The Most Dangerous Place on Earth

by Lindsey Lee Johnson

  His dad still asked him to visit some weekends—“Cindi’s got the guest room all ready for ya!”—but Nick always refused. He could hardly stand to look at his dad’s face. The man was so simply, stupidly, undeservedly happy—having spent Nick and Amy’s childhood at the office, he wanted to try again with a new wife, new kids. Why should Nick be part of it? He and Amy didn’t get to start over. That dark-haired, dark-eyed family, the one his dad had thought wasn’t worth saving, was the only family they were going to have.

  After his dad left, Nick had started running this scam on his mother. He’d say, “Mom, can you give me more than one snack for lunch tomorrow? I swear, I’m always starving. Guess I’m still growing!” Then he’d shrug and give her this big, sweet, Leave It to Beaver grin that always made her smile. She’d pack not two but three fruit snacks or bags of chips in the next day’s lunch, and at school he’d sell all three to kids who’d left their lunches at home or didn’t want to eat the nasty so-called health food they sold at the Valley Middle School Snack Bar. It’s not like he was stealing. It was his food to start with.

  He’d had a long career since then. When he was done with lunches, he started selling papers on the Internet. But that turned out to be too much work, so instead he started selling grade changes at school. For a fee, he’d hack into the online grading system—shockingly easy to do, people were so dumb about their passwords—and bump up a test score, adjust a project grade, mark a few blown-off homeworks as done. This year, he’d started selling fake IDs. Occasionally he threw parties at empty mansions that were on the market around Marin, hauling in kegs and charging every kid a fifty-dollar cover. Last year, he’d found a supplier in the city and started providing weed and pills outside the Miller Avenue 7-Eleven. Periodically he went to Silk Road online and bought bulk portions of Molly, a popular product to retail at parties. And then there was the SAT. In Marin County it was easy to make money—kids there didn’t have allowances, they had bank accounts. And sometimes he did shit just because, to take a teacher down a notch or to shake up the dull day-to-day. The Photoshop of Abigail and Mr. Ellison had been like this.

  After Nick’s dad left, his mom had started working overtime to keep up with the mortgage. She left for work before he got up in the morning and came home after dark. Amy left for San Diego State. Nick took care of himself.

  —

  On Saturday morning in the city, in the fog that shrouded St. Antony’s School, Nick waited to become Dave Chu.

  He held the SAT admission ticket and ID and hoisted Dave’s backpack on his shoulder. Inside were all these perfectly organized supplies his parents had probably packed for him—everything that the SAT website, playing on the last desperate hopes of low scorers, claimed would help—granola bars, a watch, a banana.

  He was almost to the sign-in table when a girl from his school, Elisabeth Avarine, stepped into line behind him. What was she doing there? She wore tight black pants and flip-flops and an oversized UC Berkeley sweatshirt. Her face was bare, pillow-wrinkled, and her hair tied up, with blond wisps floating down. But she was still Shakespearean, a Juliet—O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright—and he saw why every guy wanted her. If she wanted him, he wouldn’t turn her down. But this was impossible to imagine, because Elisabeth Avarine didn’t exist in his dimension. She was like a hologram, shimmering, silent. At certain angles she seemed to disappear. Nick was more interested in someone he could touch.

  “ ’Sup,” he said, nodding.

  Elisabeth gave him a small smile but then looked at the ground.

  He wasn’t offended. She always froze when teachers called her out in class, never spoke except in this whisper that wasn’t a voice at all.

  “Next!”

  It was his turn to check in. He realized Elisabeth would hear him (presumably she could hear, even if she couldn’t talk). She’d hear the lady ask his name and hear him say, “Dave Chu.” But he couldn’t turn back now. He would have to have faith.

  Stepping up, he handed the ID and admission ticket to the lady behind the card table. She wore thick plastic glasses that magnified her eyes and made them swim in her face as she peered at the ID, at Nick, at the ID again. Nick held an easy smile, wiggled his toes in his sneakers, and steadied his breath while the lady stared at him, the ID, him, her eyes narrowing and widening, and he wondered if she’d bother to think this through, if she’d make herself ask the obvious question: Is this Chinese boy really you?

  He waited for it. Almost welcomed it. It would be a new challenge to overcome—the scams had become almost too easy lately—but the lady just squinted again and asked him, “David Alexander Chu?”

  “Yeah,” Nick said. “I go by Dave, though.”

  Elisabeth made no noise behind him. The lady frowned; he could see her deciding whether to pursue this.

  One thing Nick’s career had taught him was that most people would rather go along than question—even when something terrible happened, a mass shooting, a suicide, and the news reporters swooped in to interview the bystanders, it was always, “I didn’t know, he was nothing like this, of course there were no red flags, we couldn’t see it coming.” What these people meant, what they should have said, was that it had been easier not to look.

  The lady sighed and pointed the way.

  He glanced back as Elisabeth stepped up to the table and flashed her own ticket and ID. The lady at the table asked her something. Elisabeth shook her head. The lady said something else and Elisabeth nodded, shifting from foot to foot, keeping her gaze on the table. Her eyes flickered up to meet his, unreadable.

  —

  In the classroom, Nick felt an uncommon flash of fear—was the proctor watching as he wrote Dave’s name and address on the lines provided, penciled in the bubbles underneath?

  Nick set down his pencil and stretched. Elisabeth had taken the seat behind his, and he turned toward her as casually as he could, searching her face for some affirmation—a nod, a mouthed Don’t worry, anything—but she ignored him, hunching over her Scantron form, and with the heat of the proctor’s gaze on his neck he turned forward again, squinting thoughtfully at a poster of mitosis and meiosis. His leg trembled under the desk and he stilled it, consoled by the fact that the shaking leg was as Dave Chuian a gesture as he could have possibly invented, easily explained by the anxiety of an inept test-taker facing down the Scantron, that firing squad of small, blank circles.

  “Please turn to Section One in your test booklets,” the proctor said.

  Nick flipped the page.

  Is it always advantageous to pay more attention to details than to the big picture?

  He began to write. To focus, to settle into the rhythm of his breath and the sounds of pencils scratching, erasers squeaking, the world receding as he analyzed the words of Martin Luther King and the implications of the Holocaust for the fifty billionth time, all the while replicating Dave Chu’s precise, small, blockish print, letters that hovered just above the line—and then the exhilaration as he finished the essay and worked his way through the math, the reading, the grammar, as he witnessed the incredible blinking circuitry of his own brain as it picked out patterns and called up formulas, skimmed dense blocks of text, unveiled the logic in the grammar of the sentences, dismissed red-herring answers and pushed toward the right ones, and honestly, it was hard to believe people had to be taught how to do this—that what he had, at least Sarah always told him, was a gift from God.

  —

  She wasn’t exactly his girlfriend. She didn’t demand a label, she seemed perfectly at peace whether he made promises or not, and she always looked happy to see him.

  She was in school for dental hygiene and knew all there was to know about brushing and flossing and the names and positions of the teeth and the techniques for scraping off years of plaque with a tiny metal hook. But she didn’t know about Nick’s Mill Valley life. What would he get out of telling her?

  Because here was Mill Valley lately: It was his mom at work and the hous
ekeeper at home, running her vacuum through the living room, Nick tripping over the cord on his way out the door, taking the Audi and cruising around Marin for some kid to sell to or some girl to hook up with. And silencing his phone because his dad kept calling—not wanting to know Nick, just wanting him to visit the new family like some fucked-up guest of honor.

  Here was Mill Valley. A dream made up to make eight-year-olds happy. You could tell Nick his own childhood had been a dream, and he might have believed it. All those grand redwoods. Tree-smelling skies. The mountain looming at the end of Miller Avenue, creased with trees and pearly-misted, or teal under torn-cotton clouds. The rich hippies parading along the triangle of avenues, congratulating themselves for buying Priuses along with their Range Rovers and getting their overpriced organic oranges at Whole Foods. And all the kids believing this was life. Kids like Tristan Bloch thinking they needed to die because otherwise there was no way out.

  Nick could understand that.

  After Tristan had jumped, the middle school teachers had cried and asked one another why. Tristan’s mom had started wearing Anti-Bullying Awareness ribbons around town, and Nick’s more earnest classmates had taken to wearing them too, each as shiny and ineffectual as a bit of Christmas tinsel. They’d made the kids write journals and stories and essays on the topic—Tell us your feelings! Express yourself!—as if the answer to a crisis was more homework. For the first assignment, Nick had written the truth: that the eighth-grade boys were only acting sorry to get out of trouble, and the girls enjoyed making a drama of grief, sobbing and smearing their mascara for Tristan when they were really only thinking of themselves—Did I have something to do with this? What if this happened to me? And that none of them—not the students, not the teachers, except Ms. Flax—had wanted to deal with the kid when he was alive. When Nick’s social studies teacher, Ms. Lamb, had read this, she’d sent him to the principal’s office and called his mom in for a meeting. At the meeting, Nick was interrogated by the teacher, the principal, and the counselor, while his mom sat by sighing and rubbing her temples. And afterward, driving home, she’d told him, “I don’t need this, Nick, honestly. Right now this is the last thing I need.”

  For the next assignment, Nick wrote a satirical story about Tristan Bloch as an angel in some vague, nondenominational Heaven, spilling grace upon Mill Valley and teaching all the eighth-grade kids to love one another and cherish life, “because all our souls are equal and connected through the generous and life-giving spirit of Mother Earth, just like we learned this year in the Native American Unit in Social Studies.” Ms. Lamb gave him an A and pinned the story to the wall.

  It was around this time—Tristan’s death, Nick’s parents’ divorce, the specific hell of middle school—that Nick gave up the Gifted track. He began to treat school like a joke, or a game, because he saw that that was what it was: a game that kids could win or lose.

  Tristan Bloch, for one, had lost. What made Nick different from Tristan was that he’d found a way to escape. He knew he couldn’t do it out in the open, in front of everyone, in a town like Mill Valley—he wouldn’t get ten steps out of his mom’s house before someone pulled him back and set him up with some extremely expensive aura-cleansing therapy. No, he had to find a trapdoor somewhere.

  First, he escaped in the one place he knew he wouldn’t see anyone from school: the Fiction Room of the Mill Valley Public Library. There, as redwood branches brushed the windowpanes, he read everything his teachers didn’t assign. (For what they did assign, that was why God invented SparkNotes.) Now he escaped by hopping a bus into the city—through the Headlands and over the Golden Gate Bridge and he was there, everywhere and nowhere. Anonymous. There, he could build his real life; freed from the tyranny of perfection, he could begin to be himself.

  —

  Sarah had long russet hair that trailed into his mouth when they lay in spoons on piles of blankets and rugs on the floor. Her eyes were the color of mint. Pale and clear. Wide open.

  They’d met on Valencia Street three months before. The day was windy, fog scudding across the sky. He walked down the street in slim dark jeans, a black T-shirt and hoodie. The hoodie was two sizes too big, but he liked the bulk it lent him. Hunching against the wind, he pulled the hood over his head. But in the moment he saw Sarah, the wind whipped back, stirred his hair and shocked his ears.

  She was passing out flyers on the street. Although she was short, her body looked curvy and full under an oversized apple-red sweater and two pink and gold scarves that wound in loose cowls around her neck. Her hair was tangled and her cheeks pink from the slaps of the wind. The papers in her hand were small and bright and she was giving them away. Smiling in earnest and walking up to people on the street, extending offerings to those who passed pretending not to see her or turned their heads to roll their eyes and smirk. No matter how many people walked by, she continued to smile with clean, white teeth.

  Behind her stood a dingy, white-box building with colored paper flags strung over the threshold; the flags twisted in the wind and smacked against the edges of the door. A sign above read, HIS UNIVERSAL LOVE MINISTRIES. As Nick approached, the door opened, and yellow light spilled onto the street, along with the hum of people mingling inside. But Sarah was outside, alone.

  Nick pulled his hood over his head. He’d been harassed by plenty of Jesus freaks in the city before, and wasn’t in the mood to be indoctrinated. He fingered the plastic earbuds that he wore looped around his neck so he could slip them in at a moment’s notice, block out the noise of the world. Sped up to pass her so he wouldn’t have to be another asshole turning her down. He was that asshole, but didn’t, for some reason, want her to know.

  But she reached out to him, catching the edge of his sleeve. Her touch was slight, a small bird finding footing.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Can I ask you something?” When she spoke, there was the smallest something wrong with it, a hint of a childhood lisp—it should have annoyed him but didn’t. She gazed up at him and he noticed the daubing of freckles on her nose and over the tops of her cheeks. She said, “Are you happy?”

  “What?”

  “There is love all around you. You don’t have to be alone.”

  Nick searched her face for a hint that she was messing with him, but her eyes were wide open, her gaze unwavering. “Are you serious?”

  She smiled. “Why don’t you come inside? There’s coffee. And cookies, I think.”

  “Oh, fuck. Hold up. We talking Oreos? Or some, like, cardboard Nilla Wafer shit?”

  She laughed, tilting her head back. The curve of her neck was creamy white. “I’m Sarah,” she said. That lisp again. Her hands, as she took his and led him into the white-box church, were precise and small and soft, and he told himself, She’s blazed or crazy, walk away, but something within him that was deeper than cynicism and deeper than embarrassment and deeper than fear said, Stay.

  Nick went back to the church, again and again, until Sarah agreed to go out with him.

  In Mill Valley, believing in God was something you just didn’t talk about. But his friend Ryan’s family was Christian, and once, when after a sleepover Nick’s parents had been too busy to pick him up, Nick had gone with the Harbingers to church. And the pastor or reverend or whatever had trembled red and declared that God was their constant companion, and Jesus the Truth and the Light. There was a whole thing about how God was Jesus and Jesus was God that made no sense, but Nick didn’t worry about that. He remembered instead the after part, when he stood in line with Ryan and his mom and dad and little sister, and when their turn came, the pastor gripped Nick’s hand in both of his and told him, “Son, always remember that Jesus loves you. No matter what.” Nick stared back, his hand trapped in the pastor’s palms. Beside him, Ryan jabbed his ribs. Nick just stood there, the squeeze of palms so wet and close that he wanted to pull away, but, just for a minute, he didn’t.

  The first day he entered Sarah’s church, he wanted to laugh. The mantras, the chantin
g, the sitting cross-legged on the dusty floor discussing God’s abiding love—it all seemed so self-conscious, pretentious. The old guru in charge had taken the bits and pieces of religions that he wanted and left the rest behind. Nick couldn’t believe in it. But he did believe in Sarah.

  So he stayed. Removed his shoes and socks and sat beside Sarah and watched as she placed her palms on her knees and closed her eyes.

  “There is nothing but this moment,” the guru said. “We will close our eyes and feel the universal love move through us.”

  Nick stifled his laugh by fake-coughing.

  The guru said, “Now we will make one sound together.”

  The people in the circle puffed their bellies, and then a low hum carried through the room, building power slowly, reverberating. Nick smirked and turned to Sarah, but she had her eyes squeezed shut and was humming as earnestly as all the others.

  The rug they sat on was old and gritted and had bald patches in its oriental pattern. This was something his mother wouldn’t stand for. He stared at it, at one space where the rug had been worn but not worn through, and as he stared he shook his foot, which kept tingling and falling asleep, and felt the presence of Sarah’s body beside him and tried not to hear what the guru was droning on and on about. When the guru finally shut up, Nick closed his eyes and listened to the silence. The room smelled increasingly of feet. There was the occasional cough or sigh and, once, a low, whistling fart that cracked him up, but when he opened his eyes, he saw that the guru was staring at him and that no one else had laughed or even seemed to notice, so he made a straight face and forced himself to watch the worn spot on the carpet until after a year or two passed someone finally said,

  “Amen. Namaste.”

  The people bowed, then stood and stretched. Dazedly they smiled at one another, brushed off their pants and skirts.

  “What did you think?” Sarah asked him as they walked into the open air.