“Just like that.”
The teachers were blocking the mailboxes. They stepped aside for Molly, but went on gossiping as she reached for her pile of memos and paystubs.
“Sleeping with a student,” Gwen said. “Can you believe it?”
“Such a cliché,” said Jeannie. “You never think it happens in real life. I wonder what his wife thinks.”
“He told me he was separated,” said Kristin.
“Lacey is as much his wife as she ever was. She’s gorgeous, too. She goes to my gym.”
“Can you imagine, being married to someone like him?”
“But do you really think he did it?” Kristin asked.
Gwen paused grandly. “I always knew there was something off about Doug Ellison. The way he looked at those girls.”
As Molly listened, her heart was pounding in her chest. Now, at his name, there was a sickening feeling, a cool turning beneath her ribs. “What are you talking about?” she asked.
Gwen turned to face her. “Oh, Molly. You and Doug were so close. Surely you must know.” Gwen’s blue eyes stared through her, implicating Molly and her heap of papers in whatever crime Doug had committed, judging her, somehow, for the whole sleazy mess.
“No” was all that Molly could manage to say. The bell rang, and lunch was over.
—
Hurrying into the hallway, Molly ran into Beth Firestein.
“Are you all right?” Beth asked, lightly touching Molly’s arm. Beneath her manicured hand, Molly’s skin looked allergically splotchy and red. “You don’t look all right.”
Under the elder teacher’s cool, intelligent gaze, Molly could not lie and could not tell the truth. “My kids are waiting,” she said, and pulled away.
She went into the hall. Here the students were swarming. Their sounds were all around her, the squeaking of sneakers and the echoing clanging of lockers slammed shut. A hand-painted banner drooped overhead: FEAR, MADNESS, GREED—VALLEY DRAMA DEPARTMENT PRESENTS—TOM STOPPARD’S “DARK SIDE OF THE MOON.” And the world through which she moved seemed curiously loosened, unfastened—she grew dizzy in the crowd of faces, a stretch of mopped linoleum slippery beneath her feet, and she paused and pressed her palm against a locker to steady herself. Her heart went on hammering in her chest, a little wildly, and there was a trembling in her fingers and a lightness in her legs and a cold, dull weight at her core. The faces around her, baby-cheeked, pimple-spattered, belonged to kids she didn’t know. Her thought was a drumbeat:
Which one?
Which one?
The kids went into classrooms; the classroom doors shut. Each one she passed had a small window at eye level, and past these portholes floated other teachers’ disembodied heads. Molly’s afternoon class was gathered outside her door at the end of the hallway, waiting to be let in. They huddled in circles or sat on the floor with their backs against the wall. Seeing them, she felt her body jangling with nerves as it had not since her first day. She had the feeling of one waiting in the wings to start a play, having forgotten every line. At Doug’s door she paused, peered through the porthole. Gwen was right, he was gone: his students milled among the desks, a substitute teacher flailed for attention. Molly recalled how Doug had greeted his students in the doorway every day, how he’d patted their backs and reached for their hands. It had charmed her. Now his desk was deserted and bare.
For the rest of the afternoon, as her students buzzed around her, Molly scrutinized her relationship with Doug Ellison as if feeling for a slipped stitch. She remembered his novel, with its chauvinistic teacher and nubile student. It had disgusted her, but it was only a story, and to condemn a man based on fiction alone would be to betray her own principles. What about American Psycho? A Clockwork Orange? For God’s sake, Lolita?
And there was the day she’d reached out to Calista Broderick—how strangely Calista had acted, how damaged she’d seemed. Was it possible—of course it was possible—that Calista had been the one?
Soon another scene rose to Molly’s mind, one she’d previously tried to block out. Several weeks before, she and Doug had been finishing lunch when a few kids trickled into his classroom. The first among them was a tall, uncommonly beautiful girl, not her student, named Elisabeth Avarine. She’d settled in a back-row seat and stretched her arms over her head. She was somehow clumsy and graceful at once, like a colt staggering from the womb. Molly had openly stared; she just could not imagine how it felt to look like that. She’d turned to Doug and he was watching the girl too, curious and yet more than curious: hungry.