Beth smiled, pityingly. “Of course not. It’s our job to teach.” When Molly didn’t answer, Beth went on. “I’m going to tell you something that might help you. Several years ago, I was convinced to assist with a tutoring program at the middle school, one of these feel-good endeavors meant to help eighth graders prepare for the rigors of high school. I worked there once or twice a week after school, sitting one-on-one with students and attempting to wring educational value from the insipid assignments their English teachers gave out for homework. It was a dreary project. The lessons were tedious. The students were not quite people yet, not quite cooked. Their problem was not that they were unprepared for high school; their problem was that they were thirteen years old.
“There was one boy who did not bore me. His teachers told me that he was very sweet and very smart, but somewhat odd. They said that he had trouble remembering to turn in his assignments. I soon learned that he was not at all forgetful, but that he simply chose to pursue passionately what interested him, and to disregard the rest. Although this would have been a disastrous approach to high school, I thought it was an excellent approach to life, and I respected him for it. His teachers would not accept this. They continued to pathologize him. The main problem, his resource teacher claimed, was that he had a hard time ‘fitting in with his core peer group.’ What she meant was that the other kids disliked him. I knew what this was like; I had not been all that popular in school either. I believed this boy was someone who, if he survived his public education, would find some strange and intelligent obsession in college, some strange and intelligent friend, and end up all right. Still, I wanted to help him. I tried to know him better, to talk to him about his life. One day he admitted he was lonely, and I said—it was quite offhand, really—‘Well, why don’t you do something about it?’
“Three months later, that boy was dead. He had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. They said that he had been tormented by people on the Internet—‘cyberbullies,’ they are called, as if they’re characters in some ridiculous video game. He had written a private letter which his classmates had posted online. They had laughed at his humiliation, berated and insulted him. They told him to shoot himself, and that no one would care if he died. Would you like to know who those classmates were?” Beth paused. Molly could not speak. She felt hollow and ill. She did and did not know who the bullies had been, why Beth was telling her this story now. “They’re your students, Molly. The ones you know so well.”
—
Molly stood on the mostly empty front lawn, looking down on the grass and the stucco arches and the slow and steady traffic on the road. White fog shielded half the sky; she squinted against the glare. She thought of the sneers of Damon Flintov on her first day; the daily disdain of Abigail Cress; the smirks of Ryan Harbinger on their seventh consecutive night without homework; the awkwardness of Nick Brickston in her car; the haste with which Calista Broderick had fled from her classroom as soon as she had been allowed. Fled from Molly who had poked and prodded, who had been so painfully desperate to connect. She felt like a character in an old cartoon—having run off the cliff’s edge, glancing down to see the air beneath her feet.
The afternoon bell rang, signaling the end of her free period and the end of the school day. She headed inside to gather her things. As she walked toward her classroom, the tide of students pushed the other way. She heard and felt but hardly saw them. She did not stop until she’d reached her room. There she grabbed her satchel and sweater and keys, then locked the room and hurried down the back steps to her car. She had to be alone, to think. How could the things that Beth had told her be right, and how could Molly have been so wrong?
She was stopped at the long red light in front of the school. The kids filled the front lawn; some filed under the arches and spilled onto the sidewalk. A few girls and boys crossed the avenue, the girls tugging down their miniskirts, the boys tugging up their sagging jeans. But most massed in front of the school, huddled in conspiratorial circles, the shells of their backpacks turned toward her. She peered through the windshield; she could not tell the ones she knew from the ones she didn’t know. She might have seen Calista Broderick’s caramel waves of hair; she might have seen Nick Brickston’s narrow shoulders. Prior to this weekend she would have thought she’d know them instantly. Now she could not be sure. She could not be sure of anything. She thought she saw the tide of students ebb, prepare to dissipate. As the light turned green, the circles shifted. The students moved away from her, and she drove on.
Senior Year
THE PRETTY BOY