The Most Dangerous Place on Earth

by Lindsey Lee Johnson

  “I think, where can we go now?” he said.

  But she turned him down.

  So he’d returned, again and again, each time forcing himself to sit through the entire service, staring at the objects in the room and holding his breath as much as possible and trying not to laugh.

  One day he’d focus on the rolled edge of a flyer unpeeling from the wall. The next, the guru’s weird bent toes, big and tanned with blond hairs sprouting, the nails clipped short and buffed to shine. Next time, it was the electrical cords that were tangled like briars on the floor in one corner of the room, and from there, a crooked outlet halfway up the wall, a small blank face with nothing plugged into it. And then, when he knew he could get away with it, he focused on Sarah’s small hand as it cupped her right knee, her short, unpainted nails, the freckles on her fingers and the thin gold ring around her pinky, like something given on Christmas to a child.

  The weeks went on like this. Each Saturday, she drew him in. Each Saturday, he sat and watched the objects in the room while the guru droned about love, forgiveness, God and meaning and universal truth, until they settled into that long and awkward silence in which Nick was supposed to feel something. And each time, he felt nothing but the wanting. Her. Afterward he always asked her to hang out with him, but she’d just smile and shake her head.

  He told himself, Forget her, give it up. He didn’t have to work so hard. There were plenty of girls in Mill Valley.

  But then one day, for no apparent reason, she said yes. That morning he’d been made to see his dad and so was feeling particularly shitty; he’d asked her to dinner out of habit, not expecting to hear yes, not even really caring. They went for tacos and beers and he saw why she had been so careful—because as soon as she allowed herself to give him something, she gave it all. She told him everything, about her school, her friends, her parents and five sisters in Visalia—some dusty-sounding place between San Francisco and L.A.—and her religion, which she’d found a year ago, how she’d felt so lost in the city, anxious and alone, until she’d found His Universal Love Ministries and found herself, for the first time in weeks, able to draw a full breath.

  Then it was Nick’s turn to talk. He didn’t mean to lie to her; the stories came so easily they were almost unconscious. He was in his second year at City College, majoring in English. He shared a shitty apartment in the Tenderloin with four guys from school, an apartment chaotic with comings and goings, where there was pot smoke in the air vents and pee rings in the toilets, trash in the hallway, moldy dishes in the sink.

  “You wouldn’t want to see it,” he told her. “Where’s your place?”

  —

  After taking Dave Chu’s SAT, Nick went to meet his supplier in Dolores Park, and then on to Sarah’s apartment. He knew it well by now.

  She lived in a falling-down Victorian on Valencia. Painted red and pink with lacy wooden trim, it looked like a cake designed by a five-year-old. But he liked it, because it was ancient and crappy and no one had come in with a crew and a pile of money to fix it up. It was allowed to exist.

  He climbed the stairs. The wood felt soft, gnawed on. Her studio was at the top, a wood-floored room with scuffed beige walls and tall ceilings, a sink and hot plate in the corner, a narrow doorway leading to a tiny bathroom tiled pink. In the main room were two huge windows she kept uncovered, and outside a view of Valencia, crowded stucco storefronts and patchwork Victorian façades, and Muni wires sketching geometric patterns on the sky. Packs of twentysomethings roamed in and out of taco joints and bars, and there was the steady thrum of traffic and people passing on the street. As night fell, fog settled over the city, misted the streetlights.

  And Sarah. She sat beside him on the couch, which was draped by an ugly flowered sheet that looked a thousand years old and had the falling-apart softness cotton got when it had been worn and washed a million times, like his favorite T-shirts he’d had since elementary school that his mom was always telling him he didn’t need and should let the housekeeper use as rags.

  Sarah nestled into the corner of the couch and turned toward him. Unwinding her long gold scarf, she nudged her stockinged toes under his thighs. “This city is always so cold,” she said. “Have you noticed that? Even when it’s warm, there’s cold underneath, like the fog is just waiting to roll back in.”

  “I’ll keep you warm,” he said.

  She grinned. Pulled his face to hers and kissed his mouth, his cheeks, his forehead. He closed his eyes and she kissed each eyelid, then pulled his body over hers. He felt her moving underneath him live and warm and open and he could fall into this softness, he could disappear inside it. His blood resounded in his ears. She pushed him back, she laughed. Her laugh was loud and full, rolled over him, and he laughed too. There was no talk of love. With focused blood he unwound her layers of skirts and scarves like she was a present, her flesh glowing pink in the light of the lamp. Her freckles were cinnamon on the caps of her knees and along her arms and she was wearing nothing fancy, a white cotton bra and briefs that shouldn’t have turned him on (the Mill Valley girls wore tiny lace thongs from Victoria’s Secret) but did.

  After, they lay together on the couch with their legs hanging over the edge, and he wanted nothing in the world but sleep. But she was restless.

  “Wait, I’ve got an idea.” She jumped up and ran naked to the bathroom, flesh bare and trembling. Seconds later she returned in white panties, hands up, dental floss stretched thumb to thumb.

  It was weird, but he lay back and let her do it—rested his head on the arm of the couch and opened his mouth.

  Sarah stood over him, frowning in concentration. Her hair waved over her shoulders and chest. “Close your eyes.”

  The glossy ribbon, laced with mint, slid between his teeth and wiggled into his gums. It felt good. It tingled. It hurt.

  “Oh!” she said. “You’re bleeding.”

  He ran his tongue over his teeth, tasted liquid metal. “Keep going,” he said. He heard her steady breathing as she worked the floss between his teeth, pressing into the tissue.

  After all those boring hours at her church, this was when he felt it: love was all around him. It was here, it was in this room. But only if he let it in.

  He waved at her to stop, swallowed the traces of blood that had seeped from his gums. “Sit down,” he said. “I have to tell you something.”

  “What is it? Are you okay?” She came and sat beside him on the couch.

  “I’m, yeah, I’m amazing. I just have to tell you—I don’t want any secrets—”

  “You can tell me anything.”

  “I know.” He hesitated. Her pupils were wide in the low light. “There’s something you should know about me.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to know me.”

  She smiled. “I do. What are you talking about?”

  “No—I mean, you do, but not really. Not everything—”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  He’d come this far, so he let it all go, telling her everything, rambling, clumsy. “I don’t go to City College. I don’t live in the Tenderloin and I don’t have roommates. I mean, I don’t live in the city, period.” He went on. It took just a minute to unravel it all.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  He had made a mistake. The moment of grace had passed, seemed suddenly stupid, and he heard the door close in her voice. Felt her turning against him. She took her sweater from the arm of the couch and covered herself.

  He said, “I live in Mill Valley. I go to high school.”

  “High school?”

  He nodded. “I come to the city to do the SAT—I take it for people, they pay me and I—”

  “Who does? Wait. How old are you?”

  “To get the right scores, so they can get into Stanford or whatever—”

  “So, you cheat.”

  “No. I take it legit. I’m just, like, really good at it. It’s easy for me, and—”

  “Easy? To ta
ke some rich kid’s allowance so he can cheat his way into college? And you’re, what, sixteen? Oh my God.” Clutching the sweater to her chest, she stood and backed away from him. “Where are my clothes?”

  Her skirt was balled up at his feet. He handed it to her. “Sarah, listen, I’m still me.”

  “You’re a liar, Nick.” She stepped into the skirt, yanked the sweater over her head. “Of everything you’ve told me in the last three months, how much was true?”

  Not much, he realized. “That I care about you, Sarah—that I had a, I don’t know, fuck, like a breakthrough, now, tonight, and it’s all because of you—”

  “So none of it. Basically.”

  He’d have to play the last card he had left. “That I love you, Sarah, okay? I think I love you. And I think you maybe love me too.”

  She hugged her ribs. “I don’t even know you. I don’t have any idea who you are. Do you?”

  There was nothing he could say.

  “Get out,” she told him.

  He put on his jeans and hoodie. Slipped his iPhone into his pocket and looped the earbuds around his neck. She didn’t move. He could feel her shivering, watching.

  He opened the front door. Turned back to tell her…he didn’t know what.

  Sarah’s eyes were red and wet. She shook her head. “What a fucking waste.”

  Then she shut the door behind him; from outside, he heard the bolt slide over and click into the jamb.

  Hunching against the cold, he walked to the bus stop two blocks down. He understood that he had lost her. And yet, there was still the Nick that he’d invented—older, freer, living on his own terms. This version of himself, he knew, was not real now, but could be. And that was something to believe in.

  —

  At lunch on Monday, he found Elisabeth Avarine in the courtyard at school.

  “Here,” he told her, holding out three hundred dollars in cash. “Your cut.” She looked confused, so he added, “Thanks for, you know, helping me out. Keeping this between us.”

  She cocked her head and stared up at him, like she was running through and vetoing ideas of what to say. Or judging him. Which was why most people had decided she was a stuck-up bitch years ago. “What am I supposed to do with this?” she asked finally.

  “Whatever you want.”

  She furrowed her brow like this was a brand-new, strange idea. “What would you do?”

  He couldn’t tell her the truth—that he’d bank it and know that he was a few hundred dollars closer to freedom. Instead he told her something that would be easier for her to believe.

  “You know me,” he said, and grinned. “Get some refreshments. Host a function. Fuckin’ rage.”

  MISS NICOLL

  That spring, a series of storms rolled through Mill Valley, and the days were made sunless and strange. All that distinguished the town in clearer weather—the steep hillsides, the glittering marshland, the redwood groves that had grown for a thousand years—now seemed dangerous. Streets ran to rivers. Downtown was a mess. Terwilliger Marsh, risen above the level of its reeds, seeped into the sixth-grade playground at the middle school. Redwood trees collapsed over Panoramic Highway and power lines cracked, threw sparks against the wind. Up on the mountain, the housewives were stuck in their driveways, their narrow streets blocked by felled lines. On campus, rain pelted the windows, flooded the landscaping, and streamed down the front steps. Because Valley High had no cafeteria, students crowded the halls during lunch, huddling in stairwells or eating cross-legged on the floor. This situation didn’t seem to bother anyone but Molly. Her colleagues only stepped around the kids, avoiding looking down.

  She began to leave her classroom door open at lunch. Soon kids were gathering inside—first her students, then their friends, then anyone who needed a dry desk to eat on. The room filled with smells of wet wool and sandwiches and sushi and chai lattes, and with the clamor of kids: kids talking and laughing and shouting, scuffling with one another, drumming on desktops, blasting music on iPhones. Coke cans and candy wrappers cluttered her trash bins. Rain-dampened backpacks were strewn across her floor. She didn’t mind. She had given the kids a place to be. And they had begun to talk to her—about their homework and their grades but also about their lives, their one-act plays and sailing regattas and soccer games. They complained to her about their other teachers. They waved to her in the hallways. In class they chattered happily, as though they actually wanted to be there.

  Yet Molly’s classroom still looked, mostly, like Jane Frank’s domain. It was time that she made it her own. She went in on a Sunday, when she would not have to explain what she was doing. First she broke the rows of desks—they conveyed rank and opposition where camaraderie was wanted—and arranged them into two concentric circles. Then she pushed her own desk to the side of the room. On the desk—which to this point had held nothing more than her grade book and office supplies and three or four outdated, official-looking handbooks—she stacked novels she intended to read or recommend. She displayed a porcelain cougar that Bobbi had sent upon learning it was Valley High’s mascot and a bouquet of paper dahlias that Steph Malcolm-Swann had made for her in art class. Next she brought out the prints that she’d stored in the trunk of her car, having never gotten around to hanging them at home: a photograph of Joan Didion smoking a cigarette, cover art from Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, a Rothko that had always evoked for her the threadlike line between heaven and hell. All these and more she pinned to the corkboards on which Jane Frank had hung her passive-aggressive grammar posters and lengthy lists of rules. Finally she went into the storage room and found an olive-colored vinyl couch that seemed abandoned, dragged it noisily down the empty corridor. It fit perfectly under the windows at the back of her room. There she rested, pleased with her work. The classroom felt like home—a truer home to her, anyway, than any she had claimed.

  —

  A strange energy had begun to build in Molly’s blood, a deep and relentless curiosity. She wanted to know her kids. She wanted to defend them, if she could—from predators like Doug Ellison who would hurt them, from the expectations of their parents and the cruelties of their peers. She’d sit across from perpetually spaced-out Calista Broderick, who was her most compelling student and the hardest to reach, and long to ask all manner of impossible questions: Why are you like this? What is your house like? How can I help you? What do you want? She’d notice Elisabeth Avarine passing by her open classroom door, always alone, her slender body shrouded in loose T-shirts, her shoulders hunched in what might have been misery, or shame. And again, she would wonder.

  But it was not Calista or Elisabeth whom Doug had chosen, or any of the prettier girls at school. It was Abigail Cress.

  When she first heard her colleagues whisper the girl’s name, Molly was shocked. How had Doug managed to seduce such a smart, driven student? And how had it affected the girl? Setting aside her own feelings about Doug, Molly began to watch Abigail closely, searching her face for signs of psychic damage. Catching her eye in class, Molly would offer what she hoped was a reassuring smile. Once she knelt by her desk and said, gently, “If you ever need someone to talk to, Abby, I’m here.” But the only discernible change in Abigail Cress was a renewed impenetrability. She was the kind of student to whom a teacher was neither a confidante nor a kindred spirit, but an insensate dispenser of assignments and grades. Eventually Molly had to accept the truth: that Abigail did not want her, that for this girl, in this case, there was nothing she could do.

  —

  One afternoon, Amelia Frye, the girl who’d read an answer off her phone on the first day, broke down crying at Molly’s desk. She sobbed into her fist. Her shoulders were shaking. Her bangs were strewn over her forehead. The cause of this breakdown, as far as Molly could tell, was the C+ she’d been given on her Death of a Salesman essay. It lay between them, unloved, on the desk.

  “Amelia, I’m sorry. I know it’s not what you wanted. But we can talk about how to make the paper better. I can even
help you plan a rewrite, and you can turn it in again for extra credit. How’s that?”

  This offer seemed only to refresh Amelia’s anguish—she squeezed her eyes shut and let out a new string of sobs. “I’m…so…stressed…out.”

  “It’s going to be okay, I promise.”

  “But it isn’t okay. Everything is fucking terrible. I got in a fight with my best friend and she’s still so pissed at me. And I didn’t even do anything wrong.”

  “Oh,” Molly said.

  “And I’m never going to get into UCLA, my SAT score is fucking pathetic and my grades suck this semester and I don’t even know why, and I can’t show a C to my parents, they’ll flip their shit, they’re such fucking assholes!” Here she paused to breathe. Molly could see where acne bloomed beneath her makeup; a frenzied pink mottled her cheeks. She looked up at Molly with red and smeary eyes, and in a voice that was startling in its softness asked, “You know?”

  Molly did not know, yet she did. Somehow, without exactly meaning to, she had slipped into a real, human moment with Amelia Frye. All she knew for sure was that she did not want to lose it.

  “You know what?” she said. “Forget it. I can see you really tried here.” She pulled a pen from the desk drawer, crossed out the C+ on Amelia’s paper, and wrote a B in its place.

  Seeing this, Amelia transformed: she stopped sniffling, her skin calmed, her eyes brightened. “Oh my God! Really?”

  Molly smiled back. “Life is hard enough, right?” She reached across the desk and touched Amelia’s hand.

  It had been a risky impulse, but the girl didn’t flinch. “Thank you,” she said, giving Molly a broad and genuine smile. “This is totally going to save my life.”

  That night, Amelia Frye sent Molly a friend request on Facebook. Molly received the request over email—she hardly ever visited the site. The few photographs of her there, posted by her sister, were almost embarrassingly benign: she posed stiffly at her college graduation, forked cake at her niece’s birthday party. By contrast, Amelia’s page was crowded and alive. There were photos of her from every imaginable area of her life. She was there as a baby, sitting between young, attractive parents in a field of wild lupine. As a toddler she screamed with shut eyes, clenching a doll’s neck. At eight or nine she made a clamshell with her tongue. At twelve, strapped to a snowboard on a chairlift, she grinned, swung her feet over the white void below. At thirteen she flexed her palm at the camera. More recent pictures showed her stretched by a backyard swimming pool in a chevron-print bikini, grinning in a pile of her peers on an overstuffed couch, and posing in black satin with a lime lawn behind her, narcissus blooms tumbling over her wrist, wearing a practiced, closed-mouth smile. There were status posts and links to videos and comments and comments on the comments that were posted. And there were glimpses of Molly’s other students—Abigail Cress in the track-and-field team photo, Nick Brickston in the background of a party.