The Most Dangerous Place on Earth

by Lindsey Lee Johnson

  The parking lot was rimmed by trees, but the convertible sat in full sunlight. The heat made her elbows itch. Her seat was glossy and hot to the touch, and the white leather perforated by tiny dots; the pattern blurred her vision when she stared at it too long. She hoped no one would notice her there. None of her friends had come through on their promises to visit, and she didn’t know how people from school would react to seeing her. Nor was she sure what she wanted to say to them. She wore pink Victoria’s Secret sweatpants and a black cotton tank top that absorbed the heat. She had oversized sunglasses and ponytailed hair. No makeup. She found a lip gloss in her purse and dabbed it on in the rearview mirror. Her skin looked sickly, as if the hospital’s white light had seeped into the pores.

  The stillness hurt. She tilted her seat back and raised her hips, pushed against the leather to ease the pressure on her pelvis. With every adjustment, hot knives stabbed at her core. She kept rearranging her body in the seat but she wasn’t dulling the pain, only shifting it from place to place. She was sweating under her arms and there was a strip of it along her belly, a wet line through the black cloth. Her hot-pink bra strap tangled in the skinny black strap of the tank top, and she wondered, for the first time ever, if it mattered that the bra strap showed. If this said something essential about her. If it was true, after all, that she was what they said. Slut. Cumbucket. Victim.

  Her life had now been split. There was the girl waiting alone in this open-air car, roasting in the sunshine of a June afternoon in Mill Valley. Then there was the girl on the Internet, the girl in the pictures.

  Fifteen minutes passed, and her dad did not return. She picked up her phone and texted:

  Dad where R U? Boilling to death out here!!

  She waited. Of course he didn’t answer. Parents could be counted on to respond to texts about thirty percent of the time, and often hours or days late or right in the middle of class.

  Then, across the parking lot, an army of her peers spilled onto the pavement. She hadn’t realized it was lunchtime. Crazy how she’d been out of school for only two weeks and discovered the rest of the world went on during those eight hours. Strange how she’d already forgotten the rhythm of classes, the regular running of bells. They were headed her way.

  Emma watched as the kids crossed the lot. She knew most everyone. Even the kids she didn’t know most certainly knew her. But the ones who knew her before may have forgotten that person and replaced her with the girl on the Internet, the girl in the pictures. This thought made her sick: she was the girl to be leered at or pitied or defended or mocked. The piece of news. The hashtag. The girl that some adults were condemning outright. Holding her up as a symbol of “What Has Gone Wrong with Our Kids.”

  They had said it on Twitter, on Facebook, on blogs: Emma Fleed was a rich girl. A privileged child for whom this whole town had been orchestrated so that her life might be easy and safe. Whose tragedies were petty and self-inflicted. Avoidable, if:

  She hadn’t stepped into that car.

  She hadn’t had so much to drink.

  She hadn’t danced in the living room.

  She hadn’t dressed in a skirt.

  She hadn’t gone to that party with a good friend to watch her but stayed at that party alone.

  A girl like Emma, the people determined, had no claim on heartbreak. She ought to be counting her blessings.

  Just last month, Emma’s English teacher had asked her, during a “reflection period,” But why do you think those children ended up in Rwanda and you ended up here? What if you had been born there and they had been born here? And Emma had stopped texting long enough to cock her eyebrow at the teacher, like, What did that even mean? Why was she in Mill Valley and not Rwanda?

  “Because this is where my parents live?” she’d said. Was she supposed to feel bad about the life she was born into? Was she supposed to go live in Rwanda? Or was she just supposed to know? That she could just as easily have ended up anywhere else. That it could just as easily have been some other girl sitting in the back of this shining Mercedes, watching her friends travel past her in packs she last week belonged to and now sat apart from, wondering, Am I a victim? Am I a slut?

  —

  Emma couldn’t sit in that open convertible—exposed, pathetic, trapped—while all of Valley High paraded past. What if people stopped to talk to her? What if they didn’t?

  She’d taken her painkillers. She’d practiced walking with the physical therapist in the hospital. She thought she was strong enough.

  She pushed open the car door. Reached into the backseat (stabbing pains in her gut and hips; she gritted her teeth), grabbed her crutches and lifted them over the edge, stood them on the asphalt, leaned against the car. Then she turned, clutched her thigh, and lifted her leg out, setting her foot on the ground. Every movement hurt. She stopped, breathed until the knives relented. She reached for the crutches and pulled herself up, dropped her weight on the supports under her arms. The pain was a shock. She fell forward on her crutches and the world washed in black for a second. She had not lost consciousness. She blinked the sun out of her eyes. Breathed in and out, in and out, until she had the strength to move again.

  Now she saw that the crowds had passed, and heads turned back to stare as she swooned on her feet. Freshmen mostly: nobody she could allow to see her fall on the asphalt, or drop back into that car, or cry. There was nothing left to do but to lift her chin, to feign a sense of purpose, to hobble with as much dignity as she could muster toward the fluorescent bustle of the grocery store. She had to find her father, and get out.

  Emma’s former friend Cally Broderick lounged with the beach kids on stone benches around the entrance to the store, their faces to the sun and eyes shielded by Ray-Bans. They were, as usual, in some other dimension and it was easy to avoid them as she went inside. There, the mood was jovial, frantic. Kids everywhere, shouting, laughing. Cutting lines that snaked back through the aisles, angling for position. Clustering at the deli counter, behind which middle-aged ladies in white aprons cupped their ears, straining to hear shouted orders. Boys strolled around with their fists in bags of Cheetos, cellophane crackling. Girls huddled together, clutching tubs of sushi, gazing into iPhones. Talking to each other, texting people elsewhere. They had only forty minutes before they would be locked up for the afternoon. They had to cram their lunches quickly, their socializing too. They had to find out what was happening before they were cut off from each other again, corralled in classrooms, forced to text half-blind with iPhones hidden in their laps. Then there were scattered adults who, like Emma, had forgotten that it was the lunch hour, who edged around the crowds, wary as gazelles while skirting a pride of lions.

  Emma searched for her father’s head above the crowd. Two freshman girls by the soda case saw her and giggled, huddled over their phones. Then. It was as subtle as the ripples from a cast stone: around the store, phones trilled and were pulled from pockets, one by one, eyes scanned texts, eyes lifted to follow Emma as she passed, then looked away when she stared back.

  She shouldn’t have tried to walk so far. With every step, her core seized up. She kept moving, breathed through it as Miss Celeste had taught her to do, knowing she had underestimated the power of this pain.

  “Emma Fleed!”

  Emma turned toward the older woman’s voice, a familiar rasp that she could not exactly place. Neither could she place the image of the woman rushing toward her—fat and freckled with frizzed red hair, enrobed in a peacock-printed blouse whose wispy arms fanned out like wings. But when Emma saw the ribbon pinned to the woman’s blouse—royal blue, positioned just above her heart—she knew.

  The pain at her core cooled to dread. She had known Tristan Bloch’s mother in middle school—she came to school so often that everyone had—but hadn’t said a word to her since Tristan jumped from the bridge. She wondered if Mrs. Bloch blamed her—Emma’s name was on the Facebook page, she had thought the comments were funny, she had been only thirteen years old.


  “How are you feeling, hon?” Tristan’s mother’s face up close was broad and furred with translucent hairs. Her eyes were naked blue and needed liner; they had the gloss of tears though she wasn’t crying. “I read about what happened.”

  Tristan’s mother’s breath smelled of the dregs of black tea and honey. Emma imagined her alone at a broad kitchen table, the mug between her palms. She forced herself to smile, to speak. “Okay. Thanks.”

  All around them people were stopping and staring, but Tristan’s mother went on—Emma guessed she was used to it. “Should you really be trying to walk this soon, sweetheart? What did the doctors say? How are your parents holding up? I’ve been leaving messages for your mom, wondering if there’s anything at all that I can do….”

  Tristan’s mother’s voice seemed to be growing louder. Emma was desperate to run. Instead she hunched on her crutches, the supports biting into her armpits, and leaned on her right hip with her left foot cocked, her toe just grazing the ground. She shifted back and the hot knives stabbed at her core. She gripped the metal handles of her crutches, bearing her weight in her shoulders. As Tristan’s mother talked, Emma glanced over her shoulder. Everyone in Mill Valley, it seemed, had crammed into this crush of checkout lines—where was her father?

  Tristan’s mother worried her eyebrows, tilted her head. “Oh, honey,” she said. Her eyes traced Emma from head to toe, and Emma tried to read the expression on her face. Judgment? No. Pity. The face that everyone had made for Tristan Bloch, after he was dead.

  Emma leaned on her left crutch and yanked up her tank top, which had dipped to reveal a slice of hot-pink bra. Needles of pain all over. Then Tristan’s mother reached out, closed her plump, dry palm over Emma’s fist. Her skin was unbearably soft.

  Instinctively Emma pulled back, but Tristan’s mother gripped her harder. Insisted on the intimacy. Shaking Emma’s knuckles for emphasis, she said, “If you need someone to talk to, a friend, if you need anything—”

  Emma glanced around, looking anywhere but into Tristan’s mother’s pitying, pitiable face. Accidentally she caught the eye of a man her dad’s age who hovered behind the candy display, and on his scruffed face a smile flickered to life. A sickness centered in her gut and pulsed out. Did he know? Had he seen?

  Emma was still trapped by Tristan’s mother when Ryan Harbinger strode through the automated doors. Nick Brickston shuffled in behind him. She wondered where Damon Flintov was before remembering. Juvie. She tried to conjure it: jumpsuits, steel bars, bulletproof glass. But it was an unimaginable thing—like falling off the face of the earth. Had she been the one to push him over?

  The boys came nearer. Emma pulled away from Tristan’s mother. “I have to—I have to go,” she said.

  “Are you okay?” Tristan’s mother said. “Are you sure?”

  Emma hobbled back as fast as she was able. “I’m—thank you. I’m sorry.”

  She turned, and found herself face-to-face with Ryan. Behind him, Nick trained his gaze on the floor.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Oh,” Ryan said. “Hey.”

  “What are you guys doing here?”

  “They took my car. It won’t last, they don’t want to drive my ass around. I thought you were—”

  “I was. They just let me out. I’m going—”

  “Cool. How are you—”

  “I’m heading home now. We just stopped to get some—”

  “That’s good.”

  “My dad’s here, somewhere—”

  “Yeah. Oh.” Ryan glanced over his shoulder.

  “Do you think—?”

  “Um. Yo. I’ve got a—” Ryan pulled his phone from his pocket and scanned the screen. “Yeah, sorry. We gotta go.” He nodded to Nick, who nodded back. “I hope you, you know, feel better, or whatever,” Ryan said. Then they turned and walked away.

  This hurt, and yet she understood. They did not want to be associated with her suffering. They did not want to be reminded. Two weeks earlier, she might have done the same thing. It was something she might have done, for example, to Tristan Bloch, whose love note to Cally Broderick and the Facebook comments they’d all made about it had been so riotously funny up until the moment that they weren’t.

  Tristan’s mother had walked away and Emma stood like an island in the middle of the store, shifting from foot to foot. Kids clustered up, cut lines, held hands, shared sips of soda, knocked into one another, play-fought, but around her they carved a wide circle.

  From the cover of a magazine a pink headline blared: KIM KARDASHIAN SEX TAPE SHOCKER. Kim herself, airbrushed to a poreless sheen, gazed sadly out. It seemed to Emma that the star’s humiliation had been perfectly arranged: she was sexy and pretty and perfectly pitiable and you wanted to be her. You hated her and yet you wanted to be her. You thought her life was constricted and her sex tape degrading and yet you saw, behind her tragic eyes, a small, triumphant smile.

  Emma’s humiliation had no glamour. No one wanted it. There was nothing desirable about standing there among her former peers, scraped of makeup, hobbled and hunched and wincing in pain, as eyes darted away from her or lingered too long. It was too painful to move, so she slumped against the magazine rack and waited for her dad to appear or her strength to revive.

  In her body the knives awakened, fierce and fast, rhythmic stabbing at her pelvis and hips and legs, a musical fury that halted her breath. A black curtain dropped over her eyes and lifted. She blinked at the scuffed floor and forced herself to stand upright, to lift her head. Her stomach started churning; acid tickled at the bottom of her throat. She longed to collapse on the linoleum, to drop into oblivion. She did not. She stood on her crutches and breathed in and out. She knew how to control her breath, and she had always commanded her body; she would command it now. She would hold herself up. Who will do it if you will not do it yourself? Miss Celeste had always told her. She held herself up until the black curtain dangled at the edge of her eyes, threatening to fall and take her under, held herself until, at the very last second, mercifully, her dad appeared and scooped her up, his strong arms underneath her, and looped her arms around his neck and she crumpled against him, crying into his flannel with embarrassment and hurting and relief, and yes, she thought, as her world set once more to spinning, she would let her father hold her, for a little while more.

  MISS NICOLL

  As Molly stood outside the principal’s office in her Fresno State sweatshirt and skinny jeans, it was impossible not to feel like a teenager in trouble.

  As a high school freshman, she’d been sent to the office of the humorless Principal Boyd for the sin of reading in class—worse still, reading books unapproved by the Fresno Unified School District. Her father had been called, and had seethed through the meeting, waiting till they were alone to unleash: Jesus, Moll, why can’t you just do what they tell you? Molly had apologized, though she didn’t believe she’d done anything wrong. Wasn’t reading the whole aim of school? Oh, how adults missed the point—how they seemed to do it on purpose, to delight in their obtuseness—over and over again!

  She knew she’d been summoned now because of Elisabeth Avarine’s party. She was sick about it; since seeing the posts online Sunday morning, she’d hardly eaten or slept. She’d spent the day refreshing her browser, hoping for new information that would somehow make the previous night’s stories untrue, so that she would not have to believe that the funny, friendly, utterly human kids she talked to in class each day were the same as the heartless avatars she’d seen online. Nick hadn’t called back; the kids hadn’t answered her Facebook posts. She guessed they were embarrassed to face her. She was embarrassed to face them too. But this all felt like her own private horror. What did Katie Norton want?

  Molly knocked on the office door. “Come in!” came the call in response, and she stepped inside.

  The office was overstuffed, cluttered, and forcedly cheerful: among the too-large furniture and stacks of files were globes of pink and purple roses placed in what see
med like strategic disarray around the room. Katie Norton sat behind the desk smiling tightly. Across from her, straightening a sheaf of papers, was Beth Firestein.

  “Molly, thanks so much for coming.” Katie shifted the roses on her desk. There was a royal blue awareness ribbon pinned to her lapel. What was it for? It seemed not the time to ask.

  “Of course. Why did you want to see me?”

  Katie gestured toward the seat beside Beth’s. “Why don’t you have a seat?”

  Molly sat, wondering why Beth was even there. Beth looked straight ahead, holding her papers to her chest.

  “First of all,” Katie said, leaning forward to clasp her hands upon the desk, “we want you to know that we recognize your deep engagement with and investment in your students. We appreciate that. We really do.”

  What did this have to do with the party, the accident? And who was we? The administration? Katie Norton and Beth Firestein? Molly forced a smile. “That’s nice to hear. Thanks.”

  “So, we’re coming up on the end of the semester, and I believe constructive feedback is always valuable, even if it isn’t always appreciated at first…” Katie trailed off. She glanced at Beth, then nodded. “Here’s the thing. There have been some questions raised by certain members of the staff, questions about your pattern of behavior. It seems the tone that has been set in your classroom, I mean as far as student learning objectives are concerned, has not been especially productive. It has been suggested, and unfortunately I can’t disagree, that in fact it has not seemed entirely appropriate. And now it has come to our attention that there has been some activity on your part that has been found to be, for lack of a better word, untoward. Isn’t that so, Beth?”

  Still Beth Firestein did not look at Molly. She didn’t say a word.

  Molly stared back at Katie Norton—her gamine haircut, her cheerleader face—and struggled to untangle the maddening grammar of principal-speak: the convoluted scramble of ambiguous vocabulary, the passive construction that obscured any meaning. She still had no idea what this meeting was for, and she wondered if Katie and Beth somehow didn’t know about the weekend’s events—if her colleagues were really that clueless. Finally she asked, “Have I done something wrong?”