unprepared for high school; their problem was that they were thirteen years old.

“There was one boy who did not bore me. His teachers told me that he was very sweet and very smart, but somewhat odd. They said that he had trouble remembering to turn in his assignments. I soon learned that he was not at all forgetful, but that he simply chose to pursue passionately what interested him, and to disregard the rest. Although this would have been a disastrous approach to high school, I thought it was an excellent approach to life, and I respected him for it. His teachers would not accept this. They continued to pathologize him. The main problem, his resource teacher claimed, was that he had a hard time ‘fitting in with his core peer group.’ What she meant was that the other kids disliked him. I knew what this was like; I had not been all that popular in school either. I believed this boy was someone who, if he survived his public education, would find some strange and intelligent obsession in college, some strange and intelligent friend, and end up all right. Still, I wanted to help him. I tried to know him better, to talk to him about his life. One day he admitted he was lonely, and I said—it was quite offhand, really—‘Well, why don’t you do something about it?’

“Three months later, that boy was dead. He had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. They said that he had been tormented by people on the Internet—‘cyberbullies,’ they are called, as if they’re characters in some ridiculous video game. He had written a private letter which his classmates had posted online. They had laughed at his humiliation, berated and insulted him. They told him to shoot himself, and that no one would care if he died. Would you like to know who those classmates were?” Beth paused. Molly could not speak. She felt hollow and ill. She did and did not know who the bullies had been, why Beth was telling her this story now. “They’re your students, Molly. The ones you know so well.”

—

Molly stood on the mostly empty front lawn, looking down on the grass and the stucco arches and the slow and steady traffic on the road. White fog shielded half the sky; she squinted against the glare. She thought of the sneers of Damon Flintov on her first day; the daily disdain of Abigail Cress; the smirks of Ryan Harbinger on their seventh consecutive night without homework; the awkwardness of Nick Brickston in her car; the haste with which Calista Broderick had fled from her classroom as soon as she had been allowed. Fled from Molly who had poked and prodded, who had been so painfully desperate to connect. She felt like a character in an old cartoon—having run off the cliff’s edge, glancing down to see the air beneath her feet.