Her dad didn’t like them. He said, “Look at her, Heather, she’s miserable.”
Her mom yanked the proof sheet out of his hands. “Don’t touch it, you’re getting your oily fingerprints all over. Anyway, that’s how she’s supposed to look.”
Elisabeth didn’t want to listen to them fight, or to argue her side: she’d already decided never to set foot in front of a camera again. She went to her bedroom and shut the door. Back then the walls were plain, the furniture white, the bedspread a lime-green stripe she’d picked out herself. Settling at her desk, she opened her MacBook and plugged in her earbuds. She could click around on Facebook, scan through random pictures, but this would only leave her hollow, wanting more. What she needed in times like this was actual escape. She clicked over to YouTube.
She liked the videos of a spiritual healer who performed deep chakra cleansings with no tools but his just-washed hands: he placed one hand at the base of the patient’s spine, the other at the location of each chakra, a spinning disk of energy and light that hovered in the air several inches from the skin. Then he circled his hand to spin the chakra faster, sloughing off the toxic residue the patient had accumulated through the simple act of living. The idea was to cleanse the patient’s energy fields in order to fix what had gone wrong inside. People said it was a hoax, but Elisabeth wanted to believe it. The concept was simple, complete: spin out the bad stuff, and the rest of the body would heal itself.
She liked this idea of healing. She could be a surgeon, maybe: she wasn’t sure about the med school part, but could see herself slicing into a body, in search of the source of the pain. She would specialize in heart surgery: crack the sternum to open the bones, reveal the jumping, fist-sized muscle, meaty and red. She loved that this human machine could be opened, examined. Could be held in the palm of a hand. Revealed, repaired, even replaced, encased in its jewel box of bone and sewn closed, and the person’s whole life would be different. All her old problems would cease to exist.
—
Now it was happening, Saturday night: Elisabeth’s house was full. Kids crowded the deck and the kitchen. Her mom’s easel, paints, and brushes were stowed away; alcohol cluttered the counters instead. To Elisabeth’s surprise, many had brought their own racks of beer or handles of vodka. Still, Nick commandeered the cases of hard lemonade and Red Tail Ale that her three hundred dollars had paid for and sold the bottles one by one, pocketing the cash.
He opened one for Elisabeth. She drank and the bitterness coated her tongue. Wincing, she tried to pass it back.
“Just drink it,” Nick said. “You’ll like it eventually.”
She sipped. More and more people pushed into her house. She hid in the kitchen and watched as they paraded through the White Room, followed the trail of celery-colored towels she’d laid across the white carpet to the kitchen and the deck.
Dave Chu came in with some guys from the soccer team and picked carefully over the towels toward the deck. He was tall, like her. He wore a red polo shirt with a little embroidered horse logo and chinos and clean white sneakers. As he walked, he flicked his shining black hair out of his eyes. She was surprised to see Dave. He seemed too anxiously well behaved to have any fun at parties. On the other hand, he had paid Nick Brickston to take the SAT for him, so he must be more than the compulsive front-row note-taker she saw every day in class. As she shook out a garbage bag and began to fill it with used cups, she felt him watching her.
Abigail Cress came in with her best friend, Emma Fleed. Emma was short and baby-faced in a ballerina skirt of tiered chiffon, and Abigail was skinny and stylish, with a black silk top and tight dark jeans and a black quilted purse over her shoulder. They paused in the doorway and it was strange to see Abigail so quiet, so still. Wary. Everyone had been talking about her and Mr. Ellison, who’d disappeared the month before. Elisabeth herself had always felt funny around Mr. Ellison—there was something strange about the way he lingered by the girls’ desks in SAT class, reaching down to mark answers on their test sheets, cresting his arm over theirs. And Elisabeth had seen him with Abigail once, she thought, while eating her avocado sandwich in the courtyard—squinting up at the clock tower and spying through the narrow, arched windows the figures of a man and girl embracing. Elisabeth herself hadn’t even kissed a boy since Ryan Harbinger in eighth grade—when, in an empty classroom one afternoon, Ryan had out of nowhere grabbed Elisabeth and kissed her, a kiss quick and alien and wet, an anxious tongue darting around her teeth as if probing for something hidden there. Then, just as suddenly, Ryan had pulled away. Burning with embarrassment, Elisabeth had seen, gaping in the doorway with a Slurpee in his hand, Tristan Bloch. From then on, the rumor had circulated that Elisabeth had “stolen” Ryan from Cally Broderick; no matter the fact that Elisabeth and Ryan never again kissed or spoke, this rumor refused to die. Was it Tristan who’d started it? She’d never know.
She wondered if Abigail Cress had really gone all the way with Mr. Ellison. Had she seen him naked, and allowed him to see her? No wonder, she thought, that Nick Brickston had turned the affair into a joke. If you took it seriously, it would make you sick.
As Abigail and Emma followed the trail of towels to the deck, the Bo-Stin beach kids crowded in behind them, laughing and reeking of weed. They paid no attention to the towels. Cally, who she knew had always hated her because of Ryan, padded her pink and dirty feet across the carpet.
—
The storm surprised them, pushed everyone inside. The rain was fierce, drilling the rail of the redwood deck. The guys cursed, crushed cigarettes under their heels and sheltered plastic cups beneath their arms; the girls screamed and palmed the sky above their heads, ducking to save their hair. Only Cally Broderick and the beach kids welcomed the storm; they laughed and arched their faces to the sky, danced and tried to catch the raindrops on their tongues, embraced the falling water until their shirts sheered through, clung to their bellies and breasts.
The party spilled into the White Room. Elisabeth saw them coming, a rolling tide, and knelt to straighten the trail of towels. To save the white carpet was a hopeless effort; she knew this even as she tried. Abigail Cress and Emma Fleed ran in first, apologizing as they stumbled over Elisabeth but laughing too, so it was clear they didn’t mean it. Then Damon Flintov and Ryan Harbinger were yelling and knocking people out of the way to claim the white couch and love seat in the middle of the room. After them came everyone, freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, a mass of kids and yet somehow divided, the familiar groups and cliques of school asserting themselves as Ryan, Damon, and Nick dominated the couches in the living room, Abigail and Emma corralled the junior girls around the kitchen counter, and freshman girls circled on the carpet to share a bottle of vodka, drinking and passing with dizzying speed. Dave Chu stepped in from the deck, lingered near the windows as if looking for his assigned seat. The soccer team was playing flip cup at the dinner table, but he didn’t join them; instead, seeing Elisabeth, he began to trace the room, collecting abandoned red cups and carrying them one by one into the kitchen.
Nick Brickston yanked Elisabeth’s mother’s iPod from the speakers on the sideboard and plugged in his phone; a rap song pounded out like a train that would run them all over. The beat vibrated the coasters on the glass coffee table and the lampshades on the lamps, and Elisabeth—who had given up on the carpet and stood backed against the far wall—felt the bass line humming in her teeth. Timidly she went and turned the volume down, strained to hear through the hum of fifty concurrent conversations angry neighbors who might be approaching the house, dreaded police officers’ pounding at the door. None came—instead just more and more kids spilling through as the music grew louder and louder again, as if of its own accord. The rain was growing louder too, a rhythmic pounding on the roof. The branches of redwood trees nodded and thrashed at the windows, water streaking down the glass, and beyond them the hippie kids twirling and spinning. Inside, some sophomores opened a window and curled against it smoking cigarettes,
exhaling into wind that blew the smoke back inside.
On the love seat Ryan Harbinger stretched, grinned and dimpled his cheeks, splayed his giant feet on the armrest where her mom usually placed her elbow or her half glass of white wine. He wore basketball shoes with red slashes and black soles, and they would ruin the white couch but it was too late to say anything. He set his forty on the coffee table—not, as Elisabeth’s mother had taught her, toward the center on a coaster, but directly on glass at the edge. He lay back and giggling girls tucked into the spaces around his body or sat at his feet and hugged their knees. Freshman girls perched on the edge, arranging their smiles. Ryan draped an arm around one girl’s waist but gazed away, as if the gesture were an accident.
Damon Flintov dropped his beer on the side table and sprawled on the couch, grinning and nuzzling a white chenille throw blanket to his cheek. He had a big head with buzzed, light brown hair, watery blue eyes, eyebrows pierced with silver studs. A wide, fleshy nose, chubby fingers. His belly bulged under an oversized purple T-shirt. He had this overgrown-infant look about him, yet he terrified her. He and Ryan both. She remembered, even if no one else did, what they had done to Tristan Bloch.
—
Elisabeth kept drinking and the front door kept opening and more kids kept cramming into her house. Kids she didn’t recognize. Kids who didn’t live in Mill Valley. Kids who didn’t live in Marin. She sensed the night was splintering. It was no longer a linear series of hours leading to their natural conclusion but a grotesque collage of impossible events that had started nowhere and were leading nowhere clear; it seemed to Elisabeth that the party might simply go on forever like a movie on a loop, refreshing itself over and over, until something snapped.
Emma Fleed set up beer pong on the whitewashed kitchen table, arranging red cups like bowling pins and pouring beer into each one. She was a waitress, a hostess. How did she know how to do this?
Elisabeth knelt and scrubbed a beer stain on the White Room rug. From the love seat behind her, Ryan Harbinger yelled, “I see you, Dave Chu! I see you looking at this girl like you’re gonna get some ass tonight. Man, this is Elisabeth Avarine—I wouldn’t fuckin’ hold your breath!” She turned and Ryan was grinning and Dave Chu walking away and Damon Flintov prying the battery cover off the remote control and doing this kind of choke-laugh, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe he was friends with such an asshole, but loved him anyway.
Girls were sitting in circles on the floor sharing handles of vodka—passing and giggling and swilling into oblivion. Then they were up and dancing with one another, grinding hips and swinging hair, pouting at cell phone cameras and setting off flashes, collapsing in laughter together. They were laughing about nothing, as far as she could tell.
On the couches and chairs were couples making out, older guys with younger girls cradled, strange creatures sharing breath.
A girl was crying in the designated bathroom. Her friends rushed into the room with her, flanked her, locked the door. When Elisabeth knocked, a girl she didn’t know stuck her head out; her charcoaled eyes were streaked with tears. “Give us some fucking privacy!” she yelled, and slammed the door in Elisabeth’s face.
From then on, Elisabeth couldn’t stop people from wandering through the house, looking for another place to pee. They disappeared in the maze of dark hallways. Where was Nick? Strangers kept going to the Purple Room—hers—and locking the door.
One guy—six feet tall, basketball-jersied, San Rafael High—she followed.
“Excuse me!” she called after him. “People aren’t allowed down there!”
But the guy just laughed and kept walking. “Who are you, the fuckin’ security guard?”
“Wait! Where are you going?” She tried to tamp the desperation in her voice.
He didn’t answer. He flicked his fingernails against his shoulder, she the speck, the lint.
She followed and watched as he opened the door: there was a circle of kids on her bed, and on the floor, on their knees, Cally Broderick and Jess Steinberg were performing some kind of surgery on Elisabeth’s precalculus textbook: Jess crushed a pill with a butter knife and cut the powder into rows, then Cally shut her eyes and lowered her nose to the book, closed one nostril and inhaled. Opening her eyes, she looked at Elisabeth. Elisabeth stared back, knowing she shouldn’t yet unable to move or look away. Cally’s pupils were wide and black yet impenetrable, and Elisabeth was amazed that someone she had gone to school with all her life could still be such a stranger. Elisabeth had so many questions to ask her—Why had she forced this total change upon herself? And how had she pulled it off?—but she could not fathom where to begin.
Elisabeth retreated. Noises were coming from the Blue Room. There, some freshman on her knees and her face in Nick’s lap and she still had her clothes on and he was gripping her hair in his hands. Elisabeth turned away. Why had she expected more from him?
She went back to the White Room, which now felt, perversely, like the safest place. People there were gathered at the windows smoking blunts and someone had set up a glass bong on the coffee table and people lounged around it, passed it back and forth, and she thought, for a brief, hopeful moment, that things were winding down.
Then Emma Fleed started dancing on the coffee table. She swayed and shimmied to the music, flipping her skirt of tiered chiffon and whipping her dark hair and grinning, her confidence astounding even as the camera phones went up around her, even as she tipped forward and flashed the room. She didn’t seem to be part of this place, as if she were performing for a full house only she could perceive, an invisible, adoring sea.
Damon Flintov peed in the kitchen sink.
Ryan Harbinger found the green glass vase and smashed it, not even angrily, just because.
By now the White Room was soiled and stained and it smelled like weed and cigarettes and spilled beer and B.O. A crack split the glass coffee table like a fault line. Still it wasn’t over. The speakers bumped and buzzed—she didn’t know rap music and every song sounded exactly the same, the beat relentless—and the room hummed with people in every corner, the rain having eased yet not stopped altogether, and outside the Bo-Stin hippies had multiplied to fill the deck. Cally Broderick stumbled out to join them, crawled up onto the railing and started to walk across it, dipping her toes and twirling like a gymnast on the beam, tilting and wavering as her friends cheered loudly, joyously, from below. As she tightroped on the wet and narrow rail, Cally teetered from side to side—on one side, the relative safety of the deck, on the other, the stretch of dark canyon that yawned down to the creek far, far below—in an exquisite tension that Elisabeth felt in the meat of her ribs.
Inside, Emma Fleed’s skirt was twisted up around her thighs and she was drinking from a forty on the White Room couch. Another girl crouched beside her, trying to take the bottle away, but Emma kept shouting, “I do want it! I want it! Don’t tell me what I want!”
Damon Flintov found the watermelon in a cabinet above the stove and hurled it at the White Room wall. Its pink guts exploded across her mother’s perfect linen wallpaper.
Elisabeth froze. Fragments of green rind made a hideous mosaic on the linen, and pink juice descended in long, slow drips. The pink guts were her tightly packaged heart exploding. The people were falling down laughing around her, thrilled, entertained, and behind her she heard one boy dare another to lick it. She fell to her knees on the sullied carpet, raised the roots of her hair with her fingers. What would her mom say? What would her mom do? How would her mom’s face look when she saw it?
The party around her revived itself. Elisabeth went into the kitchen, picked up the first forty she found, and uncapped it. It tasted rancid, but with each sip, she cared a little less. Cared less about the taste and less about everything else. In fact she liked it.
She stumbled down the dark hallway, searching for a quiet place to breathe. To her right she found an open door, a wedge of yellow light. She pushed inside.
A familiar scent envelo
ped her: vanilla, almond, bergamot orange. Her mother’s perfume. A wave of nausea overtook her and she fell to her knees on the cheetah print carpet. For a fleeting yet real moment it seemed plausible that she would die. It was then she realized where she was: the Gold Room. Looking up, she took in the impossible sight of Damon Flintov and Ryan Harbinger scrambling in her mom’s underwear drawer. Terror hurled her heart against her ribs. Even through her haze she understood that she was powerless to stop them. Damon pulled out a lacy fuchsia bra, which he stretched across his fat chest, looping the straps over his shoulders, and in the trifold mirrors he began to dance. Ryan laughed with his whole body, bending over, stumbling around. Elisabeth struggled to process this. They didn’t seem to notice her, or didn’t mind the audience.
Damon danced on the little stool and pushed his forty to his mouth and sucked, the amber liquid sloshing in the glass. He was jerking his big body around on the stool, posing in the mirrors. He pointed to the cheetah carpet. “This shit looks like a strip club, yo!”
“You fag,” Ryan said, laughing.
Damon paused and puffed his chest. “What did you just call me?”
Ryan grinned, the lines deepening at the corners of his mouth. “I said, fuckin’ faggot.”
“Say that over here, bitch-ass motherfucker. Lemme hear you say that one more time.”
Ryan slid his palm over his face to make it serious, like someone doing an impression. He crept to Damon on the stool and raised his chin. The boys’ faces were as close as they could be without kissing.
“Mother. Fuckin’. Faggot,” Ryan said, his face twitching to stay serious.
“You’re dead, asshole.”
But Damon fell into laughing and Ryan too, and then they were at each other like dogs. Damon lunged at Ryan and vised Ryan’s head in his armpit and Ryan, bending over, his jeans sagging to reveal funny tight blue briefs, grabbed Damon around the waist and muscled him off the stool and they spun like they were dancing, grunting, Damon breathing hard, his face baby-pink and glowing, and Elisabeth released a scream as the two boys fell into the mirrors and Damon’s body smashed the glass.
The Most Dangerous Place on Earth Page 17