The Most Dangerous Place on Earth

by Lindsey Lee Johnson

  “No one’s here to place value judgments,” the principal said.

  “I don’t understand,” Molly said.

  “Katie,” Beth Firestein said, raising her hand, “why don’t you let me take it from here?” And Molly watched, amazed, as the principal nodded and stood and ceded her own office to Beth Firestein, shutting the door quietly behind her.

  Without speaking, Beth took the papers she’d been holding and laid them out, one by one, across the desk. Molly froze. They were screenshots from Facebook, arrayed like evidence, but not the kids’ posts. Hers.

  Molly had known in the abstract that her online comments were public, yet she’d believed that what she and her kids had shared there, like what they had shared in her classroom, was protected somehow. It seemed perfectly obvious but had simply never occurred to her that a person like Beth Firestein would have the means, or even the inclination, to so easily access the students’ world—a world it had taken Molly months to penetrate.

  “What you’ve done here is highly inappropriate,” Beth said. “You know that.”

  Molly stared at the papers, unable to speak.

  “We all feel for the girl who was hurt.” So Beth did know. Her tone was calm and measured; she might have been describing the casualties of Gettysburg or the famine of some distant country, a tragedy too far away to feel. When the trouble was here, it was all around them.

  “Emma Fleed is her name,” Molly said.

  “It’s clear you were affected by her situation.”

  “I’m still affected. We’re all affected, aren’t we?” Molly heard her voice grow strident but didn’t care. “She’s one of our kids. So what are we going to do to help her?”

  “Molly, listen to me now,” Beth said levelly. Her eyes were luminous and dark. “These are not your kids. These are your students. Last year they were someone else’s, next year they’ll be gone. You can’t be their mother. You certainly aren’t their friend. You are the person who gives them grades. And if you go on caring for them in this way, you won’t survive.”

  “But isn’t it our job to care?”

  Beth smiled, pityingly. “Of course not. It’s our job to teach.” When Molly didn’t answer, Beth went on. “I’m going to tell you something that might help you. Several years ago, I was convinced to assist with a tutoring program at the middle school, one of these feel-good endeavors meant to help eighth graders prepare for the rigors of high school. I worked there once or twice a week after school, sitting one-on-one with students and attempting to wring educational value from the insipid assignments their English teachers gave out for homework. It was a dreary project. The lessons were tedious. The students were not quite people yet, not quite cooked. Their problem was not that they were unprepared for high school; their problem was that they were thirteen years old.

  “There was one boy who did not bore me. His teachers told me that he was very sweet and very smart, but somewhat odd. They said that he had trouble remembering to turn in his assignments. I soon learned that he was not at all forgetful, but that he simply chose to pursue passionately what interested him, and to disregard the rest. Although this would have been a disastrous approach to high school, I thought it was an excellent approach to life, and I respected him for it. His teachers would not accept this. They continued to pathologize him. The main problem, his resource teacher claimed, was that he had a hard time ‘fitting in with his core peer group.’ What she meant was that the other kids disliked him. I knew what this was like; I had not been all that popular in school either. I believed this boy was someone who, if he survived his public education, would find some strange and intelligent obsession in college, some strange and intelligent friend, and end up all right. Still, I wanted to help him. I tried to know him better, to talk to him about his life. One day he admitted he was lonely, and I said—it was quite offhand, really—‘Well, why don’t you do something about it?’

  “Three months later, that boy was dead. He had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. They said that he had been tormented by people on the Internet—‘cyberbullies,’ they are called, as if they’re characters in some ridiculous video game. He had written a private letter which his classmates had posted online. They had laughed at his humiliation, berated and insulted him. They told him to shoot himself, and that no one would care if he died. Would you like to know who those classmates were?” Beth paused. Molly could not speak. She felt hollow and ill. She did and did not know who the bullies had been, why Beth was telling her this story now. “They’re your students, Molly. The ones you know so well.”

  —

  Molly stood on the mostly empty front lawn, looking down on the grass and the stucco arches and the slow and steady traffic on the road. White fog shielded half the sky; she squinted against the glare. She thought of the sneers of Damon Flintov on her first day; the daily disdain of Abigail Cress; the smirks of Ryan Harbinger on their seventh consecutive night without homework; the awkwardness of Nick Brickston in her car; the haste with which Calista Broderick had fled from her classroom as soon as she had been allowed. Fled from Molly who had poked and prodded, who had been so painfully desperate to connect. She felt like a character in an old cartoon—having run off the cliff’s edge, glancing down to see the air beneath her feet.

  The afternoon bell rang, signaling the end of her free period and the end of the school day. She headed inside to gather her things. As she walked toward her classroom, the tide of students pushed the other way. She heard and felt but hardly saw them. She did not stop until she’d reached her room. There she grabbed her satchel and sweater and keys, then locked the room and hurried down the back steps to her car. She had to be alone, to think. How could the things that Beth had told her be right, and how could Molly have been so wrong?

  She was stopped at the long red light in front of the school. The kids filled the front lawn; some filed under the arches and spilled onto the sidewalk. A few girls and boys crossed the avenue, the girls tugging down their miniskirts, the boys tugging up their sagging jeans. But most massed in front of the school, huddled in conspiratorial circles, the shells of their backpacks turned toward her. She peered through the windshield; she could not tell the ones she knew from the ones she didn’t know. She might have seen Calista Broderick’s caramel waves of hair; she might have seen Nick Brickston’s narrow shoulders. Prior to this weekend she would have thought she’d know them instantly. Now she could not be sure. She could not be sure of anything. She thought she saw the tide of students ebb, prepare to dissipate. As the light turned green, the circles shifted. The students moved away from her, and she drove on.

  Senior Year

  THE PRETTY BOY

  It should have been Ryan Harbinger’s season. He should have spent his summer at the beach, should have jumped in the Expedition every day after baseball practice, swung by for Nick and Flint, and mobbed over Mount Tam to Stinson Beach. They’d surf or swim or just sprawl on the hot sand and chill as gulls wheeled and cried overhead and the waves shushed them into a kind of trance. Blaze a couple blunts and pass them around and wait for the world to lift from their shoulders, to evaporate, breezes carrying kelp smells and faint sprays of salt. Sun glazing his skin and then burrowing under. He’d feel his cells splitting, molecules dancing. His skin tingling, each breeze raising the fine brown hairs on his arms and legs.

  But in the weeks after the car crash, Ryan suffered from whiplash, bruised ribs. Stiffness in his shoulders and neck and torso, a deep ache in the muscles he used to laugh. Flint was somewhere he didn’t even know, in jail or at the far-off wilderness boot camp that was his parents’ last-ditch effort to make him what he wasn’t. Without Flint there to laugh at their jokes, Nick and Ryan were uneasy with each other, not enough to kill their friendship but just enough, along with the memory of the accident—Ryan’s crying and Nick’s bloody face—to make Ryan hesitate to call.

  After school each day, in the three weeks between the accident and the last day of school, Ryan’s mom pick
ed him up and took him home and sent him to his room. He could walk, but she encouraged him to eat in bed, where she served him bowls of tomato soup, plates of steak, even racks of ribs. She’d wet and microwave an old bath towel, spread the hot, damp towel over a cool, dry one on his lap and let him tear into the food until his plate was clear, then drag the damp towel across his mouth and scrub his chin and hands.

  “Jesus, Mom, get off!” he’d yell, pushing her away.

  “Now, what else do you need?” she’d ask, determined, undeterred.

  Even as his parents coddled him, they punished him. Took away his car and grounded him. They wanted him home. To reflect. He would be forgiven, they told him, but he had to understand what he had been a part of on the night of Elisabeth Avarine’s function.

  “Think of what might have happened to you,” his mom said.

  His dad said, “Think of that poor girl lying in the hospital.”

  But Ryan did not want to think about Emma Fleed. He had seen her after the accident, in the store across from school, his ribs still swaddled in Ace bandages. Hunched on her crutches, she’d looked up at him with uncharacteristic pleading in her eyes. Girls had often looked at him this way: as if there were something they desperately needed from him but couldn’t even name. Some answer. Some purpose or somewhere to land or some making sense of their unsteady place in the universe. They wanted him to what? Claim them? Protect them? Tell them what to want and what to do? Tell them that he loved them? He didn’t, of course—and they didn’t love him—so why did they expect it? Why did they ask him to lie? He was sorry that he’d had to walk away from Emma, that he’d left her there when no one else would look her in the eye. Basically, he liked her. But in the middle of that store, her body bent and broken, she was a damaged object that he didn’t have the tools to repair.

  After Flint’s BMW had slammed into that tree, and Ryan’s body had slammed against the airbag, as the world ground to stillness and he struggled to breathe and Flint blinked at him out of a shocked, drained face, in the clamor of Cally Broderick’s screams and Alessandra Ryding’s calls to God, Ryan realized that the nauseating thud against his seat had been a human body, Emma, and he had not looked back to see her. He had not looked back in that moment, and he could not look back now.

  —

  Starting in the last week of June, Ryan’s summer league team met at the Valley High baseball diamond. The ball field had been built, they said, on top of marshland, and was sinking perpetually yet imperceptibly under Ryan’s feet as he stood on the pitcher’s mound, waiting for the next at-bat.

  He squinted against the summer haze. The sky was drawn in pastel crayon. Bugs like tiny tangles of fishing line dangled in the air, flickering against the bare skin of elbows and temples and ears. He swiped the sweat from the back of his neck as Dave Chu—his teammate during the regular season—emerged from the dugout and strode toward home plate. Of course they were putting up Dave, a top-of-the-lineup kid, who could be counted on for a base hit or a walk, setting the table for better players to come up after him and drive him home.

  Now Dave stepped into the batter’s box and stared directly into Ryan’s eyes, furrowing his eyebrows. He backed up and knocked the red dust from his cleats, then took a practice swing and stepped back into the box. Something was different about him. It had been there since he’d hooked up with Elisabeth Avarine after the function—a feat that had amazed them all.

  Across the field, three girls scaled the silver bleachers and settled down to watch them. New girls, always new girls, eighth graders who’d be freshmen in the fall. They already knew who he was. They’d already made up their minds. Touching temples and giggling into their palms as they looked him up and down. He might fuck one or all of them next year, at some party, and then never speak to them again. That was what they expected of him, and maybe what they wanted.

  Beyond the outfield was the road, and beyond the road the marsh, through which a bike path wound southward toward Sausalito and San Francisco.

  This was the path, they said, that Tristan Bloch had taken to the bridge. The kid had been weird. The kid had made everyone twitchy. There’d been the fight at the swimming pool (which, no one seemed to remember, Tristan, not Ryan, had started). And then he had written that note. Cally Broderick herself had delivered the note to Ryan, begging him to do something—anything—gazing up at him with that Save me look, extending her palm, the note tucked inside like a bomb to disarm—and Ryan had taken it. Had done what she wanted him to do. At first the note had merely shocked him, made him laugh out loud. Then he had reread the note and seen it for what it was: an act of aggression. Tristan Bloch, grade eight, had made an open declaration of love—love!—with no euphemism, no qualifiers, no self-protective irony, no restraint, no regard for the laws of modern courtship or middle school.

  Afterward, Ryan had been suspended and grounded, and his parents had made him shut down his Facebook account. He’d set up a new account days later, using a fake name until he felt it was safe, and waited out his punishment (three weeks only—his parents were sick of it before he was) and went into high school and stopped talking to Cally Broderick and rarely thought of Tristan Bloch again.

  And when he found himself awake in the middle of a night too hot to sleep, Ryan would roll from his bed and open his closet, kneel down and scrape the shoebox of baseball cards along the floor, lift the lid and sift the cards to find the square of binder paper underneath, and unfold it, the paper worn soft at the creases, the handwriting faded, pale blue ink—Dear Cally Calista Broderick. You might not think I watch you but I do. Only on these rare occasions did Ryan allow himself to ask why Tristan Bloch had written this. To wonder, briefly: How was it possible to go through life so blind, so unafraid?

  On the pitcher’s mound, Ryan set and glared at Dave Chu, holding his grip on the ball.

  Dave Chu didn’t flinch.

  Ryan tugged his cap over his forehead. He imagined himself from the outside: a knife blade of shadow shielding his eyes. Hair burnished gold beneath the cap. Body tall and trembling with potential energy, muscles tight, developed and defined, strong jaw raised as he scanned the diamond. The ball nested in his glove. He brought his fists to his chest, as if in prayer, and tried to appear not only desirable but formidable to Dave, who waited, bat cocked, at the plate.

  Ryan turned his head and spat. Tobacco tingled in his lower gums—he’d told Coach Gifford it was Big League Chew and Coach Gifford had been happy to look the other way. Now, behind the first-base line, Coach was showing Grayson Paul, a scrawny sophomore, how to hold a bat. Where to place his fingers, whether to choke up, something so instinctive to Ryan that he had never needed to learn it—in T-ball someone had handed him a bat and he had imitated the players on TV, and the bat had instantly belonged to him.

  Mill Valley sports ran on an unspoken rule: Don’t favor the kids who are talented, because this will make the untalented kids feel bad. Despite this bid for equality, this enthusiasm for mediocrity, the untalented kids always knew who they were. The whole thing was pointless, maddening. Infuriating that Ryan should fight for attention with the likes of Grayson Paul—that Coach should focus on this kid who was clearly on the express train to accountant-ville, while Ryan, who had the potential for actual greatness, stood neglected on the mound.

  Ryan slapped the ball into his glove. Cracked his neck once, twice. Dave Chu waited. Behind him, the catcher, Jonas Everett, crouched and started flashing signals between his legs. Curveball. Slider.

  Ryan shook his head. Split-finger fastball was what he wanted, his specialty. He wanted to hurl the ball down the center of the plate, to rip a gash in, tear the fibers of, that perfect summer day. Jonas finally gave the signal for the splitter. Ryan nodded.

  Ryan wound up and lunged forward, energy flowing from the muscles of his legs and back to the arched tips of his fingers as he released the ball and it spun straight toward the plate and dropped abruptly before finding the catcher’s mitt. It was a perfect
pitch. Had it been slower, even a girl could have hit it. But it was fast, and Dave Chu, for all his newfound confidence, was not its match—he flailed at it, too high and too late.

  Ryan turned to the dugout, but Coach Gifford wasn’t watching. He stood with his back to the diamond, and laughed at Ryan did not know what, and slapped the skinny ass of Grayson Paul.

  —

  When Ryan’s parents sent him to his room each night that summer, still stubbornly punishing him for the function and the crash, they didn’t think to take the laptop out. So he was never really alone at all.

  He met Martin Cruz online. His Facebook picture was a Hollywood abstraction, a profile obscured by square black Ray-Bans and bleached by sunlight, a convertible Infiniti with a teal smear of ocean in the background, a thick, tanned thumb on the wheel. His location: City of Angels. Occupation: Starmaker.

  He sent the friend request to Ryan just before school let out for summer, with a brief message attached:

  LIKE TO GET TO KNOW YOU BETTER.

  THINK YOU COULD BE SOMETHING SPECIAL.

  —M.C.

  Ryan thought, Fuck this fag, this perv, this pathetic lurker. His cursor moved to the “Ignore” button and hovered there. But at the last moment he shifted over, and clicked “Accept.”

  A queasy thrill turned his stomach. Some hidden chord within him strummed, sending low vibrations through his body. These things were sometimes as simple as this: he wanted to see what would happen.

  —

  The first messages between them were short and friendly, with a competitive sheen that made them feel familiar and fraternal and benign: NorCal versus SoCal, Giants versus Dodgers, Tyler versus Earl. After three such exchanges, Martin changed the subject.