It was afternoon, and sunlight slanted through the windows. Directly below them, on the school’s gated front lawn, kids sat cross-legged on the grass or sprawled dramatically across one another’s laps. They looked like toys. The sun made their skin gleam like plastic; their backpacks were comically small. Above them, and farther out, were rooftops, treetops, an azure sky that softened and blanched as it stretched past the Bothin Marsh and over the bay to San Francisco. The city’s white and ash-gray towers shadowed to slate against the sky. At the waterfront, the rectangles of the Embarcadero Center skyscrapers, where her parents worked—her mother managing stock portfolios on the thirty-second floor and her father trading futures on the thirty-eighth—stood clearly against the horizon, but she couldn’t make out the details of windows or stories or lights.
Mr. Ellison moved behind her, reaching over her shoulder to point to the city. His body pressed heat against her back. “Isn’t it strange,” he said, “how close it is and yet how far away?”
“We can see the world,” she said, “we’re just not allowed to touch it.”
“You’re allowed to do anything you want to do,” he told her.
She smiled. At the same time terror licked up her spine and made her neck begin to sweat beneath her hair. She wanted to turn and look at him, but didn’t.
Outside, a bird’s small head bulleted toward them—thudded against the window. Abigail shrieked and jumped. Mr. Ellison steadied a hand on her hip. The bird reeled back and disappeared.
Heart pounding, Abigail peered out the window to see where it had gone—was there any chance it lived? She shouldn’t have cared, and yet she did, intensely. Pressing her cheek to the sun-warmed glass, she saw it, a pigeon, lying side-splayed on the roof like something sleeping. Its gray eyes glossed open. Its belly shaded by the protective fold of a wing. Abigail flinched. Turned away from the window, and into Mr. Ellison’s arms.
She pressed herself against him, her cheek to his chest. His cotton dress shirt lay soft against her skin. He smelled unexpectedly like sandalwood, and she realized that he had anticipated this moment—in his bathroom that morning, he’d stepped towel-wrapped from the steaming shower, shaved his face, swiped deodorant through the hair under his arms like it was any other day, but in the last instant he had paused, thought of this moment, her, Abigail, and dabbed his neck and wrists with this cologne.
When she craned her neck to see him, he smiled a gentle, closed-mouth smile. Tucked her head back down and vised his arms around her. His heart was kicking at her ear. It was a human heart. It was not a teacher. It did not know or care about the yearbook or the SAT. It belonged to her.
—
Through the rest of the winter, their problem was simple: they had nowhere to go. His apartment was off-limits. He had a wife—Abigail had seen her pacing the aisles of Mill Valley Market—with smooth, nut-colored hair and high cheekbones, a ballet neck and a Pilates body. She would wander around with nothing in her basket but a jar of organic lingonberry preserves and a square of dark chocolate, as though the abundance of actual food overwhelmed her. Abigail wanted to feel bad for Mrs. Ellison, she seemed so sad and lost, but she was too beautiful to sympathize with.
Because there was no place for them in town, Abigail and Mr. Ellison began to take drives together. He picked her up behind the Dumpsters at Starbucks and drove her up Mount Tamalpais toward Stinson Beach or Bolinas Ridge. They parked on the desolate edges of cliffs or in groves of eucalyptus that shuddered in the fog. They touched hands, and talked. They talked forever. He opened her with questions, eased his way in. Until one day she made the move. So for the rest of their relationship they would be able to say that she’d started it.
He was her first. They did it in the cramped backseat of his hatchback or took a picnic blanket from the trunk and lay down in the car’s grassy shadow. She was always on top, his hands clamped around her hips. She liked to see his face, his grateful silence and closed eyes, and then to lean down and press her cheek against his neck and feel the throb of a pulse that needed only her. In the same moment, she liked to imagine herself pulling away from him, fleeing, and all the pretty things he’d say to call her back. She stayed, arched back, and told him that she loved him. He said he loved her too, collapsing his hand inside her dark nestle of hair, gripping until it pulled the skin from her skull and releasing, kissing the tip of her ear. Her ears were beautiful, he told her, small and white as shells, which she’d always known was true, but which no one else had ever noticed.