Calista looked down at her arm, where green marker spiraled over the skin like a tattoo gone rancid with time. Her hair, long and wavy, fell across her cheek and hid most of her face. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Molly wanted to take the girl in her arms and soothe her, tell her she should know how lovely she was, how rare. She wanted to buy her a sweater, a copy of The Awakening, and a fortifying meal. She wanted to be a person in her life with the power to do any of these things. But she could think only of what her own father used to say to her when he found her incomprehensible: Is that all you have to say for yourself? Because she could not say this, she said nothing, and could only sit by, helpless, as the moment closed. They were back where they’d started: teacher and student, nothing more.
—
Molly had been teaching for six weeks when Damon Flintov vanished from her class. Principal Norton delivered the news in a hushed hallway encounter one morning in mid-February: the boy had some legal troubles and would not be returning for some time. Molly was not to discuss this situation with anyone. She was to move the class forward without him.
As soon as Molly walked into class that morning, she saw this command would be impossible to heed. Her kids launched straight into gossip.
“Drugs,” Steph Malcolm-Swann announced. “They arrested him at some party.”
“He’s not arrested, he’s in rehab,” said Jonas Everett.
“Just because his dad made a deal with the judge,” said Amelia Frye. “Otherwise, who knows.”
“Lockdown for life,” Wyatt Sanchez said mournfully.
“Real,” said Steph.
“Oh my God, no one gets life in prison for drug possession,” said Abigail Cress. “Plus he’s a juvenile. Don’t be retarded, you guys.”
And suddenly they were competing for Molly’s attention, sitting up in their desks, shouting over one another to share their rumors and theories, asking what she thought. She wasn’t supposed to discuss it, and they were delaying the commencement of classwork, but she didn’t mind. It was clear the kids knew far more about whatever had happened to Damon than she did. And there was a magic in it. Somehow the loss had forged a bond, and Molly felt the thrill of being one of them, if only for those twenty minutes, as interested as they in all the dirty details and as willing to be distracted.
It was only later, grading quizzes in her empty classroom after school, that she was brought down by a tugging sadness. It was strange: during the time that she had known him, Damon Flintov had consistently provoked and annoyed her. He’d tapped, he’d banged. He’d dismantled office supplies and drawn on desktops. During Silent Reading he would click his pen again and again, artillery fire, and when she asked him to stop, click on with heightened aggression. He’d plug in earbuds and play his music loud enough to send an angry, steady buzzing through the room. One day, out of nowhere, he jumped up, said, “Fuck this,” and stomped into the hall. (Molly stood, baffled, in his wake.) On other days he showed up grinning but reeking of marijuana, gazing at her with bloodshot eyes—she was ashamed to admit that she preferred him this way. Now he was gone. His father’s money might have saved him from a blemished record, but what had happened was more disturbing: the vanishing of Damon Flintov had been conducted with terrible swiftness and efficiency. His absence was a scandal to the kids, a relief to the adults. Molly herself was relieved. It was like Damon had been settled in a rowboat in the dark of night, pushed out to sea. Without him, his world went on. As Molly’s world did, back home in Fresno, without her.
She communicated with her former life by way of her little sister, Lisa, with whom she Skyped once or twice a week, and who sent her emails that were at once intensely loving and vaguely threatening: a Cosmo article that directed young women to catch husbands early lest they end up thirty and alone, competing with the ceaseless parade of twenty-two-year-olds behind them; a fertility chart captioned only Food for thought, xoxo. These emails annoyed her—why did married-with-children people feel so compelled to pull her into their web?—yet she couldn’t help wondering about the life she might have had if she’d stayed and given Josh, her college boyfriend, what he wanted: the Central Valley version of the life her landlords were living, brightly and blondly, just across her yard.
It was easier to think about Damon. What more could she do for the kid? A flock of bad ideas flew through her brain: write an email, phone his parents, find out where he’d been taken and show up there. She had enough sense not to make these mistakes. Instead, she invited Doug Ellison over for dinner.
—
Molly didn’t see quite how small her studio apartment was until Doug Ellison was standing inside it. She offered beers; he hovered behind her as she bent to pull them from the mini-fridge. They went to the love seat. The room was intimately lit, and her bed asserted itself, making its presence known like an alpha male spreading his legs in a bar, as they sat together sipping beers.