The Most Dangerous Place on Earth

by Lindsey Lee Johnson

  —

  After, shards of mirror glittered on the cheetah carpet.

  Puddles of malt liquor soaked into the floor.

  Her mom’s clothes had been rifled, tossed like streamers, stretched over strangers’ bodies, torn. Some had been stolen. She had no proof of this last. She just knew.

  “Be careful, there’s glass,” a voice said.

  She looked up. Dave Chu was there. He knelt beside her.

  She nodded. She started to cry. As Dave leaned closer, something shifted, and she fell into his arms. She did not even think.

  His arms hesitated. His heartbeat accelerated against her ear. Then he hugged her to him. Her eyelashes matted and wetted his neck.

  “It’s so stupid,” she said. “I thought someone would thank me.”

  “It’s not stupid.”

  “My mom comes home tomorrow. There’s no way to hide this. She’ll see it, she’ll see everything.”

  “She’ll forgive you,” he said.

  Then they heard the sirens coming, a plaintive cry that echoed through the canyon, hurtling closer and closer to where they were.

  “I’ll stay with you,” Dave said. “Don’t worry, okay?”

  Elisabeth cried. She did not know what she would tell the police, and she did not know what her mom would do. Maybe she’d be furious. Maybe she’d be proud. Maybe she’d blame all the others. Or maybe she’d realize that Elisabeth was the one who made this happen, who let the function grow and morph into a beast that would not stop until it tore this house apart.

  MISS NICOLL

  “Miss Nicoll? Miss Nicoll? Molly?”

  Molly awoke to find Nick Brickston staring down at her. She lay stretched across her classroom’s vinyl couch, where she’d intended to rest for only a moment at the start of her free period. Now the afternoon sun streamed through the open window, bringing with it the scent of oranges rotting in the heat.

  Nick Brickston cleared his throat; she sat up hastily. She was intensely aware of her untucked blouse and twisted skirt, the crust in her lashes, the staticky frizz of her hair. How long had he been standing there?

  She sat up. “Nick, hi. I was just resting my eyes. What’s up?”

  “I just came to say hey.” He sat down beside her on the sofa, creaking the vinyl; Molly tugged at her hem. For a moment they sat quietly together, the sun on their shoulders. Nick drummed his thumb on the vinyl. From there, the whiteboard looked very far away, Molly’s cursive small and frenzied. Finally he said, “Oh, sorry about that reading-response thing you wanted me to do. Was that important? I could make it up if you want.”

  “Sure,” she said, before realizing she didn’t actually care. “I mean, no. It wasn’t important. I know you’ve done the reading.”

  “Cool.”

  “But look,” she said, “next time, if you need an extension or something, just text me.” They exchanged numbers. Then they were silent. She waited for him to go, but instead he turned to her and said:

  “I was thinking about something you brought up in class the other day.”

  “Really? What?”

  “You told us everything we see is a signifier for something else. Something deeper. Like, the word tree signifies a tree, and the word itself changes how we think about the thing. Right? What did you call it?”

  “Semiotics.”

  “Yeah.” He leaned toward her. His eyes were dark and flashing, his breath tobacco-spiced. “Like, if we call someone a student, how does that change how we think about them? If we call someone a teacher, what does that mean?”

  “Well, what does it mean?”

  “It’s crazy if you think about it, how arbitrary it is.” His enthusiasm startled her; it transcended the cool in his voice. She recalled this thrill, its promise—when in high school her own English teacher had read from A Room of One’s Own, and she’d realized that there was another way to see the world than how the Nicoll family did, an entirely different way to be. Now she had passed on this promise to Nick Brickston. Who knew what he would do with it? He shifted closer to her on the couch. “I mean, you’re a teacher, and because of that we’re supposed to think of you a certain way. But Ms. Thruwey’s one too, and you guys aren’t even on the same planet.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “She’s a teacher, but you’re just Molly. A person you can, like, have a conversation with. Like one of us.”

  Molly couldn’t help but smile at this. She wondered at the accidental power of this gangly teenage boy—how he knew to say what she most wanted to hear. “Nick, that might be the kindest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Thank you for telling me the truth,” she said.

  —

  That weekend, Molly’s attendance was required at the spring semester faculty dinner hosted by Principal Norton.

  At the restaurant downtown, Molly chose a seat toward one end of the long, narrow table that stretched down the center of the dining room. The table was white-clothed and spotlit. Her chair was hard. Around her, everyone did just as expected, the teachers interrogating their appetizers, the servers pulling corks. How dull it was, how safe it felt. No one here would break a glass, or hurl a napkin, or empty the salt shaker on someone else’s head, or jump up and curse and storm out. Even the odors behaved themselves: gentle aromas of garlic and wine, traces of high-priced perfume. It made her throat itch. At the opposite end of the table, Beth Firestein, sipping a martini, looked equally bored.

  Around the table, the other teachers complained about school board politics, lamented the price of real estate, and marveled at the massive engagement ring of Gwen Thruwey, whose fiancé had just been made partner at a venture capital firm in the city.

  “Well, we knew he wasn’t a teacher!” joked Tom Pritchard, and everyone roared. There was nothing these teachers enjoyed more, Molly thought, than laughing bitterly at their own poverty.

  She drank. Around her the conversation veered toward the faculty’s second favorite topic: the insanity of Mill Valley parents. These parents, said Allen Francher, somehow managed to be not only entitled, intrusive, and demanding, but also negligent. Some of them seemed delusional about their kids’ abilities, added Jeannie Flugel. In other words, they were incapable of seeing what pieces of shit their own children could be, said Tom. Worst of all, said Gwen, these parents treated teachers like they were not even professionals, as if they were in the category of babysitters and maids.

  “Well,” Molly said, almost to herself, “maybe we are.” She heard too late the buttery slip of the wine on her tongue, and felt heat rise in her face as the entire table of teachers turned toward her.

  “What did you say?” Gwen asked, leaning over a plate of focaccia to glare.

  Molly gripped her wineglass, which felt slick and enormous in her hand. “I don’t think it matters, that’s all, what we call ourselves. What we are doing is very, I don’t know, elemental.”

  “I am a professional person,” Gwen said, and the table nodded in assent. “An educator. I don’t know what you call yourself.”

  “That’s not what I meant, exactly.”

  “What exactly do you mean?” Jeannie asked. “You don’t seem to think very highly of your own job.”

  “I just don’t think…,” Molly said carefully, and paused. She set down her glass and worried the stem. “I don’t think you’re going to get through to kids if you look at things that way.”

  Tom Pritchard chuckled. “You don’t think, huh?”

  “No wonder no one respects teachers the way they should.” Gwen gestured toward Molly with open palms, as if toward an exasperating child. “There’s attitudes like this coming into the schools.”

  “Calm down, Gwenny. Have some more wine.”

  “Shut up, Bill.”

  “Hold on, everybody.” Tom Pritchard raised his hand, then swabbed his goatee with his napkin as they waited. “I want to hear more of what our young Miss Nicoll has to say. Molly, how lon
g have you been teaching again?”

  “It’s my first year,” Molly said.

  He nodded. “So, proceed. You were educating us about how to get across to our kids.”

  “I’m not trying to educate anyone,” Molly said. Her blush had steadied, although cold sweat chilled her neck beneath her hair. “I’ve just found that the most important thing, I mean the way I deal with my kids, is to try to reach them on a deeper level. To really connect. To understand them in the context of their whole lives, in and out of the classroom, even the parts we’d rather not see.”

  “And I suppose their test scores aren’t important,” Gwen said. “Whether or not they learn how to read.”

  “Preparing them for college,” Jeannie added.

  “Of course that stuff matters,” Molly insisted, drawing courage from the compliment Nick Brickston had given her. She’d broken through: the kids liked and trusted her the way they could not like or trust these other teachers, and she knew them in ways these teachers could not. “But you have to look at the bigger picture.”

  In the silence that followed this declaration, the teachers glanced around the table at one another. Some were smirking, while others merely shook their heads. Katie Norton frowned at her penne. Tom Pritchard fingered his goatee. Gwen Thruwey turned to whisper into Jeannie Flugel’s ear; Jeannie nodded righteously in response. Then the table turned away from Molly and toward another topic, and within her the old, eighth-grade feeling flared: she was standing on the platform, she was shrinking to a speck. And yet, remarkably, she didn’t care. She did not even care that at the other end of the table, Beth Firestein had set down her martini and had fixed on her a cool, evaluative stare. It seemed like so long ago that she’d run into Beth after having learned the truth about Doug Ellison, even longer since they’d met at the copy machine, Beth so chic and commanding, Molly so eager and insecure. Molly had been a different teacher then, a different person.

  Two hours later the dinner was over. It had started to rain. Molly sat in the front seat of her car, warm and slightly dizzy from the wine. She rolled down the window so the air would clear her head. Through her open window she watched middle-aged couples stroll arm in arm and covered convertibles cruise. Fog drifted over the town square, and redwood trees nodded beneficently overhead. The only sounds were the drops of the rain, the clip-clop of boots on the sidewalk, and the whispers of the European engines passing by. What a strange thing, to grow up in this place as her kids had. This lavish peace was their entire world; this was all there was.

  THE RIDE

  Damon Flintov booked it when he heard the sirens wailing.

  Damon was buzzed, but it wasn’t that far from Elisabeth Avarine’s house in the canyon to his on the other side of town. Mill Valley was tiny and he knew these roads practically by heart—could drive them with his eyes closed. He stayed calm while everybody panicked, jumping into random cars.

  In his BMW it was him and his boy Ryan Harbinger in front. Nick Brickston got in back with these three drunkass girls that he was babysitting—Cally Broderick, Alessandra Ryding, and Emma Fleed. Nick sat on one side, Alessandra on the other. Cally rode bitch in the middle. Emma was pretty compact, so she climbed onto Nick’s lap for the ride. By this time the rain had taken a breather.

  “Okay?” Emma asked Nick. She kind of slurred it through her hair, which was swinging over her face. “Too fat?”

  “Shut the fuck up,” he told her, and she smiled and pressed her lips to his ear, murmuring something that Damon didn’t know but must have been pretty great, because in the rearview mirror Nick started grinning like a motherfucker.

  They slid through the night. The car was sick. He drove like a beast. The road was hairpinned and slick but he was relaxed. Steady mobbing down the narrow streets, swerving in and out of his lane, taking curves without even worrying about touching the brake.

  —

  Damon had managed to go six weeks without getting into any shit. So earlier that night, his parents decided to give him back the BMW.

  “Not give, lend,” his mom said, like there was a difference, when he was their only kid left and everything they had would come to him eventually. His mom was a first-grade teacher and liked to use her little-kid voice on him, like she was helping him sound out a word. It made him want to punch the wall. Except he didn’t do shit like that anymore.

  “Just for the night,” his dad said, dangling the keys in his face. “See how you do.”

  “We really want to trust you again, Damon,” his mom said, all earnest, and for five honest seconds he thought about staying home and hanging out with her, baking cookies and watching a Disney Channel movie like they did when he was a kid—those weeks when his dad went out of town for work and that house felt like a place where he could be. But Damon wanted to get to Elisabeth Avarine’s function, the last major party of the year. So he just said, “Cool,” snatched the key ring, and twirled it on his finger until the keys chimed and clanged.

  He went upstairs to get ready. At the bathroom sink he faced his reflection, ran a palm over his buzz cut. He liked to keep it short—liked the shivery feel of the clippers over his scalp and the dents and gleams his skull made in the mirror. He cracked his neck and felt the donut of flesh at the base of his skull. He hated how he always knew it was there. Hated his fleshy belly, his chest like a woman’s tits. As a kid he’d worn a T-shirt in the pool. Now he wore bigass shirts and jeans and he just didn’t fuckin’ swim. He wasn’t into exercise, ever since that asshole JV football coach kicked him off the team for grades. He didn’t care, he said at the time, loud enough so everyone could hear. Football at Valley was bunk anyway.

  His body was what it was, no changing it. But his clothes were bomb and he took care of that shit. The shirt matched the shoes matched the hat. That night, he chose a blazing-purple T-shirt with a neon-yellow swoosh and highlighter-yellow kicks designed to blind. He swabbed alcohol over the silver studs in his eyebrows and trimmed the stray hairs in his nose. Finally, he took out his Swiss army knife that he got for his last birthday, cut his fingernails and scraped the dirt from underneath, jabbed his cuticles with the little plastic stick, snipped his hangnails with the tiny silver scissors. Say what you want about him, he had beautiful fuckin’ hands.

  He was pumped to get out. He hated being trapped inside his house. Before he got arrested, he’d gone out almost every night with his boys, Ryan Harbinger and Nick Brickston. Ryan was this pretty boy, baseball star asshole who all the girls wanted. And Nick was like an evil genius or some shit—dealt weed and Molly and SATs, always made bank, never got caught. For years they’d gone around town getting chased away by cops. When it was soccer moms sitting around with Starbucks cups, it was called having a nice time; when it was him and Nick with a cigarette, it was loitering. Or Officer Frankel would find him walking home from Ryan’s at 11:00 p.m. on a Friday and slow to tail him like a draft car. “Been drinking tonight, son?” he’d yell. “Don’t you know there’s a curfew in this town?”

  Still, Damon preferred the nighttime. In the day he burned too hot. Sometimes it was just physical heat—sweat beading over his eyebrows, T-shirt damp and sticking to his pits—and sometimes it went deeper than that. He’d lope down Camino Alto gripping his waistband so his jeans wouldn’t fall around his ankles—the band was cinched around his ass, boxers puffing over like a cloud of smoke—and the old ladies from the retirement home would stop pushing their stolen shopping carts to stare or even glare at him, their faces asking what had happened to their town. Like he was doing some illegal shit just by existing. But he’d lived in Mill Valley all his life—it was his town as much as theirs. He was as much Mill Valley as they were, he thought, in fact more so, because he was the now and the future and they were just waiting to die.

  Overall he was just tryna get action. Tryna fuckin’ move. Kicking the leg of the dining room table. Snapping his wrist like Ali G. Tipping back in his classroom chair until he hovered on two skinny metal legs. His teachers yelled
at him to calm down, be still. Hush, Damon! they were always saying. Focus, Damon! Pay attention! Since fuckin’ kindergarten with this shit. Stop that tapping! Don’t look at that. Don’t touch her. Don’t unwind that paper clip and jab the metal end into your thumb. Don’t pick up that stapler and pry it apart, don’t stick your fingers in to wiggle the machinery inside—

  His answer was to release the spring, let the stapler’s jaws snap shut with a bang that made the teacher jump. Or the counselor. The therapist. The private educational consultant his parents were paying two hundred an hour to figure out what was wrong with him. Old ladies and hippie dudes tryna be down. They kept asking why couldn’t he be quiet and good and listen, and he just sat there counting down the seconds, thinking he’d die happy if they’d let him get outside.

  For example. A few weeks before he got arrested, he got called into the principal’s office, just because he’d called his asshole math teacher an asshole. In the office he sat and drummed his pencil on Ms. Norton’s desk. Out the window there were freshman girls traipsing out to lunch, their short, wispy skirts flashing shadows on their thighs, and Ms. Norton, who coulda been hot once but now looked faded in her uglyass tomato suit, clasped her hands like she was begging him for mercy.

  “Please, Damon, tell me what you need to be successful,” she said. “We all want the best for you, Damon. We’re trying to understand, Damon.” Saying his name over and over, like that would prove she knew him.

  His boys who knew him called him Flint. Ryan and Nick—his partners in crime. He loved the motherfuckers. They got how all he wanted, all he needed, was to make something happen. When they were bored, they’d go up the 101 freeway to Novato and take turns lying on the off-ramp, jumping up and running off right before a car sped around the curve, just to feel the rush of it, the way the blood thundered in their ears.