“So fancy,” she teased, pointing toward his feet. “Trying to impress me?”
He looked at her as though she’d caught him shoplifting. “They were a gift,” he said.
Now they were awkward; their kissing seemed wrong and so did the way that they sat there, inches apart on her pilled red comforter, avoiding each other’s eyes. Molly sensed that she’d caused it, although she didn’t know how.
“Should I put on some music?” she asked finally.
“Sure.”
She reached down to click on the CD player she kept under her bedside table. This relaxed him, and he laughed: “Didn’t think they made those anymore.” What played was a Green Day CD from her high school days, a sentimental favorite. It was wrong for the moment and she offered to change it, but Doug said no, it was perfect. He kissed her again, and they lay down together. It was nice to have him on her bed, she felt, although strange. It was nice to be touched, although strange. He’d brought condoms. Hot pink. She recognized them as the ones the HIV Awareness Club gave out at school and thought, He wasn’t willing to buy his own?
She said, “Presumptuous much?”
“Once a Boy Scout,” he said, grinning.
As their bodies moved together, she remembered being sixteen, when all she’d longed for was to kiss a boy and cuddle. She remembered being twenty, when Josh’s arms around her had felt thrilling and safe and not stifling hot. She wanted to ask Doug Ellison to lie beside her without speaking. She wanted to ask him to leave. She wanted him to feel familiar, she wanted him to be someone she wanted and knew. But he was only someone.
THE STRIVER
In the front row of Mr. Ellison’s SAT workshop one sunny April day, Dave Chu leaned over his desk, neck craned, eyes blinking. His forehead was curtained by a shining swoop of black hair. Whenever he looked down at his notes and then back up, the swoop fell forward and he jerked his head to flick it out of his eyes. This happened approximately every twelve seconds. He would have cut it, buzzed it to the scalp, but his mother said his hair was the only part of him that looked like her.
His mechanical pencil scratched across the page. He wrote everything Mr. Ellison said, even the jokes, the stories and asides, even as around him kids like Emma Fleed and Ryan Harbinger were staring at their phones or dozing at their desks, as beautiful Elisabeth Avarine sat silent and still in a halo of sunlight at the back of the room.
In the middle of his lecture, Mr. Ellison stopped by Dave’s desk, smiled, and told him, “You don’t have to remember everything I say. Just write down what feels important.”
Dave stared back. This was ridiculous advice. How was he supposed to know what was important? Maybe in math class these distinctions could be made—here are the relevant formulas, here are the steps to solve the equation—but in English everything was random. Even the rules were not rules. In SAT prep, Mr. Ellison would say, “Here are the rules about prepositions,” and then, five minutes later, “But remember—when it comes to writing, there are no rules!”
These contradictions were slowly driving Dave insane. He had written them all in his meticulous notes. Crisscrossed the pages with arrows, underlines, exclamations that were inadequate to express the madness in his head.
He wrote:
Mr. Ellison does not like semicolons! But you can use them sometimes.
Pronouns: Mr. Ellison does like He. He does not like You.
There is a rule about They. It is bad for some reason. Choose He or She instead!
“But,” Dave said, his hand crawling uncertainly into the air, “excuse me, Mr. Ellison, what if you don’t know if it’s a he or a she?”
“Check for the Adam’s apple, Dave, everyone knows that,” Mr. Ellison chuckled. Dave wrote:
?!?!?!???
Mr. Ellison said that adverbs were bad except when they were not. One adverb that was bad was “run quickly.” Mr. Ellison had once told Dave’s class that he’d run track in high school but had been cheated out of first place in the all-county track meet his senior year. Perhaps this was why Mr. Ellison disdained this particular phrase. Perhaps it raised a secret pain that he tried to cover over with his brave pacing through the classroom and big block letters on the whiteboard, his attempts to flirt with Abigail Cress, who sat upright in her desk next to Dave’s.
Dave wrote:
One adverb that is good is “carefully worded accusations.”
This is from a book that Mr. Ellison likes called Confederacy of Dunces.
This book is good because Mr. Ellison likes it.
Other books (Twilight) are bad because Mr. Ellison does not like them.
Mr. Ellison first read this Confederacy book in college at UC Berkeley.
UC Berkeley is a very prestigious school.
Mr. Ellison said, “Very is the most useless word in the English language.” Dave wrote: Do not use very. Mr. Ellison said the good news was that very would not be tested on the SAT. So never mind. Dave scratched through his notes. The very rule was not important.