She squeezed his hand over the gearshift and without warning he began to cry. Little strangled sobs. If this was all out in the open, he said, it would be the weight of the world off his shoulders. But if Abigail left him, he would have to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.
When she told him how fucked up that was, he said he didn’t mean it. “I’m such an idiot,” he told her. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I thought my life was going to be….”
Abigail tried to listen, but in her palm her phone flashed with new texts from Emma, a rapid succession:
U dont answer ur phone??
OK im comming ovr anyway…
Dude where R U?!?
“I don’t deserve you,” Mr. Ellison said. “You should leave me. Forget I ever existed.”
Abigail set the phone in her lap. She lifted his hand and pressed her lips to his palm and the palm to her breast.
“No,” she said. “I love you. I don’t love anything as much as you.”
He seemed to calm then, and smiled as they kissed. But something shifted—for a few terrifying seconds she could not feel anything at all, and he was just another human body that was much too close to hers.
When her phone buzzed again, she pulled away and stared into the glowing screen.
OK fine, Emma’s text said. L8r.
Abigail started to text back, but Mr. Ellison took the phone from her hand. He said, “You know, if they find out, it’s my life that’s going to be ruined.”
She knew what he meant: divorce, unemployment, lawsuits, prison. Yet his statement felt unfair, even untrue. She felt there was much more for her to lose, and told him so, although when he challenged this, she stared into his hard eyes and had nothing to say.
—
When Mr. Ellison dropped Abigail at Starbucks later that night, he suggested they avoid each other until the rumors died down. At school she’d steer clear of his classroom except when absolutely necessary; they wouldn’t be seen flirting in the yearbook room or laughing in the hall. On weekends their lives would revert to what they’d once been. For her this meant weeknights and Sundays spent alone in her room, doing homework and eating takeout from D’Angelo’s and Sushi Ran, Saturdays shopping and going to parties with her friends. She went along with this scheme because she wanted to protect them both. But after only a week, she was called to Principal Norton’s office.
The room was small, a cubby on the ground floor of Stone Hall. It had the same yeasty smell that permeated the entire building, but here the odor mixed with the faint perfume of the fuchsia roses that Ms. Norton had scattered in hopeful bursts around the room. Ms. Norton had cropped auburn hair, warm brown eyes, a pixie nose, and mauve lipstick that might have been fashionable in 1995. Behind her wide birch desk she gave off, even to Abigail, the impression of a little girl playing Office. She was small, in a red skirt suit and low-heeled black pumps that looked like Naturalizers or some equally revolting brand advertised with words like “affordable” and “comfortable.” As she beamed at Abigail, waiting to begin the official business of the meeting, she levered her heels in and out of the pumps beneath the desk.
Abigail liked Ms. Norton and pitied her, given all she had to deal with at that school—crazy parents like Dave Chu’s who thought their mediocre son was God’s gift, juvenile delinquents like Damon Flintov who were always one bored afternoon away from setting the teachers’ lounge on fire. But now she perched awkwardly in one of three chairs opposite Ms. Norton’s, heart pounding in her chest as she gave the vaguest possible answers to the principal’s inane questions about her AP classes and the upcoming SAT. Never in her life had Abigail been summoned to the principal’s office—but she knew why she was there now.