The Most Dangerous Place on Earth

by Lindsey Lee Johnson

  People said Elisabeth was a bitch, stuck up, but Dave sensed a sweetness lying deep within her, like the black-cherry filling at the bottom of a yogurt.

  In his dream-life, Elisabeth would tuck her hand into the crease of his elbow as they walked into the movie. He’d never had a girlfriend, but when observing other couples, he was fascinated by this easy intertwining, wondering how it felt and whether Elisabeth would sense the nervous sweat that lined the crease of his elbow beneath her hand. Was it possible she would feel the sweat with her slim, clean, pink-polished fingers and simply wouldn’t care?

  Elisabeth would kiss him, muss his hair. They’d have two children, maybe three. A house filled with small clothes and toys and the pleasant hum of voices in the other room. He thought of this, treasured it, a wish he knew could not come true.

  He told himself that his parents knew best. There was something about living that he didn’t understand yet; there was a reason that the small life that he wished for was not right. Perhaps it was true—as when in childhood he’d desired nothing more than the simple sweetness of vanilla ice cream but his father urged him toward the rocky road—that Dave did not know what he wanted, that the happiness he yearned for would elude him, until he learned to dream of more and better things.

  —

  That Thursday, Mr. Ellison handed back the results of the practice SAT. After class Dave approached the teacher’s desk, clutching his score report. Mr. Ellison was slicing someone’s essay with red pen—as the teacher himself liked to say, grinning conspiratorially at whichever class he happened to be in front of, he was “making it bleed.”

  Dave rustled his score sheet. “Excuse me, Mr. Ellison,” he said. “Can you tell me, what are the tricks?”

  “Tricks?” Mr. Ellison slashed out a paragraph of the essay on his desk.

  “I need to score 2100.”

  Mr. Ellison put down his pen. He looked up, blinking behind his glasses. Dave’s face made him sigh. “At some point, Dave, you have to say you’ve given it all you’ve got. You just have to know the stuff, or at least have a sense for it.”

  “A sense?”

  “Instinct. And your score has already gone up two hundred points, hasn’t it?” Reaching over his piles of papers, he pulled the report from Dave’s hand. “Yes. You’re at 1750 now. That’s very respectable.”

  “I need at least a 2100. That’s the cutoff.”

  “Cutoff?”

  “For Berkeley!”

  “Aren’t you being a little hard on yourself?” Mr. Ellison leaned forward in his chair, projecting humanness instead of teacherness. It made Dave uncomfortable.

  “If you will tell me the tricks, I can learn them,” Dave said. He was startled by his own voice, loud and pleading. “Please.”

  “Okay. How about this? Stop by tomorrow before class. We’ll sit down and go over your test together.”

  Relieved, Dave started to thank him, but Mr. Ellison stood up abruptly, looking past Dave to the open classroom door.

  Dave turned to see what he was looking at. There, in the doorway, stood Abigail Cress. She was staring hard at Mr. Ellison and her cheeks were white and she looked like she might cry, or scream. There was a lady with her—tall, important-looking, with black hair like Abigail’s and a black suit and a black Bluetooth headset blinking at her ear.

  “Abigail?” Mr. Ellison said. “Did you need something?”

  “Abby?” the important-looking lady said. “Honey, who is this? Is this him?”

  Abigail shook her head.

  Then the lady’s phone buzzed and she answered it, clicked back into the hall.

  “I could have,” Abigail said to Mr. Ellison. “I could have, but I didn’t.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mr. Ellison said, glancing at Dave. His voice canted, face like chalk.

  Dave knew he was not meant to see this. Some aspect of the rumor was true, and he did not want to know what. He wanted to excuse himself, but the air was ice and he sensed if he spoke he would shatter it.

  “I wanted you to know,” Abigail said evenly. “I could have told them, and I didn’t, and I still could. If you ever try to talk to me again.”

  Then she turned and left, and Mr. Ellison said that he would see Dave in the morning.

  —

  The following day, Mr. Ellison’s classroom was dark and a sign on the glass-paned door said, SAT WORKSHOP CANCELLED. The SAT was only two weeks away.

  Dave faced the door and fury rose in his chest. Where was Mr. Ellison? This was nothing short of abandonment. The teacher had led him to the cliff’s edge, dropped him into the abyss. He was gone, with no explanation and no excuse, and Dave Chu’s choices had narrowed to one.

  —

  From behind the counter of the 7-Eleven on Miller Avenue, the old man in the red vest watched teenagers push in and out of the swinging glass doors.

  At home, their parents served them three squares a day: heaping plates of quinoa and kale, sustainably farmed chicken and sustainably fished fish, steel-cut oatmeal for breakfast, mango slices for dessert. But here, he gave them what they wanted.

  Big Gulps. Slurpees. AriZona Iced Tea. Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and Kettle Chips. Jalapeno Cheese Taquitos, glinting with grease. Top Ramen steaming in its Styrofoam cup. Armloads of candy.

  A kid was complaining to the old man about the five-dollar minimum on credit card purchases. “Who carries cash?” the boy said.

  “People who don’t have credit cards,” said the old man.

  “Who doesn’t have credit cards?”

  The old man sighed. “There are fees,” he said. “You still want your Dr Pepper?”

  The boy nodded. He added four dollars of candy to his order, swiped his card through the machine, and pushed out the door into the parking lot.

  It was 4:00 p.m. Nick Brickston stood at the edge of the lot. He was just to the side of the glass doors, where the 7-Eleven man couldn’t see him. Slim, dark-haired, he wore a black T-shirt, jeans, and the limited-edition baseball cap he’d bought at the ballpark when the Giants won the World Series. He leaned against the trunk of a redwood tree. The tree was so thick, and Nick Brickston so skinny, that it would take four of him to match its girth. Its branches smothered him in shade.

  Nick did business here almost every afternoon. The world’s last remaining pay phone was stuck to the side of this 7-Eleven, but he didn’t use it. He was a drug dealer, sure, but he took calls on his iPhone like a normal human being.

  Dave trudged down the sidewalk, bowed under his backpack’s weight. He hauled all his books to school each day, just in case, and the pack strained at the seams. He wore his everyday outfit: pressed chinos and polo shirt, sneakers with clean white soles. When he reached Nick, he set his pack on the ground and flicked the hair out of his face. Sweat slid into his eyes; he pushed the heel of his palm over his brows. Regarding Nick, he thought how strange it was that the two of them, and Tristan Bloch of all people, had for six months in sixth grade called each other friends. It had all been orchestrated by their mothers, and had ended when Dave and Nick swapped knot-tying and origami for sports and girls and movies. Tristan had called them traitors and kicked them out of his house, all the while crying like a baby, a slug-trail of snot leaking from his nose.

  All Dave asked Nick was: “How much?”

  Nick rested his head against the tree trunk, squinted into the sky. “Seven hundred.”

  “Seven hundred dollars?” Dave said, trying to calculate sixteen years of allowance, Christmas money, and birthday money in his head. “That’s a lot, isn’t it?”

  Nick shrugged. He had so many customers he could afford to be casual. “That’s what it is. I guarantee over 2200, every time.”

  Dave digested this. Nick, who was not even taking the SAT prep class at school, promised to earn a nearly perfect score. “How do you do it?”

  Nick grinned. “Don’t worry ’bout it. Skills.”

  “Well, I only need 2100 to get into Berkeley.”

&nb
sp; “Whatever,” Nick said. “Seven hundred for my services, plus fifty for the fake ID. You sure you want to do this?”

  “I can get your money,” Dave said.

  —

  The safe in the basement contained the sixteen years of birthday and Christmas money that Dave had never been allowed to spend.

  Each birthday, he opened the card from his parents and the brand-new hundred-dollar bill fluttered out. He was allowed to hold it, the bill like a feather in his palm. He was allowed to examine its face: the obscure seals and numbers like an ancient code that maybe everybody knew but him; Benjamin Franklin’s odd disappointed eyes, nestled in flesh; the strange, scrawled signatures at the bottom. He was allowed to inhale the bill’s faint ink smell and press its cool cotton-linen paper to his cheek. Then he had to give it back.

  “You do not need another toy,” his father would say. “Someday, there will be something worthwhile to spend this money on. You’ll see.” And his mother would take it downstairs to the safe.

  Now Dave opened the door to the unfinished basement and ducked inside. He crept downstairs in the dark, breathing air gritted with dust. As he flipped on the overhead bulb, the dust settled on his white sneakers. This worried him briefly—when his mother came home she would see it—but he pushed on.

  The dim room was piled with storage boxes, each filled with artifacts and sealed and labeled in his mother’s elegant print. The safe sat in the corner, behind a box called DAVID Classwork & Report Cards, K–3. He pushed the box aside, cardboard scraping the concrete floor, and silky cobwebs stuck to his fingers. The safe, revealed, reflected yellow light.

  He grasped its metal dial. Recalled the numbers his mother had made him memorize when he was eight. “In case, unexpectedly, we die,” she’d explained at the time, turning the dial in the series her fingers had seemed to know by heart. “In this safe, we keep the deed to the house, the security passwords, the bank account numbers, keys.” The safe had swung open and she’d removed each item, displaying it like one of the Price Is Right ladies on TV. “This is my mother’s jewelry box with the diamond for when you propose,” she’d said. (Propose what? eight-year-old Dave had thought.) “This book has the phone number of our attorney, our accountant, all the important people. See this paper? These are the terms of the living trust. This is what says that everything belongs to all of us, and that after your father and I are gone, everything will just belong to you. It helps with the taxes. Do you understand?”

  Eight-year-old Dave had nodded. He’d known that he was supposed to pay attention to these details, to remember—diamond, living trust, taxes—but as his mother had busily arranged the contents of the safe, one phrase returned and echoed in his brain: In case unexpectedly we die. What had his mother meant by this? Were his parents going to die? When? And what was going to kill them—a sickness, an earthquake, a man with a gun? And would Dave survive this disaster if he remembered the numbers that opened the safe? If he forgot the numbers, what then? Would he have nothing? Would he have to find some other parents to take care of him?

  His mother had not finished. “David?” she’d said, jostling his arm. “Are you listening to me? Look, this is where all your money will be safe until we can trust you to do the right thing.” The manila envelope had crinkled in her hand. It was flat at the ends but bloated in the middle, like a snake that had swallowed a mouse. In black marker it was labeled DAVID. It did not look like much; Dave imagined with tender longing all the superhero figurines and soccer jerseys and vanilla ice cream cones he could have bought with all those birthdays.

  He had not visited the safe in the eight years since his mother had revealed its contents, but he’d memorized the numbers. Now he clicked the wheel right to the first number, back to the second, then forward again, and so on, just as his mother had, until he felt the final click and release. The safe swung open. It was not like safes in movies. There were no thick gold bars or winking piles of coins. Only a stack of papers, five black velvet jewelry boxes, and a ring of keys. He held his breath like he was going underwater. Reached in, and shuffled the papers until he found what he was searching for. This part did feel like a movie. Blood drummed his ears. His hand shook. Over the years, the envelope’s belly had distended. Crouching in the gloom, he flipped the envelope, pried up the clasp’s metal wings, and unfolded the flap. He reached in slowly, imagining the fat black widow spider that would tiptoe up to bite him for his crimes.

  But there was no spider, just the stack of bills his mother had for sixteen years collected in his name.

  Slowly, carefully, he counted it.

  One hundred dollars per birthday for sixteen birthdays.

  Twenty dollars per Christmas for sixteen Christmases.

  Ten dollars per Easter for sixteen Easters.

  Five- and ten-dollar bills, assorted, from his grandparents and from aunts and uncles he hardly remembered or hadn’t met.

  In total, there was $2,525 in the envelope marked DAVID. He’d always known it, yet he couldn’t believe it. He was rich.

  But he couldn’t take it all. He didn’t want to. The money scared him, the bills so vulnerable. They could be torn, they could be cut with scissors. They could fly out the window and flap away on the breeze. He could lose the money, or be seized by the sudden, irrepressible urge to find out what it smelled like when it burned. Such things—carelessness, destructiveness—were not in his nature, yet he could not trust himself. He was a teenage boy, as his parents had reminded him so many times—left to his own devices there was no way of knowing what damage he might do.

  Dave exhaled. Unlicked eight hundred dollars from the stack. Seven hundred and fifty dollars was for Nick Brickston. The other fifty was half a birthday, just for him.

  —

  On May 4, a Saturday, Dave’s father woke him at 6:00 a.m. Dave threw off the covers and stumbled to the bathroom, showered and toweled off, combed his shock of hair until it shone. He brushed and flossed his teeth. He examined himself in the mirror, zooming in closer and closer until his face abstracted and his eyes were black tunnels shifting in his skin.

  He dressed. Nothing special. Blue polo shirt and chinos, white-soled shoes. Then he loaded his backpack with supplies: one admission ticket, printed from the Internet; one plastic card that identified him as the one and only David Alexander Chu, Student, Valley High School; two number-2 pencils, sharpened, and one soft eraser; one graphing calculator; two extra calculator batteries, just in case; one watch without audible alarm; two peanut butter granola bars; one ripe banana; one canteen of filtered water. And in his front pocket, folded and tucked against his thigh, eight hundred dollars in cash.

  His mother made him gluten-free toast and turkey bacon and fried three eggs sunny-side-up. “The SAT book said you’ll need lots of protein to get you through,” she told him.

  Dave thanked her and ate it all, cleaned his plate, although he hated how the eggs quivered and glared at him like eyes.

  When it was time, his mother drove him to a high school in San Francisco. To get there, they had to cross the Golden Gate Bridge. On the span Dave conducted his silent ritual, holding his breath between one orange spire and the next and trying to imagine those final, suffocating moments in the life of Tristan Bloch.

  They passed through the toll booths and merged onto Nineteenth Avenue. In the driver’s seat Dave’s mother said, “It’s too bad we have to drive all the way into the city. I still don’t understand, you couldn’t take the test at your school?”

  Dave shrugged. “All the spots were taken.” The lie flowed from his mouth, so easy, surprising him.

  “Too bad,” his mother echoed, and was quiet. Then she asked, “Are you nervous?”

  The money in his pocket was a steadying force, a strange power. He shook his head. “I think I’m really ready,” he told her. It was the least that he could do.

  At the curb she turned and smiled at him; he turned and smiled back. Then he jumped out, his backpack, lighter now, hanging from one sho
ulder.

  The car pulled away from the curb. The school, St. Antony’s, was a massive gray building with an iron gate at its entrance and a dark, enormous cross upon its face.

  Nick Brickston waited in their meeting place, around the side. “ ’Sup.”

  Dave nodded back. He rustled in the backpack for his wallet, then slipped it into the pocket of his chinos. Nick had brought the school ID card he’d made, with his own smiling face next to Dave’s full name. “But my last name—won’t they know you’re not me?” Dave had asked when he first saw the fake; “Naw, man, trust me, no one wants to be the racist prick that starts that conversation,” Nick had explained. Now he handed everything to Nick—the backpack with both pencils and the calculator, the erasers, the granola bars, even the banana. He was thirsty and thought about keeping the canteen for himself, but didn’t. In the end, he gave it all.

  —

  The scores were posted early on a Friday morning three weeks later. Dave’s parents had punched the release date into their phones, so the phones trilled and beeped at them when it was time. They hurried into Dave’s room and hovered behind him as he logged on to his College Board account. His mother at one shoulder, his father at the other.

  As he typed in the password, his mother said, “I cannot look.” But she did. She set her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. Assiduous, he thought. That was what his mother felt like when she did this. He knew the word was wrong but suddenly no longer cared. It was almost over. When he clicked the button, it would be done.

  MISS NICOLL

  It was clear that Molly and Doug Ellison had ruined a perfectly good friendship with the play at intimacy that neither of them had enjoyed. Now Molly was determined to avoid him. She’d arrive at her classroom just after the morning bell had rung so she wouldn’t see him greeting students in the hall; she’d lock her room and walk around the campus during break so she could disappear into the crowds of kids; she’d leave at the start of lunch, hurrying away with a brown bag and a book, to eat unseen in her car. Yet his presence remained: she saw his students grinning as they exited his classroom, she heard the dull reverberation of his voice behind the wall, the banging of his pen upon the whiteboard next door. She prayed that her students did not notice her blushing. She knew she was being ridiculous, but she worried she’d get stuck with Doug in awkward silence, struggling for words as the eddy of kids pressed them closer and closer together. She worried he’d ask her to read more of his book. She worried, perversely, that he might also be avoiding her. But most of all, she dreaded looking into his face and seeing his regret.