—
It was four o’clock when Molly got home, and the main house was undergoing its daily changing of the guard: the Range Rover in the driveway, the daytime nannies handing off to the evening staff, the children running inside to trade school clothes and backpacks for soccer shorts and flute cases. The nannies were hurrying the kids in Spanish, the kids responding in English and nonsense. The little one, Archer, stood on the front stoop in only his diaper, desperate not to put on his pants. “I don’t wanna go!” he was wailing. Then: “I don’t wanna stay!” Molly understood him. The world was such a wrong place—how could one go, how could one stay? She forced herself to smile and wave as she circled around to her studio, then let herself in and locked the door.
The sight of the bed was more than she could stand. She went to the bathroom and ran the shower, undressed quickly, puddling her clothes on the floor, and stepped under the water. She shivered. Hot water needled her shoulders and back. But she wanted to be scalded—the best part of sunburn was peeling.
Under the steaming water she tried to black out the images that came to her, of Doug and the girl—whoever it was. Calista? Elisabeth? Another student Molly didn’t know? How had he done it? Had he rented a room in some seedy hotel? Had he pulled her into the world of dusty ashtrays and sour sheets, cellophaned soap, hangers handcuffed to the rod? A Mill Valley girl would never have been in a place like that before. He would have opened her eyes to the unclean world, undone in one sordid night sixteen years of her parents’ careful tending.
Molly knew what girls needed: he had told the girl he loved her. She must have thought she loved him too.
She recalled how he’d twisted his hands in her hair, pressed her head toward the band of his boxers; how he’d stroked her neck while they kissed on her love seat; how he’d pulled her chair out in his classroom, its metal feet scraping the floor. Had he really thought he would get away with it? Cheating on his wife with Molly, with a sixteen-year-old child? Or—God—cheating on the child with her.
—
The following morning, Molly avoided her teaching duties in the classic way—by asking her students to edit one another’s papers. This allowed her to sit at her desk, pretending to update her grade book as she watched the kids mill around the room. They flirted with each other, sent signals. The girls preened, the boys swaggered. They committed tiny acts of violence imbued with the promise of sex. Of course she had known, in the abstract, that they were sexual beings (she’d been a teenager not that long ago), but it disturbed her to think of them that way. Disturbed her to notice how Ryan Harbinger strutted over to Hannah Jones, squeezed the flesh of her arm to make her shriek. Calista Broderick tugged her hair to one side, exposing her suntanned neck to Jonas Everett. Wyatt Sanchez inked purple spirals on the wrist of Samantha Aster, who flushed with pleasure. Abigail Cress seemed to focus on her work, but even she was agitated by the room’s strange heat, thumping her bare legs beneath the desk. The girls were beautiful, the boys were beautiful. Even the ugly ones were somehow beautiful. Doug could have chosen any one of them.
They were also children. The depth and breadth of what they did not know astonished her. They’d mostly never heard of James Dean, Ronald Reagan, Virginia Woolf, Donald Rumsfeld, Bruce Springsteen, Rodney King. They were babies on 9/11. They loved to point out to her all the things they learned in school that they would not ever use, yet they had no idea what it was to be a grown-up person in the world, what one would use or not use in the span of a lifetime. Their lives had not even begun.
The peer edit did not last long. Ryan Harbinger derailed the lesson from the back row, hollering at Molly over his classmates’ heads: “You’re tight with Mr. Ellison, right?”
“Tight?” Molly asked.
“You hang out,” explained Steph Malcolm-Swann, who was in the desk next to Ryan’s, blackening her nails with a Sharpie.
Molly set aside her grade book. It was clear where they were going and even clearer that she shouldn’t go there with them. But it was also flattering and pleasing and, honestly, surprising that they should care about her private life. “Why are we talking about this?”
Ryan nodded knowingly, as though she’d let slip crucial information. “So you know he took off.”
“I know it’s time to continue with class.” She picked up her copy of Death of a Salesman and waved it at them. “Books, everybody?”
“Do you talk to him still?” Steph asked.
“I heard he got moved to a school in the city,” offered Hannah Jones, who was in the front row typing into her iPhone, thumbs uninterrupted.
“I heard he got fired,” said Amelia Frye.
“I heard he got wrapped,” said Ryan.
Steph put down her Sharpie. “He wasn’t fired, they made him quit.”