Molly Nicoll: Ryan, have you spoken to Damon? Is he all right? Who let him start drinking again?
Molly Nicoll: Sorry if you are too shaken up to answer questions. I’m just worried about you. All of you.
Molly Nicoll: What can I do to help?
Molly Nicoll: Love you guys no matter what. I’m here for you.
Molly Nicoll: Let me know!!!
THE DANCER
Emma Fleed danced alone. A vast stage. Shafts of light beamed against her body, warming her face and dazzling her sequined skirt. It was a ballet she did not remember learning, yet her body eased into the movements like it had known them all her life. Oddly, she heard no music, just a steady humming through her body, through the room. The audience was a red-black sea beyond the footlights. She rolled onto the boxes of her toe shoes, rose en pointe. Driving her toes into the floor, she steadied her ankles and flexed her calves and stretched out of her feet, arms above her head, until it felt like floating. Then she stepped and leapt, splitting her legs in the air, and landed with such lightness that only she could hear the soft thud of her slippers on the wood. She set, pirouetted, spotting a point beyond the lights. Rising and spinning, holding her head in perfect stillness before whipping around at the last possible second. Applause shook the room. Her center was holding. Her legs were strong. In this moment, she was exactly where she was meant to be.
Then she woke up. She squinted against stark white light. The air was cold, antiseptic.
She turned her ankles, one and then the other, and they were intact and yet something was not right. The world was not the world she went to sleep in. There was the ambient clatter of metal instruments, and a machine that measured something—possibly her heart—beeped randomly.
A silver-haired doctor—white coat, blue scrubs—approached her bed. A nurse followed, took Emma’s hand and flipped her wrist, pressed two fingers to her pulse and there was the strange urgency of her blood as it throbbed against this stranger’s skin.
The doctor peered into her face. His eyelids sagged, and pink webs fractured the whites of his eyes.
“Emma? Can you hear me?” He spoke like he was announcing something to the room. “This is Dr. Kopech. Do you know where you are?”
No, she did not. The last thing she remembered was lying down, the backseat of a moving car. A beat that shook her shoulders. Voices fighting above her. Hands moving under her skirt, or just the memory of hands, sliding under her underwear’s elastic seam, her head on someone’s lap and smells of laundry detergent and leather and beer. She was trying to be where she was but the world was falling from her, she was dropping through darkness and the music pulsing harder in her bones and all she wanted in her life was to be allowed to go to sleep. She was in the car with other people—friends or almost-friends—and now she wondered, What had happened to them?
Her mother appeared at the side of her bed. “Emma?” she said, stroking her hand as though afraid to break it. (A plastic tube snaked from the vein.) “Baby?” Her mother’s body was small and swaddled in deep-green pashmina. Her mascara washed to shadows at the edges of her eyes. The light showed every hairline wrinkle in her face. It sallowed her cheeks and forehead, the green emitting from the skin as if this was truth, what had always lain beneath.
Then her father was there, in faded plaid, tall, unshaven, on the other side. Unshaven, hunched over—he was not himself. She should comfort him.
The doctor squirted gel onto his palms—Emma swooned, for it reeked of alcohol, a familiar, sickening stench. He rested one palm on Emma’s shoulder and the hand was heavy, cold. “How are you feeling?”
She nodded because it was all she could do. She wanted to ask how much time had passed, but her lips didn’t have the energy, her tongue lay slack in her mouth. Her throat ached. Her head ached. Her feet under the starched sheets felt distant and strange.
Her dad lifted her hand and clasped it between his palms. His hands were big and hot and he was holding her too hard. She wanted to pull away but he kept squinting and not talking, so she didn’t. Her mom reached out and tucked Emma’s hair behind her ear. Emma flinched. She didn’t mean to. There were too many hands and she felt they had been everywhere, all over her body, while she had lain asleep.
The doctor made his speech. It went on and on without inflection, like something he’d rehearsed the night before. The ambulance had brought her in at 1:55 a.m. (Ambulance—she did not remember.) The CT showed internal bleeding, and they had operated in order to locate the source. (Surgery—she did not remember.) Her spleen had fractured, and they had made the repair; they did not know, yet, whether it would be necessary to remove it. (Spleen—she had seen an illustration in her physiology textbook: a purplish, pulpy organ filled with branching veins. It had something to do with blood, was that it?)
Her mom’s breath caught on the phrase remove it. “I still don’t understand, what does the spleen do?” she said. “Doesn’t she need that?”
The doctor said, “It’s amazing what the human body can learn to live without.” The doctor said that, as he’d told her parents earlier, in addition to the fractured spleen Emma had a cracked pelvis and a concussion. There would be rounds of antibiotics, exercises, rehabilitation.
Emma’s mother asked, “When can she dance again?”
The doctor told them Emma was lucky. She had not been wearing a seatbelt, and she might have been thrown from the car. She might have died. She might have gone straight through the windshield. She might have died. Had she been sober, her body rigid, she might not have absorbed the blow so well. She might have died. Through the fog of medication Emma tried to understand this.
—
Emma was sixteen and special, her teachers said: gifted. All week, her life coiled tightly around this gift—dance rehearsals, training, turning out, stretching, sitting in Chinese splits, legs spread, chest pressed to the floor and cheek turned to the waxed wood, or cycling through positions at the barre as her ballet teacher, Miss Celeste, paced the studio, pausing to press hips and rib cages into alignment, to correct the inelegant angles of arms, the placement of fingers.
Emma’s feet were her true gift. God-given. Strong and arched and perfect. Cracked and bloodied and bruised from years of toe shoes. Every day, she wrapped them in tape and lamb’s wool. She grew thick calluses on her toe pads and heels. Still, her feet swelled. Corns formed between her toes. In time, the corns became ulcers, seeping yellow pus. Her toenails thickened. Skin hardened in the nail beds. Sometimes a nail broke off and the exposed skin cracked, dark blood pooling in the pink silk of her toe shoe. Bunions formed and bruised, sometimes blackened. The skin blistered. The joints of the toes inflamed. Once, she had broken a metatarsal in the middle of a recital—a crack, a flare of pain—but this had not stopped her from dancing.
On weekends, though—endowed with that most dangerous of teenage possessions, free time—she released. And this, among her classmates, was how she was known. Party girl, fun girl. Down for a good time. Miss Celeste told Emma that her body was a temple, but Emma did not believe this. She believed it was an instrument: it did what she asked it to do. Performed as required. She wouldn’t coddle it. Indulge it, yes. Pleasure was the purest of pursuits: she was not ashamed to want it.
She was slightly chubby for a dancer, she knew, but cute. Compact. When she was a child, other, bigger kids would pick her up and adore her, place her on their laps, treat her as their baby. Her eyes were large and warm and her cheeks permanently plumped by baby fat. They petted her, prized her, fought to determine who might claim her for the hour of recess, for the day, for the term. Not understanding that it worked the other way: she had, in fact, claimed them.
All her life, Emma had lived with her parents in an A-frame in Mount Tamalpais State Park. Slanted roof, tall windows, wood-paneled walls. In the evenings, in the center of her mother’s kitchen, Emma would practice her pirouettes. Spinning past the sunset view of gold, tree-stippled hills—finding her spot on the blue bowl of the Pacific
Ocean beyond. This was a point on which to focus as she spun. A point to return to again and again. And this was what dance had always been for her. The point on which to focus, to stop the world from spinning. What did people do with their lives, she’d often wondered, when they didn’t have that spot?
—
On the second day, Emma opened her eyes to the white light and remembered: Accident. Surgery. Spleen. Pelvis. Damaged. Lucky.
Trapped. Cut off.
In the hospital room she lay alone, her door cracked to the hallway, rubber soles of strangers squeaking past. She wanted to know where her parents were, what had happened to the others in the car, what had happened to her phone. She sat up, opening her mouth to shout. But her body shrieked in pain that shut her lungs, and she fell back against the pillows, closing her eyes and evening her breath until the pain’s pitch lowered to a deep and steady moan.
The room’s ubiquitous plastic radiated a faint artificial smell. Like the Vacaville Walmart where she and Abigail Cress had stopped last summer on their way to Abigail’s Lake Tahoe cabin—the store a monolith that Emma’s mother forbade her to visit (its owners were “those big-corporate, human-rights-violating, air-polluting jerks”) and which Abigail’s mother simply dismissed as “that nightmare.” Emma and Abigail had wound through the aisles of flimsy melamine furniture and tacky polyester clothes, clinging to each other as they giggled in fascination and horror at this newly discovered yet essentially unknowable corner of the universe.
Where was Abigail now? A memory returned, a bright balloon she grasped for as it floated past:
At Elisabeth Avarine’s party, Emma had gone into the kitchen in search of more to drink. Bottles and cups littered the counters, and a sour stench drifted from the overstuffed trash bag that slouched below the sink.
Abigail had followed her. “Do you think you should?” she asked.
Emma shrugged. She found a partially full handle of vodka on the counter and unscrewed the cap. Sniffing it, she scrunched up her nose: it was cheap stuff, like medicine. Still she poured most of what was left into a red plastic cup, then added Sprite until the liquid foamed and shimmered at the rim.
“Why do you let him do this to you?” Abigail said.
“Let who do what?” Emma said, and drank. The burn slid down her throat and warmed her stomach. She felt steady, then a pleasant dip, like the first drop of a roller coaster.
“Seriously,” Abigail insisted. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”
“Dude. Are you my mom?”
“I’m just saying.”
“Everything’s fine.”
“I know. I just think—”
“Seriously, Abby. Fucking get over it, okay?”
“Excuse me?”
She went back to the bottle. “Why don’t you have a drink and, like, relax for once in your life?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” Emma said, refilling her cup.
In the living room, lounging on white couches, Ryan’s friends were glancing at her, smirking. Damon Flintov said, “Yo Ry, did you just get some ballerina ass?” and Ryan shrugged. The freshman girls were back; they glommed on to him like metal shavings to a magnet, and not one of them understood him the way she did.
Emma didn’t care. Dance was the real thing in her life, the core of it. School was something to do beforehand. The weekend was the way to unwind after. And Ryan Harbinger was only a “distraction” (so Miss Celeste would say), a “harmless crush” (so her mother believed), or an “idiotic, misogynistic waste of time” (so Abigail told her, whenever she found out that Emma and Ryan had hooked up again). He was most certainly not a boyfriend.
Abigail flipped her middle finger at Ryan and his friends. “He’s such an asshole,” she said.
“So what,” Emma said.
“I’m just saying. You deserve better.”
The vodka was gone, so Emma found a fresh bottle. She thought about the cup but why bother. She pressed the bottle to her lips.
“I’m just saying, you can’t, like, expect these guys to give you respect. They want what they want and the truth is they don’t give a shit about us. So you have to protect yourself, Em. I don’t want to see you get your heart broken. Especially not by an immature asshole like Ryan Harbinger.” Abigail paused, crossed her arms. “And look, I’m sorry, I really don’t think you need another drink!” She grabbed at the bottle in Emma’s hands.
“Oh my God, Abby!” Emma jerked back, and the vodka sloshed onto her wrist. “You fucked one teacher. That doesn’t make you an adult!”
Only in the silence following this outburst did Emma realize she had yelled. Around them the silence spread outward in slow, awful waves. And everyone—whether milling in the kitchen, playing flip cup in the dining room, lounging in the living room, or huddling in the doorway to the deck—stopped and turned to stare.
Abigail blinked at Emma, a permanent hurt in her small gray eyes.
“Fuck,” Emma said, dropping the vodka bottle on the counter. “Abby. I didn’t mean—”
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Abigail said evenly.
“I’m sorry.” She didn’t know what to say. “I just meant—”
“You know what?” Abigail said. “Fuck you, Em, okay? Find your own ride home.”
—
Emma’s parents returned to the hospital room bearing cafeteria coffee and strained smiles. Their anxiety emanated from their skin. It flowed outward like the electricity in textbook illustrations and made Emma squirm in her bed, her pelvis yelping in protest. (That was what it was—a pelvis. She was never so aware of the presence of a bone. Of its precise location within her center, where Miss Celeste said she derived all her power—not from the legs, but from the core. Make yourself as light as a bird, Emma. It is up to you to lift yourself up.) She wanted to go to rehearsal. It was torture to lie there, flexing and pointing her toes under the thin, tight sheets, with nothing to do but think. She wanted her phone, the portal to life outside this room. She wanted her phone, her missed texts, her Facebook, her friends.
Her parents answered her questions with questions of their own:
“The other kids are fine, sweetheart. Tell us, please, what do you remember?”
“Why did you get in that boy’s car?”
“Did you know that he was drinking?”
“We always told you to call us if you needed a ride home—even if you had been drinking. Were you scared to call us? Did you think you’d get in trouble?”
“Honey, why didn’t you call?”
“Honey, tell us, why did you get in that car?”
She had no answer for them. What she remembered of that moment they could not possibly want to hear:
She was puking at the feet of the redwood trees that lined Elisabeth Avarine’s driveway. Cold sweat broke on her forehead, and although the rain had stopped, the trees dripped on the back of her neck. The air smelled of wet pavement. Someone was holding her hair back. Pulling her up, leading her away from the house. Had her by the arm and was guiding her out toward the street, into the dark and the wet. She didn’t want to. She wanted to lie down, to sleep. The earth reeled beneath her and the house was slanting sideways, tilting on its stilts.
“Come on, hurry, you have to get out of here,” said the boy who held her triceps in his grip.
She dropped her head on his chest. “I just wanna, let’s sit here a minute.” Let her weight sag against his body, pulling him down. “Let’s sit and look at the stars and just rest. Okay?”
The clouds had passed over and stars strained to blink between the redwoods. They were deep inside that dark and winding canyon; branches shielded much of the sky.
“You have to go,” the boy said, his voice panicked.
She laughed. The laughter rolled over her body in waves that picked up speed and power until she felt she would drown beneath them. She was drowning already, doubled over now, gasping for air. (A boy had drow
ned once, or almost drowned, in the Valley Middle School swimming pool as the rest of the eighth grade had watched—was that right? His fat arms stirring the water, blond head pulsing frantically under another boy’s hand? Was this a true memory, or only a trick of her mind?)
—
After a week of quiet, a nurse knocked on her open door. “Emma? You have a visitor.”
“Come in,” Emma called, relieved. She propped up on her elbows, gritting her teeth through the now-familiar pain, prepared to apologize as soon as Abigail appeared.
But it was Elisabeth Avarine who followed the nurse into her room. Elisabeth was model-tall and perfect, but slouched when she walked. Miss Celeste would have pushed her shoulders to the wall, tipped her chin up with two fingers, told her, Posture, darling, posture. Who will stand you up in this world if you will not do it yourself?
“How are you feeling?” Elisabeth asked.
“Okay, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I know. Still.” She glanced at the monitor by Emma’s head. “Is it okay in here?”
“I guess. The nurses are nice. The food is fucking foul.”
Elisabeth smiled. There was an awkward pause as she looked around the room; she seemed to be searching for something to say. Finally she asked brightly, “Who else has come to visit?”
Emma thought of Abigail, Ryan, Nick Brickston, Dave Chu, Jonas Everett, Lexie Carlton—her circle of friends was wide. She knew they loved her. She hadn’t heard from any of them yet. This thought caught in her throat; she shook her head. “What’s going on at school? What did I miss?”
“You know.”
“Did Damon get in trouble? They told me everyone else was okay.”
“He’s in jail, I think. The police came to my house—they had all these questions—I didn’t know what to tell them.”
“Did your mom flip her shit?”
“It was pretty bad. But good, too, in a way.”
The Most Dangerous Place on Earth Page 22