That spring, a series of storms rolled through Mill Valley, and the days were made sunless and strange. All that distinguished the town in clearer weather—the steep hillsides, the glittering marshland, the redwood groves that had grown for a thousand years—now seemed dangerous. Streets ran to rivers. Downtown was a mess. Terwilliger Marsh, risen above the level of its reeds, seeped into the sixth-grade playground at the middle school. Redwood trees collapsed over Panoramic Highway and power lines cracked, threw sparks against the wind. Up on the mountain, the housewives were stuck in their driveways, their narrow streets blocked by felled lines. On campus, rain pelted the windows, flooded the landscaping, and streamed down the front steps. Because Valley High had no cafeteria, students crowded the halls during lunch, huddling in stairwells or eating cross-legged on the floor. This situation didn’t seem to bother anyone but Molly. Her colleagues only stepped around the kids, avoiding looking down.
She began to leave her classroom door open at lunch. Soon kids were gathering inside—first her students, then their friends, then anyone who needed a dry desk to eat on. The room filled with smells of wet wool and sandwiches and sushi and chai lattes, and with the clamor of kids: kids talking and laughing and shouting, scuffling with one another, drumming on desktops, blasting music on iPhones. Coke cans and candy wrappers cluttered her trash bins. Rain-dampened backpacks were strewn across her floor. She didn’t mind. She had given the kids a place to be. And they had begun to talk to her—about their homework and their grades but also about their lives, their one-act plays and sailing regattas and soccer games. They complained to her about their other teachers. They waved to her in the hallways. In class they chattered happily, as though they actually wanted to be there.
Yet Molly’s classroom still looked, mostly, like Jane Frank’s domain. It was time that she made it her own. She went in on a Sunday, when she would not have to explain what she was doing. First she broke the rows of desks—they conveyed rank and opposition where camaraderie was wanted—and arranged them into two concentric circles. Then she pushed her own desk to the side of the room. On the desk—which to this point had held nothing more than her grade book and office supplies and three or four outdated, official-looking handbooks—she stacked novels she intended to read or recommend. She displayed a porcelain cougar that Bobbi had sent upon learning it was Valley High’s mascot and a bouquet of paper dahlias that Steph Malcolm-Swann had made for her in art class. Next she brought out the prints that she’d stored in the trunk of her car, having never gotten around to hanging them at home: a photograph of Joan Didion smoking a cigarette, cover art from Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, a Rothko that had always evoked for her the threadlike line between heaven and hell. All these and more she pinned to the corkboards on which Jane Frank had hung her passive-aggressive grammar posters and lengthy lists of rules. Finally she went into the storage room and found an olive-colored vinyl couch that seemed abandoned, dragged it noisily down the empty corridor. It fit perfectly under the windows at the back of her room. There she rested, pleased with her work. The classroom felt like home—a truer home to her, anyway, than any she had claimed.
—
A strange energy had begun to build in Molly’s blood, a deep and relentless curiosity. She wanted to know her kids. She wanted to defend them, if she could—from predators like Doug Ellison who would hurt them, from the expectations of their parents and the cruelties of their peers. She’d sit across from perpetually spaced-out Calista Broderick, who was her most compelling student and the hardest to reach, and long to ask all manner of impossible questions: Why are you like this? What is your house like? How can I help you? What do you want? She’d notice Elisabeth Avarine passing by her open classroom door, always alone, her slender body shrouded in loose T-shirts, her shoulders hunched in what might have been misery, or shame. And again, she would wonder.