The Most Dangerous Place on Earth

by Lindsey Lee Johnson

  Ms. Norton said, “Damon? Damon? Are you listening to me?”

  He grinned real big because she had no clue what she was up against. He started telling her some bullshit story about his favorite grandpa that just kicked it, but stopped when little clear tears wobbled in her eyes.

  “Oh, Damon,” she told him. “I didn’t know—”

  “Forget it,” he told her. “It doesn’t fuckin’ matter.”

  Okay, he’d done some shit. Like his dad always told him, he was no angel.

  There was that kid in eighth grade. He and Ryan were just fuckin’ with the guy, they didn’t mean anything. Tristan was a freak to begin with, then he wrote that note going after Cally Broderick, who everybody knew was Ryan’s. After it happened, the school came after Damon, but his dad went off on them—threatened to sue the school, the police, anyone in Mill Valley who was gonna accuse his son. Saying Damon had done nothing but act like a normal eighth-grade boy and that he didn’t need to be punished because the other kid couldn’t cope. Plus, it didn’t even happen on school property, so what right did they have? He was only saving his own face, but the school backed down. The worst thing that happened to Damon was he didn’t have to go to school for a week.

  That was how he knew. That nothing could touch him. And if nothing could touch him, then nothing he did mattered.

  Since then, he’d been smoking weed and drinking whatever and for a long time Molly was his jam. It helped him relax. Made his anger melt and transform to love. Love for his friends who partied with him and love for the girls in their silky tank tops and tight jeans, love for the rap on the radio, love for the world. It wasn’t a problem till Ski Week, when he and Nick hosted a function and the cops showed at the wrong fuckin’ time.

  The whole thing was Nick’s idea. He did this thing where he found some bigass mansion somewhere that was empty because the people were selling it, then threw a party there, selling hella tickets to all the kids in Marin. He always made bank.

  This one house sat high on Mount Tamalpais, spying on the San Francisco Bay, and it was on the market for $5 million. The function was Nick’s idea, but when the cops showed, it was Damon outside pissing on the lawn, drunk and high and ecstatic, with the plastic pouch stuffed into his sock. He was having so much fun that he forgot to be afraid. They found the pills in five seconds, hooked the cuffs around his wrists, palmed his head into the back of their black-and-white car. He sat in the cop car and its lights swirled red and blue around the street. He was waiting for Nick to come out in the cuffs, to slide over to make room for his friend’s skinny ass. But Nick was too smart for that. He found a way to disappear. Only Damon took the fall.

  Damon’s dad had a reputation to protect, and he wasn’t tryna have a kid in juvie. That’s why he worked out with the judge that Damon would go to this special rehab place on Mount Tam. After that he’d be golden, as long as he stayed clean.

  When Damon first got to rehab, he was amped. It looked more like a resort hotel than a place to get punished. But as soon as he saw what he’d be doing all day, he thought the jail time woulda been better. At least in juvie he’d just hang out in the yard in his orange jumpsuit or whatever—and the people there would expect him to be what he was, they wouldn’t be all up in his face about changing.

  At rehab, his counselor was this big, bald black dude named Lance, and it took him a minute just to stop laughing about that. But Lance must have known how faggy his name was, because he didn’t get heated about it, just sat back in his swivel chair with one tree-trunk leg crossed wide over the other and scribbled on this yellow notepad he liked to carry around. He must’ve been writing shit about Damon, but Damon didn’t mind. He was used to being sized up—assessed. He’d been assessed so many times his mom had a file cabinet full of little papers all tryna explain to her what her own son was like. She must’ve read them, but it didn’t make a difference. The years kept passing and everything kept going on the same.

  Lance told Damon about these Four Steps to Recovery that they were gonna do.

  “Aren’t there supposed to be like twelve of those?” Damon asked, and Lance grinned.

  “Different program,” he said. “But it’s great you know about that.”

  Lance said the Four Steps were Building Awareness, Finding Support, Learning Vigilance, and Taking Accountability. It sounded like the usual bullshit. Lance said he really believed that Damon could change his life for the better.

  Lance didn’t try to bond with Damon over sports. He didn’t try to impress him with how hard things had been when he was in high school a million years ago. He didn’t ask dumbass questions like most adults did: What’s your favorite subject in school? Aren’t you excited to be a senior next year? Where are you applying to college? Lance didn’t care about that shit. They just talked about whatever. How Tyler, the Creator, was the best emcee since Hova, and how Damon was gonna flip if someone didn’t give him his iPhone and headphones back soon. How the sheets in this place were some common, two-hundred-thread-count shit that chafed your ass at night. How all the food was bunk except the frozen yogurt they brought in every Friday, which, Damon admitted, was pretty bomb.

  “I don’t know, man, I’ve never been much into fro-yo,” Lance said. “It just doesn’t compare to the real stuff.”

  “Jaws!” Damon protested. “That shit is creamalicious, yo.”

  Lance laughed. He told Damon his way of talking was hella inventive, kinda like Shakespeare, which his English teacher tried to make him read sophomore year, like on purpose tryna confuse him.

  “What can’t that dude just talk in fuckin’ English?” Damon said. He waited for Lance’s reaction, thinking maybe he liked Shakespeare and was gonna get pissed off, but Lance just laughed and shook his head, like he didn’t get it either.

  Lance started asking Damon all these questions no one else ever had—not Why couldn’t he keep still? but What did he care about? and What did he want his life to be? He wanted to know other things too, like what Damon liked to smoke and what he liked to drink and what was happening in his life, and in his head, in the instant before he decided to take a hit. He wanted to know how Damon felt at school, what he thought when teachers yelled at him, and why he’d chosen Ryan and Nick as his crew. How he felt about getting arrested while his best friend got off.

  “That’s just Nick,” Damon insisted. “He’s always doing some cutty James Bond shit like that. It’s not personal.”

  Finally, Lance asked how Damon felt about his family. His brother, Max, six years older, who’d left the house at age eighteen and promised never to come back. His mom. His dad.

  “Why do you gotta know about that asshole?” Damon said, and plucked a Bic pen off the desk and pried its little plastic handle till it broke.

  After a few weeks, him and Lance went outside to hike in the hills around the center. It felt good, after being stuck inside all those beige rooms. It was kinda crazy and Damon wasn’t about to admit it out loud, but by that point Lance was his boy. He liked the way Lance laughed big and loud when Damon said something funny, how Lance leaned back in his chair and rubbed his palm over his shiny bald head like he was tryna get a genie to pop out. He liked how Lance’s voice was this low, rumbly drawl that vibrated over the airwaves to Damon and made him chill. How he was built like a NFL lineman but didn’t need to talk about it. How he didn’t give a fuck if Damon messed with the little office shit on his desk, the paper clips or staples or whatever that those teachers were always so worried about. And when he asked Damon questions, he actually cared to listen to the answers.

  They hiked along a trail that humped over round hills covered with tall yellow grass. Trees popped up along the edges of the hills, and beyond them a few thin clouds stretched over the San Francisco Bay. The pale blue sky was everywhere. It made him squint and bow his head. His blue nylon basketball shorts hung past his knees and the sun hit the brown-blond hairs on his shins and made them shine. As he stomped down the trail of packed brown dirt, dry
grasses slapped his legs. The Timberland boots Lance had loaned him laced up to his ankles and made his feet look bigger than they were and basically he was cool with that. There were no girls there, anyway, so it didn’t really matter how he looked.

  When the trail narrowed, Lance told Damon to go ahead. As they walked, the air was so quiet he could hear Lance breathing behind him. Their feet beat a rhythm on the dirt. Damon’s thumb twitched for his iPhone, but his iPhone wasn’t there.

  Birds talked to each other over the sky and the wind rustled all the dried-up spears of yellow grass and whispered through the leaves and branches of the green trees ahead. Every now and then something invisible shivered the grass—a snake or a mouse or whatever. The hills looked all meadow-like and still up on the surface, but there was all kinds of shit going on underneath, down in the dirt and the roots, that most people never bothered to know.

  All that quiet was starting to fuck with his head. “Man, I’m not built for this exercise shit. Think it’s time for some Doritos,” he said, glancing back to grin at his boy.

  Lance smiled but stayed quiet, letting Damon know to do the same. So Damon cracked his knuckles and kept going. He was hot and sweaty now, T-shirt sticking to his chest, sweat in his eyebrows and dripping down the back of his bare neck, where the glossy tag of his shirt flooded and became a cool square pressing on his skin. The muscles of his legs and ass were burning. His feet ached in the arches. His mind buzzed with boredom. In a minute, this endless trail and these invisible bugs humming in his ears and these little grasses swatting his legs were going to start pissing him off.

  Lance had told him once that when he felt like this, he should try to pay attention to his own breath and, like, watch it travel in and out of his body. At first Damon had laughed at this idea, like how did you watch breath that was invisible, but Lance had said, Just use your brain, picture it—like smoke. Damon had smirked at the smoke part but Lance was dead serious on this. Like red-hot smoke going out, cool blue smoke coming in. Hold it in your lungs. Ride it. Watch it. Now let it go. So now, on the trail, Damon tried it. Watched the smoke suck into his nostrils and lungs, caught it there, held it, then watched the smoke stream slowly out.

  He kept on walking and watching his breath. And then he was ready to talk.

  What he told Lance—which he’d never fully told anyone else—was the truth about what his father did to him.

  Damon’s dad was a big shot. Big like Damon, with light blue eyes and light brown eyebrows and light brown hair cropped close to his head. A big-time corporate defense lawyer in San Francisco. He gave thousands of dollars to the school foundations and fire and police groups every year, and went to the charity auctions and bought paintings and spa packages and shit, and got his name printed up on all the little flyers. He was loud and funny and throwing bills and opinions all over the place, and everybody loved him or was scared of him or both.

  The last time it happened was the night before Damon got arrested for Nick’s party.

  When school got out that afternoon, Damon drove by 7-Eleven for a couple bags of Cheetos and Rips and some ninety-nine-cent AriZona Iced Teas. Then he went home, which was a mini-mansion tucked between the freeway and a hill where people let their horses graze. It was early, and his parents were both at work. So he dropped his backpack on the floor and sat down on the leather couch in the great room, emptied his Sevvies bag on the coffee table. He’d opened one of the Cheetos in the car and it was already down to Day-Glo dust. There was dust on his fingers too that he licked off and wiped on the couch. He sat back with his legs spread wide, stayed like that for a minute and ate, sprawled out, enjoying all the space.

  When he was done, he grabbed the second AriZona and went upstairs. Got into his room and flicked the light off, shut the blinds, locked the door behind him. He turned on the TV and Xbox, and scooted his fat leather beanbag chair up to the screen. Then he grabbed the controller, upped the sound until it felt like he was sitting inside it.

  The game he was working on was Call of Duty: Black Ops II. In the middle of the screen were two white hands holding a handgun. His hands. His gun. He started stalking through some farm that was on fire. All charred-out barns and shit and darkness. Jolly cowboy music echoed in the background. Then zombies started coming out of shadows to veer toward him, eyes blazing. One came too close, so he swapped his gun for a knife and stabbed its chest. It groaned and screamed. Then another zombo came toward him and he stopped it with three gunshots: pop-pop pop. Blood spurted out of the hole where its head was.

  When his mom had got him this game, she’d asked him, Was it like Mario. He said Sure, but of course that was a jaws. In this game, there weren’t gold coins you got or anything. The only point was not to die.

  The screen changed. Now he was in a town that was set on fire just like the farm had been. The air all dark and smoky. Ground torn up. Fancy burned-out cars and broken windows. Flames jumping up everywhere. Embers hanging in the air like fireflies, and horror-movie music swelling all around him. A girl zombo came at him waving its arms around like some hella fucked-up dance routine. He shot its face and blood washed the screen dark red. Another one got too close and swiped him. He fell on the pavement and dropped his gun and this cheery-ass song started blasting.

  “Motherfucker!” he yelled. But it didn’t really matter. He got another life. Same busted town, but the zombos in this one started running at him. If he capped them in the head, they’d die faster. And sometimes the head exploded and shot fireworks of blood and bone into the sky and for a minute he felt hella raw.

  Damon’s problem was, his dad was so fuckin’ loud he could hear him even with the game turned up as high as it would go. Whatever he did, there was always his dad pushing through, hollering the same old shit, like Get your ass downstairs.

  Damon paused the game and went down.

  His parents were waiting in the great room. His mom in an armchair and his dad at the foot of the staircase in black suit pants and a shirt the color of fogged-in sky. A glass in his hand—rye whiskey, had to be. His tie was off. How many had he had already? Two? Three?

  “You want to explain yourself?” his dad said, pointing to the coffee table where there were crinkled-up Cheeto bags and cellophane, an empty AriZona can, little twisted papers from the Rips.

  Damon shrugged.

  “Don’t be an asshole,” his dad said.

  “Fuckin’ chill,” Damon muttered.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s right nothing. You better believe it nothing.”

  Damon stuck his hand in his pocket. His Swiss army knife was there like always, and he flicked its small blade up and down, sliding his thumb against the steel. He said, “Yes, sir, Drill Sergeant, sir.”

  “That’s all you have to say to me?”

  “The fuck else do you want?”

  “What do I want?” his dad said. “What do I want?” Then he started yelling shit Damon wasn’t tryna hear. How Damon was always pissing everybody off, how his dad had given him everything a kid could want and he’d done nothing, not one single thing, to deserve it. How he was the luckiest kid on the planet and he didn’t even know it. “And I want to know. When are you going to grow up? Learn to act like a goddamn human being?”

  Damon’s mom stood up, crossed her arms. “Hey. Cut it out, you two.”

  Damon’s dad said, “How much money have I wasted already, trying to set you straight?”

  “What are you even talking about?” Damon said. What was money? It came, it went. It always came again. “Who gives a shit?”

  “Okay, smartass.” Damon’s dad waved his glass around the great room—plush leather furniture, huge stone fireplace, giant-sized windows with fancy silk curtains—as if Damon gave a shit about any of it. “You like your life? How bout that Xbox? Those ridiculous clothes?” His eyes moved over Damon’s oversized baby-blue T-shirt, his jeans sagging over his crotch, his coordinating blue and green Adidas. “For Chrissake,
why don’t you pull your pants up for once. The world doesn’t need to see your ass hanging out twenty-four/seven.”

  Damon glanced at his mom, but she ducked her head, studied her fingernails like she’d just now noticed they were there.

  “Why, so I could look like you? Fuckin’ fatass.”

  His dad’s face flared red. His mom stuck her palms up, like I surrender. She went into the kitchen and the next sound was water blasting in the sink.

  His dad went and clattered his glass on the marble-topped bar; the ice cubes cracked and smacked together. He came back. Stepped to Damon to show how he was still the bigger man. “You will not talk to me that way. Not in my house.”

  “Your house is a prison cell with curtains,” Damon said, getting in his face. “I can’t wait to get out of here. Fuck, you ever wonder why Max hasn’t been back here once since graduation? Not one time? You think that’s fuckin’ normal?”

  For an awful moment Damon’s dad just stared. Then he laughed, hard, mirthless. “You think high school is so hard?” he said. “See what it’s like out there for one day, you little shit. One fucking day.”

  It was evening, and out the window the palominos grazed Horse Hill against a wide and purpling sky. Their necks, silhouetted, stretched for grass, and there were the beautiful swirls of their tails as they flicked the air.

  “Anytime, asshole,” Damon said, and pulled his face into the fuck-you grin he knew his dad couldn’t stand.

  That was all it took. His dad threw a punch and Damon jerked back. The fist flew past his face, sloppy. Then his dad checked his balance and bobbed back, fists up. He bent his knees, hunching his shoulders like this shit was official. Damon’s muscles twitched to squeeze his hands to fists, but he held them still.

  “Get your fists up,” his dad said, “what’s wrong with you?”

  Damon ground his teeth. Blood throbbed at his temples. He stretched one hand and closed it. With the other he thumbed the cool edge of the knife in his pocket. And it took all his energy to hold himself still in that moment. To pay attention. He knew there was only one way out of this. Like that dumb song they made him memorize in preschool—Can’t go over it, can’t go under it, gotta go through it. Why was he thinking of that now?