When they reached the classroom, she stopped.
Seeing her, Mr. Ellison stood up behind his desk; his chair scraped the floor. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple jumping in his throat. With arms by his sides, he clenched and unclenched one fist. It was the hand with his wedding ring, the silver titanium he’d let her weigh in her palm that first night in his car, to let her feel how light it was. How insubstantial. How he could slide it off and on and off again. Facing her in his blue striped shirt and jeans, his square-framed glasses and stupid braided belt, he was all the layers of the man she knew. He was Mr. Ellison and Doug and Mr. Ellison again.
She wanted to run to him, to claim him. She wanted him to claim her, to tell her parents all the wonderful things about her that they had never bothered to know, things she herself had not known, that she could be not only smart and self-sufficient but loving and kind and sweet—even, in the right light, beautiful.
But the main thing, the important part, was how he looked at her. The rash of shame on his cheeks. His worried brow. His fear. Not the fear of what might have happened to her, not the fear even of losing her, which he’d professed so many times, his freckled head rolling in her lap, but the fear of getting caught. And she understood, or rather felt, that everything Ms. Norton hinted at was true.
Love is love. What did it mean?
“Abigail?” he said, and his voice tore on the edge of her name. “Did you need something?”
“Abby?” her mother said. “Honey, who is this? Is this him?”
Abigail shook her head. Her brain strained to catalog, organize, everything he’d ever done or said. Real: When he pulled her hair, and the shivers down her body made her gasp. Not Real: When he told her, You’re the one I didn’t realize I was waiting for. You’re a miracle, Abby, you’re mine. Now his eyes begged her to leave and she told herself, Nothing he has ever done or said to you, none of that happiness, was as true as this is.
Her mother’s phone rang and she stepped away to answer it.
Abigail stood in the doorway, weighing her power in the palm of her hand. It was the weight of a stone she could hurl at his head, watch it strike the thin skin at his temple, watch as he jolted and bled. He was right—she could ruin him.
What had Ms. Norton called it? Taken advantage. Crossed the line.
Yes, she had crossed over.
MISS NICOLL
Several weeks into the semester, Molly sat in her apartment with a round of Gatsby essays on her knees and an exhausted red pen in her hand.
The apartment was in fact a converted toolshed attached to the circa-1910 Mill Valley home of Justin and Julie Smythe-Brower, a pair of corporate lawyers with three towheaded children under six. It had a separate entrance she reached like a burglar, following a trail of slate stepping-stones around the main house. Its ceiling was low and its walls paneled in a glossy maple, giving the studio a vibe both groovy and claustrophobic, like a 1970s ski cabin or Scandinavian sauna. The single window’s glass was thick and warped; tawny spiders skittered over its sill. But she cherished it, because it faced onto a redwood grove, lush and dark—a view unattainable by even the most privileged people in the place where she was from.
Now, outside her window, the redwood grove had blackened and blurred. The fog dripped desultorily on her roof, pattering its wooden beams. She curled up in the corner of the love seat and draped her comforter around her shoulders. In a large house, on such a night, she might have felt her loneliness acutely, but the small apartment fit her perfectly. The family in the main house sent happy sounds across the yard, but these were almost imperceptible to her and not quite real, like a distant radio transmission.
Her students’ essays disappointed her: mediocre efforts peppered with one or two competent, if soulless, endeavors; two or three unmitigated disasters; and three or four thinly disguised plagiarisms from the Great Gatsby entry on Wikipedia. (Couldn’t they at least bother to change the font?) Where was the passion, the connection? How could they read a book like that and come away with nothing?
And yet: toward the bottom of the stack she found a paper that made her set her red pen down.
Calista Broderick
Period 1 English
Great Gatsby Essay
“I hate careless people.” This is what Jordan Baker says to Nick when they are driving together. Careless, what does it mean? The dictionary says, “Not giving sufficient attention or thought to avoiding harm. As in, ‘She had been careless and left the window open.’?” The truth is, everyone is careless. In Mill Valley, most people leave their doors and windows unlocked all the time. No one thinks anything is going to happen. No one thinks at all.