—
It ended eventually. His payment in his pocket, eight hundred dollars in cash. He’d had money before, always, but this money belonged to him.
Outside, the sky lay low and smoggy and soft, and stucco buildings glared white light. Grit scattered in the street. The sidewalk was empty, and cars sped by not seeing him.
He wanted to check Facebook but his iPhone was off, untraceable. A pay phone was across the street, clawed to the side of a squat motel. He’d heard of these things but never used one. He crossed and read the ancient instructions, dug for quarters, dialed the only number he knew by heart.
As it rang, he wondered what she’d say. What her voice would sound like small and jagged and scared. Ryan, is that you? Where are you, baby, we’re going crazy here worrying—
She interrupted him. “Hello! You’ve reached the home of Ellen, Steven, Ryan, and Nell! We’re four busy bees, so leave your message at the tone!”
Her voice was bright, smooth, oblivious. Contained in the machine, it was like another person’s mother in another person’s life. At the same time, he heard it in a deeper place and with sudden force remembered being small, the sweat and powder of her body as she’d opened her robe in the morning and he’d wrapped himself inside, pressed his ear to the soft cotton nightgown to hear the steady throbbing of her heart. He knew her, a determined kind of woman: given the slightest clue to follow, she would never stop searching for the boy he wasn’t anymore.
He believed that it would be his first unselfish act, his kindness, to lay the phone in its cradle and walk away.
MISS NICOLL
In the deal that was struck, Molly was allowed to keep her job but not her classroom. The following fall, she was relocated to the school’s most modern building: two stories of steel and glass, gray walls and bright hallways. Her classroom was large and air-conditioned and more functional in every way, yet Molly missed her old home in Stone, that musty, sunny, hundred-year-old hall.
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.