The Most Dangerous Place on Earth

by Lindsey Lee Johnson

  She might have set this in motion, but now it was dragging her behind. She watched the comments fill the screen.

  Damon Flintov: hey triss. if i had a face like yours id shoot myself

  13 people like this post

  Ryan Harbinger: bwa ha ha

  Elisabeth Avarine:

  Cally curled up on Abigail’s bed. “Turn it off.”

  “What’s your problem?” Abigail said. “They’re defending you. Ryan Harbinger is defending you.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have shown it to him.”

  “Oh, come on. That note was disgusting. It was like sexual harassment or something.”

  “I think I ate too many Red Vines.” Cally got up and went into Abigail’s bathroom, which was newly remodeled in expensive white marble. Like magic, the bathroom had transformed into a shrine, but Abigail hardly seemed to notice it. To her it was just a place to pee in the middle of the night.

  Cally leaned over the toilet. She saw Tristan’s crane and Ms. Flax’s sad eyes and her own name inked in delicate blue. She wanted to puke but couldn’t. She told herself that Abigail was right—the note was disgusting and she’d had every right to report it. And Tristan Bloch had brought it on himself. He’d laid it all out on paper, for anyone to read. What did he expect to happen?

  She moved to the sink, rinsed her mouth and hands with water from Abigail’s brushed-chrome tap. In the mirror her eyeliner looked suddenly clumsy, a painted-on frame around little-girl eyes. Her cheeks were wan under their bursts of blush.

  In a line beside the sink stood three washcloths folded into origami fans. This sight made her queasy again, so she shook one fan open and scrubbed it over her face. She picked up the other two, shook them, and folded them in sloppy squares like the washcloths in her bathroom at home, which made her feel better and worse at once. Even if she’d wanted to, she had no idea how to refold them. There was someone who’d know how, but to talk to him would be to lock herself into that airless room forever and throw away the key.

  “I thought you fell in,” Abigail said, spinning toward her in the desk chair, when Cally returned to the bedroom.

  Cally grinned, remembering with sudden force that Abigail was her best friend in the world. “Let me,” she said, and went over to Abigail and leaned over the keyboard to type:

  Abby Cress: Hey tristan I talked to cally and she says FUCK OFF you make her sick and fuck your gross note too NO THANK YOU!!!

  When Abigail laughed, it sounded like mercy.

  Then they went to YouTube to watch a cat try to scramble out of a claw-foot tub, its panic hilarious. They watched the clip five times, collapsing on each other in laughter, before Abigail sent Cally to the mini-fridge to find her brother’s beers.

  As she popped the tabs on the cold silver cans, Cally began to feel free. Powerful. She began to believe that Tristan Bloch would fade away, that already he was folded into that square of paper, pale and insubstantial as that barely blue ink. Already, he was almost nothing.

  —

  From then on, Tristan spent his lunch periods outside, walking the edge of the schoolyard where asphalt crumbled into marshland. He kept his head bowed, and when he came back inside, his ankles were purpled with mud.

  Nobody bullied him at school. Nobody minded him at all.

  And every afternoon, Cally and Abigail watched from Abigail’s bedroom as the Facebook posts continued, flashing onto the computer screen at an inexorable pace, gleeful, hateful, now from people they didn’t even know. Sometimes Tristan wrote back, defending himself angrily or desperately, but each comment he posted only renewed the energy of the attacks.

  Someone would stop it, Cally thought. Tristan would close his account. Tristan would tell. Or some adult—his mother, Ms. Flax—would sense something wrong, venture into the Facebook world and see what was happening, pull them all back from the brink.

  —

  One foggy morning in June, five weeks after he wrote the note to Calista Broderick and one week before the end of eighth grade, Tristan Bloch woke early, at 6:00 a.m.

  His bedroom lay at the end of a narrow hall. The small room was painted little-boy blue. Against one wall was pushed a twin bed with a Pokémon blanket and red metal frame. Stickers splotched the bars of the headboard, the top layer of each pried off over years by a plump, patient hand, so that only the white underlayers remained, the shapes of rockets and robots and snakes indelible, reminding the boy of his boyness every day, reminding him that he was still a child, in a child’s bed.

  He pushed off the covers and set his feet on the carpet. He wiped his eyes with the belly of his T-shirt. The shirt was warm and retained the sour smell of sleep.

  Yawning, he went to the trio of wooden shelves beside the window. He cracked the blinds; lasers of white light hit the objects on the shelves. The Revell Wright Flyer model airplane, carefully constructed of balsa wood and glue. A four-by-six birchwood board with Boy Scout knots of thick white rope, each neatly labeled in his fifth-grade print: Cat’s Paw, Figure Eight, Square Knot, Bowline. A tiny samurai with tiny sword, a thumb-sized bald patch worn on the crown of its black plastic head. A stack of books with brightly colored spines: Harry Potter, The Hobbit, The Lightning Thief, The Boy Scout Handbook (three years out of date), The Official NASA Guide to Rockets. A cherrywood box of origami folding papers, given to him by his father before his father disappeared. A broad, beige clamshell that cradled gleaming pennies. A wallet-sized school photo from first grade, his white-blond hair shaped into a shining bowl. A Matchbox car. A calcified branch.

  Tristan blew dust from the lid of the cherrywood box, thumbed the head of the tiny samurai. If he could live just in this room, he’d be okay. But he could not.

  Tristan undressed quickly, threw his T-shirt and sweatpants and briefs in the hamper and selected new ones from his drawers. He dressed and stepped into the hall. For a moment he allowed himself to pause, to press his ear against the cool painted surface of his mother’s hollow door. An almost imperceptible sifting of sheets.

  He crept downstairs and into the kitchen. He was hungry. There was a carton of organic orange juice in the refrigerator door. He tipped its mashed cardboard spout to his lips and was braced by its coolness, its tart, bright taste. Licking the last drops from the corners of his mouth, he set the empty carton on the counter. He found a Pop-Tart in the bread bin and ate it over the sink in four quick, crumbling bites.

  The one-car garage was a cool, gray cave just off the kitchen. The car sat outside, while boxes and bins cluttered the dim space, plastic toys and scooters that Tristan had never much liked. Dust tickled his throat, making him cough. When he stopped, he listened for footsteps; none came.

  Tristan found his bicycle and rolled it to a strip of empty floor. Kneeling beside the red metal frame, he examined it. The chain had fallen off the gear. He looped his finger under the chain and fit it onto the circle of metal teeth, rotated the pedals and watched it whir.

  He stood. Grease stained his fingers. He couldn’t risk going in the house again, so he swiped his thighs, leaving dark stripes like war paint on the yellow. Dutifully he picked up his helmet, which seemed to scream at him with its glossy neon plastic, and squeezed it over his head, taking the usual moment to tuck the tips of his ears uncomfortably inside, and snapped the nylon strap under his chin. Then he remembered. He didn’t have to wear it.

  He unstrapped the helmet and tossed it aside. Leaving the automatic door closed, he wheeled his bike out the side door and along a narrow, graveled alley to the street.

  He pedaled under the wide arms of sycamore and maple trees, their leaves shaggy and bright against gray fog, their broad trunks draped with moss. He turned and rode along the empty street to the entrance of Valley Middle School. The large, modular building—its windows blackout, its siding painted penitentiary gray—sat on an ancient landfill at the edge of the Pickleweed Inlet and Bothin Marsh.

  He kept riding: beyond the school’s front entrance was Bayfront Park, where they r
an the mile in PE, although Tristan himself had been spared this particular horror by virtue of weak knees and an indomitable mother. He’d spent hours on the splintered park bench, filling out worksheets on the rules of basketball or the tenets of weightlifting as he watched Calista Broderick cheat the course, disappearing into the willow trees with Ryan Harbinger. Ryan, who had made it his mission to prove that Tristan was unfit for this world. Calista, the girl with the magical name, an alien-princess name, and a distant look that sometimes crossed her imperfectly pretty face; Calista, the girl who he had sensed, or hoped, was like himself—with that Ryan-Abigail group but not of them—although he now saw how absurd that hope had been.

  The air grew colder and damp as Tristan drew nearer the water. With no helmet, he felt the moist breezes whip over his scalp. He liked it. He steered onto the bike path that cut through Bothin Marsh. Before him stretched an expanse of green brush that turned to reddish reeds, and the water shone like mirrored glass. There were the echoing shrieks of gulls, the honks of pelicans. White egrets balanced on thin black legs among the reeds, stretched serpentine necks to watch him as he passed. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the teal rise of Mount Tamalpais, its profile the body of the mythic Sleeping Lady, its shoulders shrouded in gently shifting fog, and the valley nestled beneath it. He could appreciate the beauty of this place now, without a hint of pain or sadness, because in his mind he had already done it: he had already made the decision. This was why he’d slept so soundly the night before, why he’d woken determined and hopeful. For the first time in a long time, he’d felt power in his muscles and focus in his mind, had felt compelled to climb onto that bike and ride.

  He pedaled on. The bike path circled wide and slid under the Richardson Bay Bridge, a flat, unspectacular span that stretched over the water on concrete grates. On the other side, he took the road to Sausalito. As cars paraded by, he kept to the path between the water and the road. At a stoplight a woman in a pearl Mercedes looked out and glared at him, and for a moment he feared he would be stopped, found out—but then she tapped her head and shook her finger at him, and he remembered about his helmet. He shrugged. The light turned, and the car pulled ahead.

  He biked on. This was farther than he had ridden possibly ever, and his bottom was sore on the hard, hook-nosed seat and his legs were growing tired. The sun was burning through the fog, and even without the oppressive squeeze of helmet, his head was hot and wet, salty sweat dripping down his temples and eye sockets and into his eyes and mouth. He squeezed the rubber handlebars for strength. Passed apartments that crouched on stilts over the water. Finally, parched and heaving, he saw the Golden Gate Market and slowed, craving the sweet ice of a cherry-cola Slurpee on his tongue. But his pockets were empty.

  He rode on. The road began to wind uphill. To the left was a battered metal guardrail and to the right were houses, so many houses, crowded as teeth, fighting for a view of that water. Tristan’s lungs tightened, his heart beat a galloping rhythm in his chest as the road slanted upward, and he was forced to slide off his bike and walk, leaning on the handlebars, the rubber hot now and slippery with sweat, to push the weight of both himself and the bike up the terrible slope. The pavement rolled beneath his wheel, glittering with glass and drifted garbage, debris of accidents already forgotten. To keep himself going, he tried a series of distractions. He thought of all the U.S. presidents in order. The prime numbers, starting with two. The times tables. The countries of Africa. Then Europe. The wars. The wiggle of shapes on the maps in his history textbook, with dark arrows of armies moving back and forth across.

  An hour had passed and he was almost there. He got back on the bike and rode into the yellow-grassed hills. At a fork in the road he veered right. A green road sign pointed him forward: SAN FRANCISCO. When, finally, he reached Highway 101, the cars and buses blew by him in a noisome, furious rush. It was 7:45 a.m., and the working parents of Mill Valley were on their way to offices downtown. His mother, too, must be awake by now.

  Turning to his left, he saw the red-orange spires of the Golden Gate Bridge, like masts of an enormous ship, like skyscrapers of an alien nation, like ladders to the sky. His heart beat frantically in his ears. Yet for the first time in a long time, he felt like he could breathe.

  He got on his bike and skimmed along the path that sloped downward to the bridge. On the left side was the pathway for pedestrians, a narrow lane guarded by rust-colored bars to the height of his shoulders. He stepped off his bike and leaned it against the rail, not bothering to lock it. It was early yet for tourists, but there were some: mothers gazing over the water with sundresses whipped around their knees; fathers hiding behind large, expensive-looking cameras; kids running back and forth between their parents’ legs, or trying to poke their small faces between the bars of the guardrail and failing.

  You had to go over, that was the thing.

  Tristan knew this because he had studied. He’d learned everything there was to learn about the Golden Gate. For example:

  The bridge was 8,981 feet long.

  Until 1965 it had boasted the longest main span of any suspension bridge in the world, at 4,200 feet.

  It was made of concrete and steel and painted a color called International Orange, which enhanced its visibility in fog.

  Its weight was supported by giant cables, each cable made of 27,572 strands of wire.

  It was held together by approximately 1,200,000 rivets.

  It was 746 feet above the water.

  —

  Cally’s father read the newspaper story aloud. Tristan Bloch, age thirteen, had gone to the Golden Gate Bridge and jumped.

  He’d left his bike against the rail, leaning where the tourists came to pose for pictures.

  —

  Tristan’s mother came to school to gather his things. She drifted through the halls, slack, rudderless.

  In the eighth-grade pod, Cally pretended to search her locker while Mrs. Bloch worked herself up to opening Tristan’s. Ms. Flax and Principal Falk and the janitor clustered around her, murmuring. What could they possibly be telling her? There was nothing they could have done. They couldn’t have made Tristan less awkward or strange, or stopped him from writing that note and sending his heart into the world for everyone to cut a piece of. Couldn’t have stopped Cally from giving the note to Abigail and Ryan Harbinger. After Tristan had jumped, Ryan and Damon Flintov had been suspended for a week, Abigail and a few others for three days each. Cally had been questioned, but she and Tristan weren’t even Facebook friends; technically speaking, she’d done nothing wrong. So now she was supposed to go back to class, copy science labs and cheat on algebra tests as though nothing had happened.

  Tristan’s mother fell against the locker, pressed her forehead to the metal. Ms. Flax palmed circles over her broad back and murmured something that Cally, stepping closer, barely heard: “Gloria, we don’t have to do this now. We can wait, as much time as you need.”

  Cally knew she should leave, hide, but she couldn’t. From down the row of lockers, Ms. Flax noticed her and glared. The teacher must have understood the truth: that this was Cally’s fault and no one else’s.

  Finally Tristan’s mother stepped back and the janitor clipped the lock with bolt cutters; the hollow clang made Cally gasp as if it were her own dark heart being cut. She stopped herself from crying out. It seemed wrong to go through someone’s locker, even if they were dead. She expected Tristan to trudge around the corner and shout at them to get out, which, after all, would have been his right.

  Tristan’s mother opened the locker, and as the adults peered in to assess its secrets, a rush of origami cranes, red and blue and green and gold and silver, paper wings rustling, tumbled forth and floated to the floor.

  “It’s just a bunch of paper,” the janitor said. He and Principal Falk looked at each other and then at Tristan’s mother, as if waiting for an explanation.

  “Calista Broderick,” Ms. Flax said flatly. “Shouldn’t you be in class?”

&n
bsp; Cally had come too close. Words dried up in her throat like leaves.

  “Well? What are you waiting for?” said Ms. Flax.

  Cally knew that she was going to be found out, Ms. Flax was going to expose her—but then again, that would be a kind of blessing. She stepped closer to Tristan’s mother. “Mrs. Bloch? I just wanted to say. I’m sorry.”

  Clutching a silver crane, Tristan’s mother gazed back at her. Her eyes, small and watery blue like Tristan’s, asked, Who was this girl, what was this effusion of beautiful paper, what did any of it mean?

  The newspaper said that Tristan had left no note.

  “Calista,” Tristan’s mother said. “Yes. Tristan mentioned you. You were a friend to him—he never said it, exactly, but I could tell.” She smiled. The sudden light in her face was strange and hard to look at. Did she not realize that Cally was the girl Tristan had written to? Did she not care? “Thank you,” she said.

  What Cally felt then was more than guilt or sadness. It was like the pleasure-pain that Abigail had shown her, a connection that cut you and thrilled you, a sharp, exquisite opening.

  She smiled back at Tristan’s mother. And understood:

  She thought he had a friend.

  Junior Year

  MISS NICOLL