The Most Dangerous Place on Earth

by Lindsey Lee Johnson

  —

  It ended eventually. His payment in his pocket, eight hundred dollars in cash. He’d had money before, always, but this money belonged to him.

  Outside, the sky lay low and smoggy and soft, and stucco buildings glared white light. Grit scattered in the street. The sidewalk was empty, and cars sped by not seeing him.

  He wanted to check Facebook but his iPhone was off, untraceable. A pay phone was across the street, clawed to the side of a squat motel. He’d heard of these things but never used one. He crossed and read the ancient instructions, dug for quarters, dialed the only number he knew by heart.

  As it rang, he wondered what she’d say. What her voice would sound like small and jagged and scared. Ryan, is that you? Where are you, baby, we’re going crazy here worrying—

  She interrupted him. “Hello! You’ve reached the home of Ellen, Steven, Ryan, and Nell! We’re four busy bees, so leave your message at the tone!”

  Her voice was bright, smooth, oblivious. Contained in the machine, it was like another person’s mother in another person’s life. At the same time, he heard it in a deeper place and with sudden force remembered being small, the sweat and powder of her body as she’d opened her robe in the morning and he’d wrapped himself inside, pressed his ear to the soft cotton nightgown to hear the steady throbbing of her heart. He knew her, a determined kind of woman: given the slightest clue to follow, she would never stop searching for the boy he wasn’t anymore.

  He believed that it would be his first unselfish act, his kindness, to lay the phone in its cradle and walk away.

  MISS NICOLL

  In the deal that was struck, Molly was allowed to keep her job but not her classroom. The following fall, she was relocated to the school’s most modern building: two stories of steel and glass, gray walls and bright hallways. Her classroom was large and air-conditioned and more functional in every way, yet Molly missed her old home in Stone, that musty, sunny, hundred-year-old hall.

  She now taught next to Beth Firestein, who would observe Molly’s classes several times every term while Molly, as Katie Norton put it, “worked on getting back on track.” Molly had swallowed this, as she’d swallowed the censure by Katie, the note in her file, and the not-entirely-voluntary deletion of her Facebook account. At least for a while, she’d reside in the land of the actual, where she might discover who her real friends were. Where she might discover herself.

  On a sunny Monday morning, Molly strolled into her classroom in black pants and a crewneck sweater and dropped her satchel on the desk. Her class was a new crop of juniors. They were reading The Great Gatsby, just as last year’s juniors had. The kids were gossiping about a party from the weekend. There was some dispute about a student who’d been arrested or almost arrested or merely grounded.

  “Hey, guys,” she said. “Quiet down, please. Take out your homework.”

  The kids groaned and whined. Three hands shot up; she knew what this meant and preempted. “If you didn’t do it, I don’t need to know why. Just bring it to me tomorrow.”

  The hands sank. The papers were passed through the rows to Molly’s desk at the front of the room. She scooped the pile into her satchel and pulled out a stack of first drafts handed in the week before.

  “Peer edits,” she said. “Partner up, everybody.”

  Again the kids shifted and groaned. “Seriously?” one asked.

  “Seriously.”

  There was a murmur of activity as her students paired up and shoved their desks together. She distributed their papers, then sat at her desk and sorted her faculty mail: payroll statements she filed away, department memos she tossed in the recycling bin. At the bottom of the stack was a paper, typed and stapled, but nothing that she had assigned. It was a short story written by Calista Broderick.

  Molly picked up the story and riffled the pages. The paper was unthumbed, unstained—this had been printed for her. It surprised her. Since the start of the school year, she’d seen Calista in the halls several times, but they’d swept past each other like strangers in an airport, hurrying toward distant destinations.

  Molly recognized Calista’s story, of course. It centered on a group of kids at Valley Middle School, in particular the class outcast, who writes a love note to an insecure girl who cannot be trusted with it. She shares the note with her friends, who share the note on Facebook, and the boy is cyberbullied until driven to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. It was the story Beth had told her, but with Calista Broderick as protagonist and villain. No wonder the girl had been blowing off classes, getting high, spacing out: she was carrying the weight of this.

  Molly got up and went to her classroom door. Her students stirred in their seats; she shushed them. In the mostly empty hallway a few seniors were chatting. Seeing Molly, they scuttled into the girls’ bathroom. The one she cared about, Calista, wasn’t there. An old, familiar impulse flared: she wanted to find Calista, pull her in and sit her down and talk until they had unraveled every detail—then help the girl, somehow, to move past it. She returned to her desk, uncapped her red pen, and turned to the story’s final page.

  THE SLEEPING LADY

  Cally Broderick had gone through middle school with Abigail Cress and Emma Fleed on either arm; she started high school on her own.

  She walked through the Valley High School gates and passed Abigail and Emma and her other former friends clustered on the lawn. They saw her too. She passed them by. She’d hardly spoken to any of them since she’d done what she had done.

  She knew the boy was dead because of her. A series of small decisions she had made, each of which had seemed inconsequential at the time, all of which had combined to bring the end of Tristan Bloch.

  Tristan had died, and Cally’s mom had recovered. The combination of radiation and chemotherapy and mastectomy had nearly killed her and then allowed her to live. So Cally had a mother again—hollowed, bowed, yet present. Her father returned to work, and the living room, cleared of insurance papers, became a living room again. Peace and order restored, life returned to normal. It was Cally who had changed.

  —

  Through freshman year, she kept mainly to herself. And it seemed right that she should be alone. A kind of penance.

  Her parents didn’t understand why the suicide of “that poor, strange boy” should affect her so deeply. They sent her to a psychiatrist she knew they couldn’t afford. In session Cally talked about the things that didn’t matter—the stress of high school, the challenge of making friends, the pressure to be exceptional in a town where nothing less was tolerated—and the doctor seemed pleased with her answers. He prescribed pills meant to dull Cally’s emotions, make her lighter, more pleasant and pliable—Cally took them home and dumped them down the bathroom sink, watched them swirling in the drain.

  The months came and went, yet she could not avoid the scattering of small reminders.

  A Facebook post.

  A blond head.

  A red bicycle.

  Blue ink on lined paper.

  A crane, or really any bird, shrinking to a black speck in the sky.

  Tristan himself would haunt her dreams, a broken body floating on the current of the bay. She’d thought nothing could be worse than her nightmares, so she Googled once for details: What happens to a body after jumping from a bridge?

  But the truth was worse. The truth was that it could take minutes for death to arrive. The force of impact caused organs to tear loose, bones to snap. Spleens, livers, hearts. Ribs, clavicles, pelvises, necks. People thought that jumping off the Golden Gate would feel like flying into Heaven, the Marin County coroner said, but it didn’t. It was multiple blunt-force trauma. Like being hit by a car but worse, because even if you survived the fall itself, you’d likely drown. Sometimes jumpers could be spotted thrashing in the water, too weak to swim because their organs were bleeding out. By the time the Coast Guard reached them, these jumpers were usually dead. The sailors would pull a body from the water and lay it dripping on the deck. So
metimes mucous bubbled at the nostrils. In almost all cases the body was purple all over.

  Cally would wake sheet-tangled, shaking, and soaked in cold sweat. Sometimes she hated Tristan. Cursed his selfishness. Middle school had been close to over—he could have waited it out. Sometimes, strangely, she missed him, imagined him with her and some new group of misfit friends. Was it too much to believe she could have talked him out of sweatpants, convinced him to grow out his hair and keep his tongue inside his mouth and his mom out of the school? Was it a fantasy to think he could have learned to be a little cooler, to care a little less? It was too late, anyway.

  —

  Sophomore year, Cally took to eating lunches sideways on a splintered wood bench in the outdoor amphitheater at the outer edge of campus. Here she met Jess Steinberg, Kai Alder-Judge, and Alessandra Ryding. They were so-called Bo-Stin slackers, Bolinas and Stinson Beach kids who were bused over Mount Tam every morning. They all took drama, and Alessandra was president of the HIV Awareness Club, but that was the extent of their participation in life at school. During spirit rallies they slept behind Ray-Bans in the uppermost rows of the theater; at morning break they wandered off campus to smoke. Often they ditched their afternoon classes and drove up the mountain to Sunset Ridge; they’d photograph one another in halos of sunset, and drink until the sky swam over their heads. Sometimes it seemed that they were the only ones who realized this was a paradise they lived in.

  “How could you sit in a classroom all day,” Jess wondered one late afternoon, pinching his blunt between two fingers, drawing its bright tip across the mountain’s green-gold panorama, the pink-striped sky over hazy water far below, “when this is all around you?”

  “Fuckin’ insanity,” said Kai.

  “Eyes wide shut,” said Alessandra, stretching her arms overhead. Then they all nodded knowingly, Cally silently longing to be told what this meant.

  Cally grew to love to hear her talk. Alessandra had plans. She was going, for one thing, to start visiting Christian centers for pregnant girls, to infiltrate and investigate.

  “You know, Calista,” she said as they faced each other cross-legged on a bench, sharing lunch (a salty baguette, a plastic crate of strawberries). She had small, perfectly round brown eyes and long lashes. “Those places advertise in our school paper, promising pregnant teenagers help and guidance and, like, all the options”—she pulled the school newspaper out of her tote bag and shook it fiercely—“and then, when you go there, it turns out they just want to lecture you about Jesus and, like, indoctrinate you and make you look at pictures of tiny aborted fetuses and their tiny aborted limbs and scare you into keeping yours. It’s so deceptive. It’s, like, criminal.”

  Cally sucked on her strawberry, listening to Alessandra’s emphatic voice. It amazed her that Alessandra believed the world could be a better place in this one specific way, and that she herself could make it better.

  The fall of Cally’s sophomore year drifted toward the winter. A collection of small moments let her know she was no longer alone: Cally sat passing a flask between Kai and Jess in the school theater, watching Alessandra beam heat from the center of the stage. (She always played some tragic woman—Lady Macbeth or Antigone or Tamalpa, daughter of the mountain witch, whose story Tristan Bloch had referenced in his note.) Alessandra looped her arm in Cally’s as they wandered off campus together. Cally and Jess lay side by side on the mountain, smoking and watching the fog roll over the sky, when he reached out to caress the silver chain that Cally wore around her neck. In his car Kai leaned in close, pursed his lips, and blew a fallen eyelash from Cally’s cheek. At Muir Beach after midnight, Alessandra stripped off her skirt, thighs ghostly beneath her oversized shirt as she ran into low waves laughing and calling—“Calista!” Once or twice they’d all made out at parties. Casually, giggling all the way. Jess snuggled her in doorways or nuzzled her on couches; Kai kissed her briefly, softly, on the lips to say goodbye. Never a discussion of what any of it meant.

  By the end of that school year, Cally was one of them. Her hair faded and tickled the scoop of her spine. She threw away her lip gloss and mascara; her skin took on a gentle tan. She let Alessandra draw elaborate, vaguely Asiatic patterns on her forearms and hands, painted her fingernails putrid green, stacked silver rings on her thumbs and hammered-silver bangles on her wrists, went to the Salvation Army and covered her body in costume: short, flower-splattered dresses; silk vests and patched denim; gauzy lingerie; dead men’s shoes.

  —

  Junior year. She was high most every day. She drifted through her classes. The teachers just kept passing her along. Some, young and earnest like Ms. Flax had been, would stop to pull her into classrooms, tell her she was wasting her potential.

  “You are a perceptive, intelligent girl,” her English teacher, Miss Nicoll, told her one day during lunch. “Why not try?” With her deep brown eyes and optimistic blazers, Miss Nicoll seemed so innocent, so hopeful—Cally couldn’t bear to tell her who she really was, or what she’d done.

  Miss Nicoll worried, Cally’s mother worried, her father worried. One brother, Jake, called her a freak, while the other, Erik, began to watch her with a new, grudging respect.

  On school days, Cally daydreamed through the morning and at lunch went into an abandoned potting shed behind the school to smoke weed with Jess and Kai and Alessandra, then swam through the day till the day was done. She hated being trapped at school. The English classes were the worst. Romeo and Juliet, All Quiet on the Western Front, A Clockwork Orange, The Great Gatsby, Macbeth. Did the teachers realize that all their books were obsessed with death? Giddy with it. The why and the how of it. People thrusting knives into each other, severing heads, crushing each other with luxury cars, blasting off limbs in the name of God and country, stabbing their hearts in the name of love. Cally preferred poetry:

  The memory throws up high and dry

  A crowd of twisted things;

  A twisted branch upon the beach

  Eaten smooth, and polished

  As if the world gave up

  The secret of its skeleton,

  Stiff and white.

  She couldn’t get Eliot’s poem out of her head. The music of the syllables. The permanent stillness of that calcified branch. Once, she sat down and tried to write about it, to work out her obsession:

  The image of the branch on the beach represents…

  The branch on the beach is important because…

  She stopped. Out her bedroom window was the old, familiar view: the undulating lawns and willow trees of Bayfront Park, where a lifetime ago they’d run the mile in PE. Mount Tamalpais loomed above, bluish in the fading light as if it had been dipped under water. She wrote: The branch on the beach means nothing.

  The end of junior year was Elisabeth Avarine’s party. Cally went with Jess and Kai and Alessandra. They showed up high, then shared bottles of beer on the crowded deck. When the storm hit, most people ran to take cover inside. But Cally danced with her friends in the rain, stretching her neck to it, drinking it, letting it batter her shoulders, wet her hair till it glistened and curled. Then she was led down a hallway, to a purple bedroom and the promise of a better feeling, and this she did want: the capsule that Jess dropped in her palm. There was one hit of Molly for each of them. She moved to place it on her tongue, as she’d always done before.

  “Wait,” Kai told her. “It’s better if you rail it.”

  “Real,” Alessandra said, and tapped her nose.

  Cally nodded. She set the capsule on a precalculus textbook on the floor. With a kitchen knife Jess chopped her capsule into three clean lines of powder. Cally leaned over the first line, closed one nostril. Just a second’s hesitation and she forced herself to do it: inhaled fast and sharp so her sinuses burned—she cried out from the shock and the pain of it. Alessandra knelt beside her, offering a glass of water. Cally drank it fast, prepared to disappear.

  After a few minutes, everything was clear. Alessandra climbed onto Jes
s’s lap at the edge of the bed and Kai wrapped his arms around Cally, his body warm against hers. On the bed Jess whispered into Alessandra’s ear; her giggles floated weightless in the air. Alessandra’s power came out of her body, the arcs and shapes she made as she disentangled from Jess and stood and swayed around the room. They wanted to see her bare arms luminous against the walls of purple, her pupils wide and dark as she exclaimed, “I love you guys, all of you, everyone!” They laughed. Their laughter had a movement of its own, a texture—together they created a soft, supple space in the world. Cally curled on Kai’s lap and it was expansive, a throne. She found balance in her flimsy dress, rough denim against her thighs. Shifting sideways, she looped her arms around his neck and tucked into a ball. She was so small and he was so big. This feeling familiar and warm. She could lose herself in him if she wanted to—he would give her the gift of completely overtaking her. She pushed closer, her head against his chest so she could watch Alessandra at an angle, skewed. Cally was part of him and part of them, all of them one being. Here she was, here here here. This moment was the only moment there was, this place the only place.

  They needed to move. So they were up and running to the living room, where music burst upon them, a joyous crowd of noise. Oh, the rush of those guitars, electric, the singer bratty and loud. The room was crowded and hot, so they ran out to the deck to dance. Reaching for a hand, Cally found one, Alessandra’s, tiny dark freckles scattered along the fingers. They were dancing, singing, though they didn’t know the words. Jumping and dancing and shaking their hair, bodies strummed by the song. They were holding everybody’s hands. Cally’s body turned liquid. Her heart was beating harder and nothing would ever stop it. Nothing new would ever happen. Everything in the world was exactly right now.