The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(86)

She now taught next to Beth Firestein, who would observe Molly’s classes several times every term while Molly, as Katie Norton put it, “worked on getting back on track.” Molly had swallowed this, as she’d swallowed the censure by Katie, the note in her file, and the not-entirely-voluntary deletion of her Facebook account. At least for a while, she’d reside in the land of the actual, where she might discover who her real friends were. Where she might discover herself.

On a sunny Monday morning, Molly strolled into her classroom in black pants and a crewneck sweater and dropped her satchel on the desk. Her class was a new crop of juniors. They were reading The Great Gatsby, just as last year’s juniors had. The kids were gossiping about a party from the weekend. There was some dispute about a student who’d been arrested or almost arrested or merely grounded.

“Hey, guys,” she said. “Quiet down, please. Take out your homework.”

The kids groaned and whined. Three hands shot up; she knew what this meant and preempted. “If you didn’t do it, I don’t need to know why. Just bring it to me tomorrow.”

The hands sank. The papers were passed through the rows to Molly’s desk at the front of the room. She scooped the pile into her satchel and pulled out a stack of first drafts handed in the week before.

“Peer edits,” she said. “Partner up, everybody.”

Again the kids shifted and groaned. “Seriously?” one asked.

“Seriously.”

There was a murmur of activity as her students paired up and shoved their desks together. She distributed their papers, then sat at her desk and sorted her faculty mail: payroll statements she filed away, department memos she tossed in the recycling bin. At the bottom of the stack was a paper, typed and stapled, but nothing that she had assigned. It was a short story written by Calista Broderick.

Molly picked up the story and riffled the pages. The paper was unthumbed, unstained—this had been printed for her. It surprised her. Since the start of the school year, she’d seen Calista in the halls several times, but they’d swept past each other like strangers in an airport, hurrying toward distant destinations.

Molly recognized Calista’s story, of course. It centered on a group of kids at Valley Middle School, in particular the class outcast, who writes a love note to an insecure girl who cannot be trusted with it. She shares the note with her friends, who share the note on Facebook, and the boy is cyberbullied until driven to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. It was the story Beth had told her, but with Calista Broderick as protagonist and villain. No wonder the girl had been blowing off classes, getting high, spacing out: she was carrying the weight of this.

Molly got up and went to her classroom door. Her students stirred in their seats; she shushed them. In the mostly empty hallway a few seniors were chatting. Seeing Molly, they scuttled into the girls’ bathroom. The one she cared about, Calista, wasn’t there. An old, familiar impulse flared: she wanted to find Calista, pull her in and sit her down and talk until they had unraveled every detail—then help the girl, somehow, to move past it. She returned to her desk, uncapped her red pen, and turned to the story’s final page.





THE SLEEPING LADY


Cally Broderick had gone through middle school with Abigail Cress and Emma Fleed on either arm; she started high school on her own.

She walked through the Valley High School gates and passed Abigail and Emma and her other former friends clustered on the lawn. They saw her too. She passed them by. She’d hardly spoken to any of them since she’d done what she had done.

She knew the boy was dead because of her. A series of small decisions she had made, each of which had seemed inconsequential at the time, all of which had combined to bring the end of Tristan Bloch.

Tristan had died, and Cally’s mom had recovered. The combination of radiation and chemotherapy and mastectomy had nearly killed her and then allowed her to live. So Cally had a mother again—hollowed, bowed, yet present. Her father returned to work, and the living room, cleared of insurance papers, became a living room again. Peace and order restored, life returned to normal. It was Cally who had changed.

—

Through freshman year, she kept mainly to herself. And it seemed right that she should be alone. A kind of penance.

Her parents didn’t understand why the suicide of “that poor, strange boy” should affect her so deeply. They sent her to a psychiatrist she knew they couldn’t afford. In session Cally talked about the things that didn’t matter—the stress of high school, the challenge of making friends, the pressure to be exceptional in a town where nothing less was tolerated—and the doctor seemed pleased with her answers. He prescribed pills meant to dull Cally’s emotions, make her lighter, more pleasant and pliable—Cally took them home and dumped them down the bathroom sink, watched them swirling in the drain.

The months came and went, yet she could not avoid the scattering of small reminders.

A Facebook post.

A blond head.

A red bicycle.

Blue ink on lined paper.

A crane, or really any bird, shrinking to a black speck in the sky.

Tristan himself would haunt her dreams, a broken body floating on the current of the bay. She’d thought nothing could be worse than her nightmares, so she Googled once for details: What happens to a body after jumping from a bridge?

But the truth was worse. The truth was that it could take minutes for death to arrive. The force of impact caused organs to tear loose, bones to snap. Spleens, livers, hearts. Ribs, clavicles, pelvises, necks. People thought that jumping off the Golden Gate would feel like flying into Heaven, the Marin County coroner said, but it didn’t. It was multiple blunt-force trauma. Like being hit by a car but worse, because even if you survived the fall itself, you’d likely drown. Sometimes jumpers could be spotted thrashing in the water, too weak to swim because their organs were bleeding out. By the time the Coast Guard reached them, these jumpers were usually dead. The sailors would pull a body from the water and lay it dripping on the deck. Sometimes mucous bubbled at the nostrils. In almost all cases the body was purple all over.