The Most Dangerous Place on Earth

by Lindsey Lee Johnson

  The kitchen was her mom’s studio, a blank slate. It was vast and bright and a skylight stretched across its ceiling, spilling pale light over birch cabinets and bamboo floors. Redwood branches swept across the skylight, shedding needles at the edges of the glass. Jars of paints and brushes and her mom’s easel and canvases filled the room where normal people might cook food. Her mom had started painting right after the divorce. Landscapes, still lifes, twisted self-portraits. In real life, Heather Avarine was a true brunette with highlights of henna in her hair, smooth olive skin, neatly arched eyebrows, wide green eyes; in the paintings, her skin was cornflower blue, hair twists of indigo, eyes violet gleams. Though these paintings embarrassed Elisabeth, they were also her favorites. She liked to stare into the violet eyes and imagine what the shadow-mother on the wall was really thinking.

  The kitchen opened to the White Room, where the walls were papered with bleached linen. Glass coffee and side tables floated on plush white carpet. There was a snow-colored couch and love seat. The accent pillows were white and there were white chenille throw blankets that Elisabeth and her mom would tuck over their toes when they curled up to watch Molly Ringwald movies from when her mom was in high school, or Project Runway, her mom’s favorite show. Her mom always knew immediately which designer’s outfit was the most fabulous and which one had no style and was doomed to go home. “In fashion, Liza-Belle, the worst thing you can be is boring,” she explained. “It’s the same in life. Even ugly is better than boring.”

  In the White Room a wall of bare, floor-to-ceiling windows faced the redwood deck and the forested canyon below. When her mom went out at night, Elisabeth would sit alone on the love seat and scan the dark canyon for signs of life. She knew any hiker could look in and see her. Strange men might peer through the glass, knives glinting. Kids from her school, hunting for a secret place to smoke. Wild animals. One night, when she was waiting for her mom to come home from yet another date, a deer appeared just outside the window. The deer stood sideways and pressed its brown flank to the glass, cropped hairs flattened and fanning out, like it would push through if it could. It turned its head toward her and stared. Ears perked and flicked, nostrils trembled. It seemed to know her. Trained its gaze on her like it had something crucial to tell her. But what? Elisabeth stood and stepped nearer to the window. The deer spooked, and clattered down the wooden steps into the dark.

  Despite Elisabeth’s pleas, her mom refused to fit the windows with curtains or blinds. She said the view made the house. She said, “Don’t be silly, Liza-Belle, there’s nothing out there but trees.”

  The most important room in the house was the Gold Room, her mom’s dressing room. It had cheetah carpeting in tan and white, light yellow walls, white shelves edged in shimmering gold leaf. There were racks for dresses, skirts, blouses, pants. White drawers, gold-handled, for her lace and satin underwear. White velvet boxes for her jewels. Shelves of shoes with toes pointed down: flats, sandals, pumps, low boots, tall boots, over-the-knee. One pair of flip-flops for yoga, slim black thongs to flaunt red-polished toes. No sneakers. Nothing that Elisabeth’s mom did not love. There was an oversized ottoman upholstered in gold fabric. A trifold set of full-length mirrors like in the dressing room at Nordstrom, and a small white pedestal to stand on. There was no black anywhere. Nothing Elisabeth’s dad might deem reasonable.

  When creating the Gold Room, Elisabeth’s mom had seemed to be pursuing something bigger than Elisabeth could understand. “For the first time in my life, I am going to have exactly what I want,” she’d said, as if this explained it all.

  —

  “Okay,” Nick Brickston told Elisabeth. “First rule, hide everything.”

  It was Saturday afternoon. She had waited until her mom left for a wine country weekend with Steve, an anchorman from the local news. Now she stood with Nick under the skylight in her mom’s studio-slash-kitchen, trying desperately to seem at ease as he hauled in the last case of alcohol and stacked it with the others on the floor. White fog eddied over the pane of glass above their heads, and redwoods smacked drops of wet onto the glass. Nick palmed a delicate green glass vase that her mom had bought at the Fall Arts Festival. “Anything breakable. Anything valuable.” He turned, assessed the room. “Hide the easel, the paintings. Plus the paints and brushes and shit. Who knows what fucked-up ideas people are going to get.”

  Elisabeth nodded.

  “Do you have any money around?” he asked. “Cash, credit cards? Your mom’s jewelry? You should get it out of here.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. Then there’s the weird shit. The shit you wouldn’t think.”

  Elisabeth followed him across the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator. Inside, along with the milk and condiments, were two liters of Smartwater, a takeout box from Sushi Ran, a bag of raw spinach, and a watermelon. “Will your mom expect all this to be here when she gets back?”

  “Are you saying,” Elisabeth said slowly, “that someone is going to steal this watermelon?”

  Nick shrugged. “Last month Jonas Everett got wrapped over a missing crate of farmers’ market strawberries. He’s allergic—when he said he ate them all himself, his mom knew he was full of shit.”

  “Hide the watermelon, then, definitely.” Elisabeth had hated watermelon ever since she’d puked it all over Mr. Hamilton’s sixth-grade social studies classroom during her oral presentation on ancient Chinese foot-binding.

  “Now the most important thing.” Nick lifted the phone off its receiver on the kitchen counter. “Where can this go?”

  “The phone?”

  “Trust me, the last thing you want is this thing rings and some drunk asshole picks it up to say hello. Get it?”

  “I think so. And we’re going to keep everyone out here, right?”

  Nick nodded. “Kitchen, bathroom, deck. No one goes down the hallways. No one goes in your room or your mom’s room.”

  “Or the Gold Room,” Elisabeth said, blushing as soon as she heard herself say it. No one knew about the room names and no one should. “I mean, my mom’s dressing room. It has to be off-limits.”

  “Sure,” Nick said. Then he grinned, draped his arm across her shoulders. “You know, you’re gonna have fun tonight, girl,” he told her. “If it kills you.”

  —

  There were 175 kids in the junior class. Most of them didn’t like her.

  Since middle school, girls had pricked up around her, as cats prick up at danger, and edged away. Once, when she was in seventh grade, three eighth-grade girls had cornered her behind the snack bar, surrounded her and pressed her to the wall, so close she felt their hot, sweet-and-sour breath against her neck, and demanded to know why she thought she was so fucking superior. When she hadn’t answered, the biggest of the three had smiled calmly beneath her dark, center-parted hair, braces glinting, then reared back and slapped her face. A sting that mellowed to an ache. Loose tears. That night, a plum-colored bruise had bloomed high on her cheek, and she’d wished that it would make her ugly by the morning, but it hadn’t.

  She didn’t make such wishes anymore. But she knew what boys thought of her. The dime. The bitch. If they did talk to her, it was just to ask about her mom in a way that made her skin crawl.

  Everyone liked Elisabeth’s mom, who was pretty and fun and trendy in her skinny jeans and knee-high boots. She worked in a local boutique, and after closing took Elisabeth to dinner at downtown restaurants where divorcés hovered by the bar in designer jeans and dress shirts, or polos embroidered with the scrolling logos of Palm Springs golf courses and Napa Valley wineries. Elisabeth looked just like her, the men said when stopping by the table to be friendly. Those gorgeous, sea-green eyes. That skin. Elisabeth’s mom always grinned and thanked them, radiating warmth as if to assure them that her beauty meant nothing to her. That she was not even aware of it.

  The anchorman, Steve, was bolder than the rest. He pulled a third chair to their table without asking, flashed bleached teeth. He wore makeup for h
is job on TV, and orange foundation crusted in the folds of his eyelids and the grooves of his nostrils.

  He leaned over the table and winked. “You know,” he said, “when you grow up, you’re going to be a knockout.”

  Elisabeth’s mom beamed and patted the back of her hand, a reminder to be gracious.

  Elisabeth clicked her teeth shut. Made a small, closed-mouth smile. “Excuse me,” she said.

  As she stood, Steve’s eyes traced her height. Five foot ten in flats. As she walked through the restaurant in her scoop-necked sweater and jeans, three old men in a booth grinned at her with mouths full, jousted at her with their knives. She passed the clanging kitchen—two busboys, leaning by the open door, swiped their palms on their aprons and trailed her with their eyes. She bowed her head. If she looked at them, she’d have to smile, pretend she liked it. If they talked to her, she’d have to say hello, act flattered like her mom would, make small talk, which she was so painfully incapable of doing. So she raised her chin and stared ahead. Her body was a long elastic and she held it taut.

  When she got back from the bathroom, her mother was sipping a martini and laughing and Steve was sitting close beside her, stroking the ridge of her thumb, whispering secrets into her hair.

  People said Elisabeth was beautiful. Her mom said she was lucky, with a golden complexion and a body built for clothes. But the beauty was foreign to her. She wore it like expensive jewelry she knew was dangerous to own.

  It seemed that she had always felt this way. She remembered a Memorial Day weekend when she was six or seven years old, at the Mendocino Valley ranch where Mill Valley parents went to play. The ranch crowned a hill at the end of a long dirt road that corkscrewed up through madrone and manzanita trees. Around the house was a clearing, and beyond that, hills of grass tall enough to hide in.

  During the day adults would hike around the hills or sprawl in chaise longues by the swimming pool or pass out on towels on the lawn with paperback novels and bottles of beer. And inevitably, in the blaze of a late afternoon, Elisabeth’s mom would wake red-bellied and howling for aloe. Elisabeth would bring her the bottle. She’d squirt the cold green gel into her palm and rub it over her mom’s belly, chest, shoulders, and neck, skin hot to the touch and goosebumps rising, angry red.

  “I didn’t mean to fall asleep!” her mom would moan. “Why didn’t you wake me, Liza-Belle?”

  “Stop flinching,” Elisabeth would say. “The gel will help. It always helps.”

  Her mom would laugh, tears glistening in her eyes. “My sensible girl. Where did you come from? How did you come out of me?”

  When dusk fell, the crowd would gather at the fire pit. The adults smoked sweet-smelling cigarettes, flames playing on their faces, orange against the blueing dark, and laughed at jokes that Elisabeth didn’t understand and so stopped listening to. She stepped closer to the fire, bracing against waves of heat. Above the flames the air rippled like warped glass, and gold sparks spit and sizzled in the sky.

  Then hands gripped her waist and she was pulled back, settled onto a man’s lap. He was a friend of her parents and didn’t have kids of his own. Everyone had been swimming and she still wore her one-piece, pink with small black polka dots and a short, wavy skirt around the hips. Damp, it stuck to her body. On the man’s lap she pulled the fabric from her skin with a sucking sound, creating a bubble of air, and then popped it against her belly. The man laughed. He said her hair smelled like lemonade. From across the campfire her mother explained that she squeezed lemon in Elisabeth’s blond hair so the chlorine wouldn’t turn it green. The man held her close against his chest, big hand blanketing her belly, heart beating fast against her back. Her swimsuit pulled against the secret place between her legs and there were sudden little stars bursting all over her body that made her face burn and she thought if she stayed absolutely still maybe nobody would notice and she would not have to explain.

  Then the grown-ups wanted to have grown-up time, so the kids had to go to bed. They slept in tents on the lawn; there weren’t enough rooms in the house for everyone who wanted to shower and change and sleep, and grown-ups needed privacy more than kids did. So Elisabeth changed clothes in one of the tents, quick quick, no lock on the door—not even a door, a half circle of shiny nylon, so thin, and the zipper dangled there at the end and there was no way to hold it closed and change at the same time. She could only stand and watch the zipper as she peeled the damp swimsuit from her body. Her skin was cold and clammy underneath and her thin hair crunchy from its lemons and its hours in the sun. Her dry clothes, a purple T-shirt and shorts and pink cotton underwear dotted with tiny panda bears, lay on the sleeping bag beside her. As she reached down for the underwear, there was the shriek of the tent unzipping. The friend was there, looking. She froze with her panties in her hand. What was she supposed to do? Scream?

  But he acted like there was nothing wrong, he saw her there and he didn’t say Excuse me and he didn’t leave. He told her to hurry, her mother wanted her, it was time to toast the marshmallows. She didn’t answer. She thought that if she didn’t break her silence this thing would not be real, this thing so small it almost didn’t happen.

  During middle school, the greater world began to pursue her more aggressively, and in response she clung more stubbornly to her policy of silence.

  There was the time her dad took her to visit the properties he owned in the city’s Sunset District. When he had to meet with a tenant, she went to get a soda at the convenience store he promised was just around the corner.

  The store was nowhere. There was no store. She was wandering the sidewalks, counting blocks and squinting at street signs, when a strange voice lapped the back of her neck.

  “Your back is real straight,” the voice said. “You work out?”

  She glanced over her shoulder. The man was skinny and short and wore a tank top: thin white cotton over scarred white skin. He was loping along like a wounded deer and staring at her and sliding his tongue over his teeth. “Where you work out at?” he said. “Around here?”

  “No,” she whispered. She closed her elbows around her ribs and hurried, but the man caught up to her and now they were side by side.

  They walked for a few seconds more, the man considering something.

  “You’re cute,” he said finally. His eyes ran down, up. “Very cute.”

  Sweat broke out on her palms and under her arms. The smell of her own orange-flower perfume released from her skin, and she willed it back like a scream he must not hear. She scanned the street for a store or restaurant to duck into, but there were only more and more stucco houses, windows latticed and barred. “I have a boyfriend,” she said finally, quietly. When she reached Taraval Street, she turned.

  The man turned too. “He’s a lucky guy. Very lucky.”

  Her throat felt strangled. Her breath too loud. Her T-shirt shrugged up in the heat and she could not move her arms to pull it down. She tried not to look like she was hurrying.

  “You could be more lucky, though,” the man said, showing crowded yellow teeth. He reached, and pinched the bare flesh at her hip.

  She jumped. A small yelp escaped. But she couldn’t speak. There was a tingling behind her nose and tears in her eyes.

  The man laughed and sauntered off, and she pushed into the first open storefront she could find. After, she told no one. If she told her mom, her mom would blame her dad. If she told her dad, he’d want to find the guy and kill him, or—maybe worse, maybe more likely—he wouldn’t do anything at all.

  When she turned fourteen, modeling scouts began to call the house. There was one who saw her in the city one weekend and wouldn’t quit until she agreed to a test shoot. Elisabeth didn’t want to go, but her mom insisted: “This is your time, Liza-Belle! You have to take advantage of every moment.” She said this with such conviction that Elisabeth wondered when her time would be over, and what would happen then?

  At the studio, the stylists swarmed around her. Sitting still under the lights,
she watched in the mirror as the hairstylist back-brushed her hair and wound it on hot rollers. The makeup girl spun her away from the mirror. “Keep your eyes closed, sweetie,” she said. “This stuff is, like, industrial.” Elisabeth obeyed. A machine growled to life and spit cold flecks of makeup over her forehead and eyelids and cheeks, her chin and her neck. “Once this foundation sets, it won’t come off unless you scrub like crazy—you’ll have to take off, like, three or four layers of skin.” The other stylists laughed. “Relax, I was only kidding.”

  Eventually her skin was thick and poreless, eyelids glittered and heavy with lash glue, lips gummy and red. The stylists removed her robe and stood her in front of a silver clothes rack in nude thong underwear and five-inch platform heels. They never stopped talking. They told her she was gorgeous, so lucky. So young. “I’d kill for your thighs,” one confided. “Fourteen, fuck, it’s so unfair.”

  The photographer posed her on a white backdrop. In head-to-toe black he hunched, aimed his huge lens at her head. He never stopped talking. He said, “Put your shoulders back, honey, stand up straight, honey, give me your sexy look, look like you want this. Now smile. Not like that. Like you mean it, honey. Like you almost didn’t want to but I was just so funny. Natural, sweetheart. Be yourself.”

  Elisabeth tilted on the five-inch heels and her limbs angled everywhere and the corners of her mouth trembled when she tried to hold the smile.

  He kept telling her to close her eyes, then open them. “Look down, then look up. Don’t stare, honey, no, don’t squint.”

  When they got the photographer’s proofs, the girl in the pictures did not even look like her.