The Most Dangerous Place on Earth

by Lindsey Lee Johnson

  Dave knew that he was missing something. He wrote:

  To Google: is hedonistic good or bad?

  Mr. Ellison said, “A second strategy is to follow the checklist for grammar questions.” He pounded the whiteboard with capital letters, blood-red:

  1. SUBJECT VERB AGREEMENT.

  2. PRONOUN ERROR.

  3. PARALLELISM.

  4. ADJ—

  From the hallway came a racket: the thunder of feet and laughter and the smack of something heavy hitting the floor. Dave stopped writing. Mr. Ellison went to the classroom door and opened it: there were Cally Broderick and Alessandra Ryding, crouched on the linoleum where a backpack’s contents had spilled.

  Dave watched the back of Mr. Ellison’s head. The teacher was still for a moment, and when he spoke it was not in his classroom boom but a voice that was smaller, startled:

  “Calista Broderick? What are you doing out here?”

  Cally came slowly to her feet, pushed her overgrown hair behind her ears, and glared. She was nothing like the girl Dave remembered from middle school, the type who’d care about something practical and normal like the SAT. Dave was the exact same person he had been in eighth grade, seventh grade, fifth grade, third grade, just with larger polo shirts and sneakers. What had happened to her?

  Cally said, “Nothing, Mr. Ellison. Sorry.” But she didn’t sound sorry at all.

  Alessandra Ryding got up from the floor and sidled beside Cally, a woven backpack dangling from her shoulder. Alessandra was willowy and olive-skinned and president of the HIV Awareness Club. Dave couldn’t help but wonder how often she had sex—he guessed it was often—and with who. She was even flirting with their teacher: “Calista’s a bad, bad girl, Mr. Ellison,” she said. “Do you think she should be punished?”

  Alessandra collapsed in laughter. Cally elbowed her ribs. Dave couldn’t see Mr. Ellison’s face, but the teacher shifted on his feet. This startled Dave. It made him remember with sudden, embarrassing vividness the Photoshopped picture of Mr. Ellison and Abigail Cress that Nick Brickston had posted on Instagram. In the picture, Mr. Ellison was naked and his eyes were closed and Abigail was in her track outfit, touching him right there. To this point, Dave had mostly ignored the rumors that Mr. Ellison and Abigail were doing it, thinking such things only happened in the movies. But now he wondered.

  “Mr. Ellison?” Hannah Jones called out. “I have a question? About this modifier thing?”

  Mr. Ellison cleared his throat. “Ladies, why don’t you move along? Your peers are trying to learn something here.”

  Alessandra answered for them both—“Peace and love, Mr. E.”—and the girls carried on together down the hall.

  Mr. Ellison sighed and shut the classroom door. With the interruption, he seemed to have forgotten about the rest of the grammar checklist. Instead he replied to Hannah, mentioning something called a “dangling modifier.” This relaxed him, and he began to chuckle. He said, “Dangling modifiers are the funniest parts of grammar. You’ll see.”

  Dave wrote:

  Mr. Ellison thinks that there are funny parts of grammar.

  Google this. Google everything.

  —

  Dave sat at his mother’s wide glass dinner table and vocabulary swam in his brain. They weren’t words to him yet, only letters jumping in and out of line.

  Mr. Ellison had said, “Make a picture for each word—this is how we remember what we read.” As Dave chewed string beans and watched his father slice into a steak—his father’s eyes dark under heavy eyelids and speckled brows, hair a peppered gray—his brain struggled to conjure pictures for the Hundred Most Commons. But all he saw was Mr. Ellison’s bald spot as he pounded nonsense on the whiteboard, Abigail Cress’s foot tapping in her track shoe because it was all so easy for her, and Elisabeth Avarine glowing, silent, in the sun at the back of the room.

  “You are distracted again,” his father said. “Why?” The knife in his hand jabbed toward Dave. An exclamation point.

  Dave shrugged. “Tired, I guess.”

  His father’s eyebrows narrowed. “You are not yourself.”

  His mother, in her chair between them, laid her fork on the glass table with a deliberateness that seemed rehearsed. She turned to Dave. “David Alexander, have you been doing ecstasy and raves?” she asked, pushing her black swoop of hair out of her eyes. “Your parents are not stupid. We’ve heard what goes on at that school.”

  Dave laughed. He had never even touched a cigarette or tried a sip of beer. When had he ever had time for such things?

  His parents took this laughter as proof there was something wrong with him. His father said, “What are these teachers teaching you? This disrespect.”

  His mother said, “This is not the boy I raised.”

  “I don’t know what we’re paying these teachers to do,” his father said. “Has Mr. Ellison graded your practice SAT yet?”

  Dave shook his head.

  “You must score over 2100 if you expect Berkeley to consider you.”

  “I am aware of this,” Dave said.

  “What is this attitude?” his mother said. “UC Berkeley is a very fine school.”

  “For some people,” Dave said. He didn’t know why. He opened his mouth to insert another string bean, and the words fell out. He knew nothing about Berkeley, really. It was as if he’d suddenly decided to have a vehement opinion about artichokes, which he had never eaten, and now he’d have to explain the opinion and defend it.

  “What does that mean?” his father said.

  “I went to Berkeley,” his mother said. “Your father went to Berkeley.”

  “It was a privilege,” his father said. “Our parents didn’t have the opportunity to go to college. Our parents had nothing. And when they gave us something, we appreciated it.”

  “I do appreciate it,” Dave said. But he sounded unconvincing even to himself.

  His father clattered his fork on the glass. He leaned over his plate. “It’s not easy to go to college when your parents work in factories,” he said, stabbing the knife toward Dave’s mother. “It’s not easy to become a doctor when your parents are strangers in this country, when your only path is hard work and scholarships and loans.” This time he stabbed toward himself.

  “I know,” Dave said.

  “You do not know. You do not know anything, because we have given you everything. You don’t know that you are exceptional—we tell you and tell you and yet you refuse to see it. When are you going to see it?”

  Dave cut a cube of steak and chewed. The meat was salty and rare. His brain groped for the Most Commons to describe the reddish flesh that quivered on his plate. It was florid, querulous. It extenuated. These words sounded right to him although he sensed that their meanings were wrong. He swallowed, raised his head. He knew that already he had gone too far, yet he couldn’t stop. He said, “I do want to go to a good college. It’s just, I was thinking, maybe I should take a gap year first.”

  “What is this, a gap year?” his mother asked.

  “It’s like…I don’t know. Time off after graduation. To, like, think, travel, whatever. Like a vacation, I guess.” Dave immediately regretted the word. It was not what he meant. In those dinner table conversations he never said the right thing; it was like trying to remember the Hundred Most Commons when the proctor started the timer in the fourth hour of the SAT. Hopeless.

  But Dave’s father did not yell. Instead his face brightened and relaxed. He laughed. “Your whole life is a vacation.”

  —

  Dave was aware that the only thing holding him back was himself. His father was a vascular surgeon at UCSF Medical Center. His mother, who had stayed home to raise him, had been prelaw at Berkeley. Dave was their only child. He was everything.

  Dave’s parents believed he took after his father. It was true that they looked alike. Both were tall and slim with skin that showed the webs of blue-green veins at their temples and wrists. Dave had his father’s heavy-lidded, almond eyes
, sparse brows, and nose whose broadness made him a little less than beautiful. The long neck. There was even a small mole, flat and black, above his lip that exactly resembled the mole on the ridge of his father’s cheek. But this was where the similarities ended. He was not like either of his parents, really.

  He was unremarkable. He had no diagnoses. No dyslexia or numerophobia or even ADHD, which at least would have earned him time-and-a-half on the SAT. According to the official records, he had a normal attention span. Average math skills. A moderate interest in history and science—he was in chemistry now and felt a quiet fondness for the periodic table printed on the inside cover of his textbook. There was an order to it, a totality, that reassured him. He hated English, which was all opinions and loose ends.

  At school, he was well aware of all the ways in which he was not enough. For example, in history class it was not enough for him to know the basic components of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. He was expected to grasp its nuances, its causes and implications. More than this, he was expected to have an opinion—to be like Abigail Cress, who could articulate a fully formed thesis about any topic imaginable. He had heard her debate the New Deal, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Sunnis and the Shi‘ites, evolution versus creationism, the proper technique for dissecting an earthworm, the literary merit of Harry Potter, and the superiority of Lancôme mascara. He was in awe of her, and a little afraid. He knew that in his parents’ eyes he ought to be like her. If only he would work a little harder.

  On his report card, it was not enough to have that hard-won column of B-pluses; in his parents’ eyes he might as well have failed. In group presentation projects, it was not enough for him to do exactly his share of the work (three slides, two references, two minutes on the Key Components of the New Deal) and no more. Yet this was what he did. He left it to the Abigail Cresses and the Nick Brickstons to show off—Abigail did this by making seven extra slides with historical photos from an expensive Internet archive and delivering a memorized speech aided by color-coded notecards, Nick by patching together a single slide with nothing but jokes about President Roosevelt’s wheelchair and Mrs. Roosevelt’s horse face and then charming their teacher by stretching his allotted two minutes into six with what could only be described as a last-chance audition for an improv troupe, as Abigail seethed behind him.

  After school, Dave played soccer. An average member of an average team. Every afternoon, he arrived at practice on time with his shorts and jersey clean, cleats tied. He ran the warm-up lap and drills knowing he was not the fastest or the slowest, not the preternaturally graceful Ryan Harbinger yet not a klutz. He rarely scored goals but happily assisted other, better players in the mad pack-run down the field. Most of his friends were on the team, and he loved to practice. But he hated the games, because his parents attended. As soon as he felt them there, he had to strive for points, elbowing opponents and herding the ball toward the goal line, all the while sweating under his oppressive swoop of hair that he could not cut because to do so would be to break his mother’s heart.

  —

  After dinner Dave retreated to his room and closed the door, but his mother pushed in anyway.

  She stood on the square red rug in the center of the room, which was lit by the gentle glow of Dave’s soccer-ball desk lamp. The room had light blue walls, bare except for one Ansel Adams poster—a black-and-white photograph of Muir Woods redwoods reaching into gloom—that had hung above Dave’s bed for as long as he had slept there. The bed’s beige comforter masked Superman sheets. Beside it sat a small maple desk, so close that he could roll out of bed and into the black desk chair with hardly a step between. His desktop was bare except for the soccer-ball lamp, a Mason jar of mechanical pencils, a tray of paper clips, and a laptop computer.

  Dave’s backpack slumped on the floor by the desk, yawning to reveal a crowd of books and binders. His desk drawers were full as well—of papers tumbled and dog-eared and torn; broken sticks of lead and crumbles of eraser; movie-ticket stubs; scribbled-on school pictures; four Harry Potter figurines and a pack of Batman Silly Bandz from when he was a kid; a hot-pink condom handed to him by a member of the HIV Awareness Club on the first day of his freshman year; a crumpled picture of Kate Upton in a white bikini, ripped from the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue that Jonas Everett had brought over; a pile of metallic origami papers from sixth grade; a half-drafted love note to Elisabeth Avarine that would have looked to anyone at first glance like a list of SAT Most Commons (abundance, adulation, impetuous, inevitable) and which, after what had happened to Tristan Bloch, he knew better than to send—but these were Dave’s secrets. The drawers were shut.

  “David?” his mother said. “Why are you hiding here? We’re not finished with our talk.”

  Reclined against the maple headboard of his bed, Dave shrugged. His mother was small, compact, yet there was no room for her in there. He was too old for her to curl beside him on the bed—if she’d even perched on the edge, it would have embarrassed him. They were used to seeing each other over tables spread with food, or sitting in her Lexus in their separate leather seats, listening to the radio, looking at the road.

  It still felt strange to him, this distance between them. When he was a kid, they’d spent hours, days, years alone together. When his father would leave for work, the air in the house would seem to lighten and expand, and she’d sit with him on the vine-laced living room rug playing Thomas the Tank Engine and then cook him butter noodles, warm and plain just like he liked, and fold him into bed at night with stories about heroes who were always brave and always saved the world. And just loved him. And there was nothing that he’d had to do to earn it.

  Dave’s mother arranged herself in the desk chair, pointed her knees toward the bed. “We are not understanding each other,” she said.

  Dave shrugged.

  “You think we don’t love you? We don’t care? You’re the most important thing in our life, David. Number one.”

  “I know,” he said. What she’d said was supposed to be a compliment, but it made the acid lurch in his stomach.

  Dave’s mother wrinkled her forehead. Her eyes were liquid brown. The skin around them had feather grooves in which the black gunk of her makeup had smudged. She said, “All we ask is that you realize what you are.”

  “What I am,” he echoed.

  “You know you could do so much better, you could do anything. If you’d only try.” His mother’s voice was firm, emphatic. He was going to throw up. Did she really believe these things? Did she believe he hadn’t tried?

  He had nothing to say to her. He pulled his legs to his chest. His socks were bleached and his toes banded by a thin gold thread.

  In his silence his mother said carefully, “You know, I have always wondered what it would feel like to have really done something.”

  This confession had come out of nowhere. Was he supposed to respond? He couldn’t. He felt he had intruded on a private moment she was having with herself. Yet she seemed to be waiting for him. Her gaze fell to her hands; her hair swept into her eyes and she tucked it self-consciously behind her ear. It was not her usual harried brushing away. It was something a girl would do.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” She smiled, waved him away. The moment was over. “It’s just, I don’t want you to regret. You have so much potential. You can be anything you choose to be.” She placed her hand on his shoulder and squeezed.

  Dave looked into her eyes. What he saw was not anger or disappointment or righteousness but simple human need. She had given up her life to be his mother. Because he was special. Every report card had told her otherwise, that he was little more than “a hard worker” and “a pleasure to have in class,” yet she had kept her faith. He had the potential, he could, and one day—at the right time, with the right class, the right teacher—he would. This was the story she’d told herself; it was his job to make it true.

  It was hard, he thought, to be responsible for all this ha
ppiness. He was angry but he was also sorry.

  “I’ll try harder,” he told her. “I will try to be better.”

  —

  Drifting to sleep that night, Dave imagined another life in which he was allowed to wear happiness in the simple way that felt native to him. He thought of his future secretly, as if his parents would peer through the crack of his open bedroom door and deep into his brain (he usually left the door open because closing it triggered a string of questions he couldn’t stand: “Why do you need to close this door? What are you doing in there?”). He saw not a high-powered job, not a doctor’s white coat or a lawyer’s striped suit, but himself, Dave Chu, in chinos and polo shirt, in the middle of an ordinary life. Some job. A home. Enough money to see the newest superhero blockbuster every Friday night, not at the art-house theater in Mill Valley but at a strip-mall megaplex with stadium seating and IMAX screens. He wanted the hero to get the girl. He wanted to eat Milk Duds and popcorn and sip Sprite from a straw that he shared with his girlfriend or wife.

  Dave could not help but imagine Elisabeth Avarine in this role, a girl he’d never talked to but who was so unearthly gorgeous that it was difficult to look at her. She had sugar-blond hair that hung straight around her face and down the narrow space between her shoulder blades. She had eyes like sea glass, skin like milk. Dramatic, dark blond eyebrows. A little divot in her pink lower lip. She was tall, as tall as Dave himself. At school that day she’d worn a thin white T-shirt slung wide over her shoulders, revealing a strip of collarbone, and cutoff jean shorts. The shirt had shrugged up as she’d crossed the classroom, her belly button winking beneath the shadows of the cloth. She’d slid into her desk and the hem of her shorts had pressed into her thighs. She’d crossed her ankles and the bones there were delicate, flanked by fine grooves. A gold chain draped over one ankle, dangling two small hearts. This was all the jewelry she needed. Her feet were naked but for a pair of brown thong sandals slid through little crooked toes.

  With closed eyes, on the cool cloth of his pillow, Dave watched Elisabeth as she bent to rifle in her backpack. The sun caressed her shoulders, white and soft. Her hair swung like a movie curtain over her cheek, and a bra strap, pink as a shell, unhitched and fell down her arm. Seeing him, she cocked her head and smiled, waved him over—