“Shut up, Bill.”
“Hold on, everybody.” Tom Pritchard raised his hand, then swabbed his goatee with his napkin as they waited. “I want to hear more of what our young Miss Nicoll has to say. Molly, how long have you been teaching again?”
“It’s my first year,” Molly said.
He nodded. “So, proceed. You were educating us about how to get across to our kids.”
“I’m not trying to educate anyone,” Molly said. Her blush had steadied, although cold sweat chilled her neck beneath her hair. “I’ve just found that the most important thing, I mean the way I deal with my kids, is to try to reach them on a deeper level. To really connect. To understand them in the context of their whole lives, in and out of the classroom, even the parts we’d rather not see.”
“And I suppose their test scores aren’t important,” Gwen said. “Whether or not they learn how to read.”
“Preparing them for college,” Jeannie added.
“Of course that stuff matters,” Molly insisted, drawing courage from the compliment Nick Brickston had given her. She’d broken through: the kids liked and trusted her the way they could not like or trust these other teachers, and she knew them in ways these teachers could not. “But you have to look at the bigger picture.”
In the silence that followed this declaration, the teachers glanced around the table at one another. Some were smirking, while others merely shook their heads. Katie Norton frowned at her penne. Tom Pritchard fingered his goatee. Gwen Thruwey turned to whisper into Jeannie Flugel’s ear; Jeannie nodded righteously in response. Then the table turned away from Molly and toward another topic, and within her the old, eighth-grade feeling flared: she was standing on the platform, she was shrinking to a speck. And yet, remarkably, she didn’t care. She did not even care that at the other end of the table, Beth Firestein had set down her martini and had fixed on her a cool, evaluative stare. It seemed like so long ago that she’d run into Beth after having learned the truth about Doug Ellison, even longer since they’d met at the copy machine, Beth so chic and commanding, Molly so eager and insecure. Molly had been a different teacher then, a different person.
Two hours later the dinner was over. It had started to rain. Molly sat in the front seat of her car, warm and slightly dizzy from the wine. She rolled down the window so the air would clear her head. Through her open window she watched middle-aged couples stroll arm in arm and covered convertibles cruise. Fog drifted over the town square, and redwood trees nodded beneficently overhead. The only sounds were the drops of the rain, the clip-clop of boots on the sidewalk, and the whispers of the European engines passing by. What a strange thing, to grow up in this place as her kids had. This lavish peace was their entire world; this was all there was.
THE RIDE
Damon Flintov booked it when he heard the sirens wailing.
Damon was buzzed, but it wasn’t that far from Elisabeth Avarine’s house in the canyon to his on the other side of town. Mill Valley was tiny and he knew these roads practically by heart—could drive them with his eyes closed. He stayed calm while everybody panicked, jumping into random cars.
In his BMW it was him and his boy Ryan Harbinger in front. Nick Brickston got in back with these three drunkass girls that he was babysitting—Cally Broderick, Alessandra Ryding, and Emma Fleed. Nick sat on one side, Alessandra on the other. Cally rode bitch in the middle. Emma was pretty compact, so she climbed onto Nick’s lap for the ride. By this time the rain had taken a breather.
“Okay?” Emma asked Nick. She kind of slurred it through her hair, which was swinging over her face. “Too fat?”
“Shut the fuck up,” he told her, and she smiled and pressed her lips to his ear, murmuring something that Damon didn’t know but must have been pretty great, because in the rearview mirror Nick started grinning like a motherfucker.
They slid through the night. The car was sick. He drove like a beast. The road was hairpinned and slick but he was relaxed. Steady mobbing down the narrow streets, swerving in and out of his lane, taking curves without even worrying about touching the brake.
—
Damon had managed to go six weeks without getting into any shit. So earlier that night, his parents decided to give him back the BMW.
“Not give, lend,” his mom said, like there was a difference, when he was their only kid left and everything they had would come to him eventually. His mom was a first-grade teacher and liked to use her little-kid voice on him, like she was helping him sound out a word. It made him want to punch the wall. Except he didn’t do shit like that anymore.