The Leftovers

accent. Make you look like teenager again. But Nora had no interest in looking like a teenager; if anything, she wished there was a little more gray up there, wished she was one of those still-youngish people whose hair had turned snow-white as a result of the shock they’d suffered on October 14th. It would’ve made her life easier, she thought, if strangers could take one look at her and understand that she was one of the stricken.
    Grigori was a highly respected colorist with an upscale clientele, but Nora didn’t want to involve him in her transformation, didn’t want to listen to his objections or explain her reasons for doing something so drastic and ill-advised. What was she supposed to say? I’m not Nora anymore. Nora’s all finished. That wasn’t the kind of conversation she wanted to have in a hair salon with a man who talked like a movie vampire.
    She made her appointment at Hair Traffic Control, a chain that catered to a younger, more budget-conscious consumer, and presumably handled lots of foolish requests without batting an eye. Even so, the punky, pink-haired stylist looked dubious when Nora told her what she wanted to do.
    “Are you super sure about this?” she asked, brushing the back of her hand across Nora’s cheek. “Because your skin tone doesn’t really—”
    “You know what I’m thinking?” Nora said, cutting her off in midsentence. “I’m thinking this’ll go a lot faster if we skip the small talk.”
    *   *   *
    JILL WASN’T making much headway with The Scarlet Letter. It was partly Tom’s fault, she thought; back when he was in high school, he’d complained so bitterly about the book that it must have poisoned her mind. Actually, he hadn’t just complained; she’d come home from school one afternoon and found him stabbing his paperback edition with a steak knife, the tip of the blade penetrating the cover and sinking far enough down into the early chapters that he sometimes had trouble pulling it out. When she asked what he was doing, he explained in a calm and serious voice that he was trying to kill the book before it killed him.
    So maybe she wasn’t approaching the text with the respect it deserved as a timeless classic of American literature. But she was at least making a good-faith effort. She’d sat down with the book on three separate occasions in the past week and still hadn’t made it through Hawthorne’s introduction, which Mr. Destry claimed was an important part of the novel that shouldn’t be skipped. It was like she was allergic to the prose; it made her feel slow and stupid, not quite fluent in English: These old gentlemen—seated, like Matthew, at the receipt of the custom, but very liable to be summoned thence, unlike him, for apostolic errands—were Custom-House officers. The longer she stared at a sentence like that, the less sense it made, as if the words were dissolving on the page.
    But the real problem wasn’t the book, and it wasn’t spring fever, or the fact that graduation was just around the corner. The problem was Ms. Maffey and the I.M. chat they’d started up a few days ago. It had gotten under Jill’s skin and was pulling her in a direction she didn’t want to go. And yet she couldn’t seem to stop herself, couldn’t find a good reason to disengage, to sever a connection that had renewed itself so unexpectedly, after so many years.
    Ms. Maffey, Holly —Jill was still trying to get used to calling her by her first name—had been Jill’s fourth-grade teacher at Bailey Elementary and her all-time favorite, though it hadn’t started out that way. Holly had taken over the class in January, after Ms. Frederickson left to have a baby. All the kids resented her at first and treated her like the interloper she was. After a week or two, though, they began to realize that they’d lucked out: Ms. Maffey was young and vibrant, way more fun than stuffy old Ms. Frederickson (not that anyone had thought of Ms. Frederickson as stuffy or old until Holly showed up). Almost a decade later, Jill couldn’t remember much about fourth grade, or what had made that spring so special. All she remembered was the goldfish tattoo above Ms. Maffey’s ankle, and the feeling of being a little in love with her teacher, wishing every day that summer would never arrive.
    Ms. Maffey only taught in Mapleton those few months. The following September, Ms. Frederickson returned from her maternity leave, and Holly took a job at a school in Stonewood