Soon they moved from commiserating about their work to talking about their lives. She told him that her father, who operated a small construction business out of their garage, had wanted Molly to stay home forever, to help run the business once she was, as he put it, “done with school”—as though her education were merely a tiresome childhood phase. She told him how every time she stepped into her father’s office and wove her way through dusty piles of his things, her lungs would start to close. How she’d calm herself by curling in a cracked vinyl chair and hiding inside the story of someone somewhere else. “Sitting around with her head in a book,” her father used to complain to Bobbi when Molly was right there beside her, thinking, If my mother had known how to do this, she wouldn’t have needed to leave.
Doug told her that he was from the Central Valley too, the small town of Visalia. His mom was a teacher; his dad was a cop. His two older brothers were amateur wrestlers, or believed themselves to be, and when they were kids their favorite ritual was to wait until the smaller, weaker Doug had fallen asleep, then attack: while one held down his arms, he told her, the other would sit on his head, and he would lie helpless against the barrage of fists and knees and elbows—it was frankly impressive the way they would manage it, flattening him to the mattress and keeping him quiet while they pummeled his body and their parents slept soundly in their room down the hall. He’d learned, eventually, to prop a chair under his door handle, and to hide his favorite novels in the laundry hamper, lest his brothers find them and rip out their pages for sport. As a teenager, he’d found refuge at school, staying late to run track and edit the newspaper and practice the trombone, and when he’d earned a full-ride scholarship to Berkeley it had been as if the low, mold-speckled ceiling of his life had cracked open and sunlight had poured down. At Berkeley he had been happier than ever before or since. He’d majored in English, completing an honors thesis on the failure of the masculine ideal in The Sun Also Rises that was widely admired among his professors. Molly saw the value in Hemingway, she told him, but preferred the British modernists—Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf. Their novels were so mournful and musical; when she read, she felt the prose vibrating her body like song. She expected Doug would laugh at this confession, but he didn’t.
He and his wife, Lacey, had recently separated—a secret, he said, that almost no one knew. He’d met her in a seminar the spring of his senior year, and married her six months after graduation. “She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever been with, and she loved me, and I didn’t want her to leave me, so I asked,” he said. “I remember feeling life was blowing by like a tornado and I needed to grab hold of something, anything I could. Our families came, we had a live band, a big cake, the whole nine. At the end of the night, I vomited in the bushes. That was the first time I disappointed her, definitely not the last.” Molly was amazed by how easily he opened up to her, the unflattering depths he was willing to plumb. She saw that his failed marriage was a tender subject that he still found hard to talk about, and she liked that he trusted her enough to tell her this. Most of all, she liked that the two of them could avoid the faculty-lounge cliques together and tell themselves it was a choice.
THE LOVERS
At seventeen, Abigail Cress knew she wasn’t beautiful. She wasn’t modelesque Elisabeth Avarine, trailed down Miller Avenue by grown men in Lexus sedans. She wasn’t even ordinary-pretty like Cally Broderick, her former best friend. Although black hair fell in glossy curls over Abigail’s shoulders, beneath it were small gray eyes and a thin sharp face and a nose that would have been too big on a boy. In her track uniform—a red sports bra stretched flat across her chest and silky blue shorts that ballooned around her hips—her body was skinny and hard as a coin.
She believed unprettiness was something to atone for, so she made herself an A student, track captain, president of the Valley High chapter of the National Organization for Women, editor of the yearbook. She enrolled in Mr. Ellison’s class to prep for the June SAT, and on weekends wrote out careful, color-coded flashcards for the vocabulary words she didn’t know. She believed high school was easy: you just did the work. She believed love was bullshit, teenage boys idiotic. She made plans: Dartmouth for college, or another competitive school on the East Coast, where she believed she would fit in better than she ever could in Mill Valley, California. Where her life would click into focus and her unprettiness transform to specialness, or glamour.