But it was not Calista or Elisabeth whom Doug had chosen, or any of the prettier girls at school. It was Abigail Cress.
When she first heard her colleagues whisper the girl’s name, Molly was shocked. How had Doug managed to seduce such a smart, driven student? And how had it affected the girl? Setting aside her own feelings about Doug, Molly began to watch Abigail closely, searching her face for signs of psychic damage. Catching her eye in class, Molly would offer what she hoped was a reassuring smile. Once she knelt by her desk and said, gently, “If you ever need someone to talk to, Abby, I’m here.” But the only discernible change in Abigail Cress was a renewed impenetrability. She was the kind of student to whom a teacher was neither a confidante nor a kindred spirit, but an insensate dispenser of assignments and grades. Eventually Molly had to accept the truth: that Abigail did not want her, that for this girl, in this case, there was nothing she could do.
—
One afternoon, Amelia Frye, the girl who’d read an answer off her phone on the first day, broke down crying at Molly’s desk. She sobbed into her fist. Her shoulders were shaking. Her bangs were strewn over her forehead. The cause of this breakdown, as far as Molly could tell, was the C+ she’d been given on her Death of a Salesman essay. It lay between them, unloved, on the desk.
“Amelia, I’m sorry. I know it’s not what you wanted. But we can talk about how to make the paper better. I can even help you plan a rewrite, and you can turn it in again for extra credit. How’s that?”
This offer seemed only to refresh Amelia’s anguish—she squeezed her eyes shut and let out a new string of sobs. “I’m…so…stressed…out.”
“It’s going to be okay, I promise.”
“But it isn’t okay. Everything is fucking terrible. I got in a fight with my best friend and she’s still so pissed at me. And I didn’t even do anything wrong.”
“Oh,” Molly said.
“And I’m never going to get into UCLA, my SAT score is fucking pathetic and my grades suck this semester and I don’t even know why, and I can’t show a C to my parents, they’ll flip their shit, they’re such fucking assholes!” Here she paused to breathe. Molly could see where acne bloomed beneath her makeup; a frenzied pink mottled her cheeks. She looked up at Molly with red and smeary eyes, and in a voice that was startling in its softness asked, “You know?”
Molly did not know, yet she did. Somehow, without exactly meaning to, she had slipped into a real, human moment with Amelia Frye. All she knew for sure was that she did not want to lose it.
“You know what?” she said. “Forget it. I can see you really tried here.” She pulled a pen from the desk drawer, crossed out the C+ on Amelia’s paper, and wrote a B in its place.
Seeing this, Amelia transformed: she stopped sniffling, her skin calmed, her eyes brightened. “Oh my God! Really?”
Molly smiled back. “Life is hard enough, right?” She reached across the desk and touched Amelia’s hand.
It had been a risky impulse, but the girl didn’t flinch. “Thank you,” she said, giving Molly a broad and genuine smile. “This is totally going to save my life.”
That night, Amelia Frye sent Molly a friend request on Facebook. Molly received the request over email—she hardly ever visited the site. The few photographs of her there, posted by her sister, were almost embarrassingly benign: she posed stiffly at her college graduation, forked cake at her niece’s birthday party. By contrast, Amelia’s page was crowded and alive. There were photos of her from every imaginable area of her life. She was there as a baby, sitting between young, attractive parents in a field of wild lupine. As a toddler she screamed with shut eyes, clenching a doll’s neck. At eight or nine she made a clamshell with her tongue. At twelve, strapped to a snowboard on a chairlift, she grinned, swung her feet over the white void below. At thirteen she flexed her palm at the camera. More recent pictures showed her stretched by a backyard swimming pool in a chevron-print bikini, grinning in a pile of her peers on an overstuffed couch, and posing in black satin with a lime lawn behind her, narcissus blooms tumbling over her wrist, wearing a practiced, closed-mouth smile. There were status posts and links to videos and comments and comments on the comments that were posted. And there were glimpses of Molly’s other students—Abigail Cress in the track-and-field team photo, Nick Brickston in the background of a party.
After a moment’s hesitation—was there something in her contract about this?—she accepted Amelia’s request.
—
Driving home one stormy Friday afternoon, Molly noticed the lanky figure of Nick Brickston under a redwood tree in the 7-Eleven parking lot. There was an elegant slump to his shoulders, a large black backpack at his feet.