The Most Dangerous Place on Earth

by Lindsey Lee Johnson

  Later, as the drug’s effects began to fade, Cally climbed onto the narrow redwood railing of the deck. Stood shaking, winged her arms. The rain slowed to a patter along her naked arms, but she didn’t feel the cold. In fact she felt a warmth that radiated from inside, and as her friends cheered and hooted below, she began to walk the rail. On one side was the safety of the deck, and on the other, nothing: canyon that yawned into the black mass of redwood trees, smashed tracks of deer, the creek whispering over stones and dirt and chokes of weeds below. A strange thought took hold: the whole creek was moving, not just the water on top but the water beneath and the fish and the pebbles and sediment and dirt. All of it was moving, all the time, and never stopped. This thought distressed her; she wasn’t sure why. There was something unrelenting, cruel, in the water itself. How it could break a person’s bones, or slide inside and drown the lungs. How soft it sounded. How hard it was.

  Cally stood on tiptoe and teetered left and right, shifting her weight, pulling herself up again. To her friends on the deck, it was a game. They believed that she was like them, careless and brave. To her it was a thrill to stare down the canyon, to know that if she were to fall into it, no one would think that she’d jumped. They’d consider it an accident, a tilting of her body into blackness. It was a joy to think of it, a relief to think of it. A relief to think it could all be over in an instant, that she might fly from her guilt and evaporate to nothing, and no one would blame her.

  Arms extended, Cally pirouetted on the slick and narrow beam. Across her field of vision swept darkness from the canyon and light from the house. She closed her eyes and listened to the whooping of her friends. Wavered once but held her center. This was it, she felt: the time to let go. She took a breath—air fresh from the rain—and released it. As she began her slow tiptoe across the beam, her mind was very clear. She thought, If I am going to do this, I am going to do it now.

  But she was not like him. She was afraid.

  Later that night, she heard the sirens shrieking and climbed into the backseat of the first ride heading out: Damon Flintov’s BMW.

  Alessandra and Nick Brickston jumped in on either side, and Emma Fleed, eyelids fluttering and skirt askew, lay across their laps as if to sleep.

  Ryan Harbinger blasted a rap song in the front seat. He was the only person she truly hated, a brutal force in the universe. It was all that was wrong with the workings of life, that he should be grinning and dancing while she sat there trapped in her misery, while Tristan Bloch’s body lay under the ground. The fact that she had once convinced herself to kiss a person like Ryan now nauseated her, and made her hate him with the fiercer intensity of putrefied lust.

  They sped through the canyon. With each curve Cally was thrust from Alessandra’s shoulder to Nick’s. She closed her eyes, pulled her seatbelt down across her chest and buckled it. Moments later they crashed. In the aftermath Cally looked down at Emma Fleed, whose body was twisted at a sickening angle. Emma didn’t move. Dead? Eyes shut, spine twisted. Yes, Cally thought, dead.

  When that car hit the redwood, Cally herself should have gone straight through the windshield. She should have been injured even more seriously than Emma was, or killed. Just hours before, on the railing, she’d wanted to die. In the car, she had fastened her seatbelt. Intention was one thing; it was the smallest decisions that made any difference.

  —

  “Oh my God,” Alessandra told her one day in the fall of senior year, as on the serpentine roots of a redwood tree they sat shoulder to shoulder, sharing lunch (a cup of key lime yogurt, a bag of salted pretzels), “you so need to do this.”

  “What is it?” Calista asked.

  “Write me a play. For the One-Act Festival.”

  “I’m not a writer.”

  “That’s negative energy. Totally unproductive. How do you know?”

  “I’ve never written anything in my life.”

  “Yet.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I need a good part. Otherwise I’ll just get cast as a prostitute again, and I’m so over that. I’m so over the systematic subjugation of women by these chauvinist writer-directors I can’t even tell you.”

  “Why don’t you write it yourself?”

  Alessandra scooted closer, crossed her slim, bare leg over Calista’s. “Oh, sweet Calista, my darling, my love, the muse doesn’t create. She inspires.”

  Calista spent the next few weeks writing. On school days they’d pile into Kai’s old Land Cruiser and drive to the beach, to Sunset Ridge, or to the cemetery in the hills above Mill Valley.

  At the cemetery they’d gather at the feet of a wooden Buddha in a clearing at the curve of a one-lane road. The Buddha faced away from the hill with its imperfect patchwork of graves, toward the clutch of coast oaks and eucalyptus in the canyon. On the air was the chatter of songbirds, the echoes of car horns far below. Above them stretched a pale blue sheet of sky.

  Calista circled ground that was blanketed by wood chips, strewn with yellow leaves. They reminded her of Robert Frost: And both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black. Breezes shifted her hair and the leaves on the trees. She settled on one of six tree trunks arranged around the Buddha, each flat-topped, solid and smooth. It was clear someone had cut and arranged the trunks exactly, and yet she felt there a sense of eternity, of this place having risen intact from the land. The Buddha was said to be powerful, magic, and as they visited again and again through the spring, Calista began to believe that it was. In yellow-toned wood were carved the intricate folds of his robe and the buttons that covered his head. His eyes were closed in a face that was human and beyond human. His right hand was raised with palm facing outward, the second finger bent to meet the thumb. “Karana mudra,” Alessandra explained once as Calista examined the Buddha’s hand. “He’s warding off bad energy, bad spirits.”

  There was a hollow in the tree trunk on which the Buddha sat. The hollow was filled with offerings, small, significant: a gourd, a pair of sunglasses, a string of beads. There were school pictures of girls who had overdosed and boys who had driven off cliffs. The offerings were for them. The rule was, you could leave things but not take things away.

  Her journal open on her lap, Calista wrote as the others talked and smoked and dozed. She wrote the only story she had to tell.

  Tristan Bloch had been smart. After the torment had started, he’d known it wouldn’t end. He’d known that his world would continue to constrict, like those finger-trap toys sold in Chinatown: you stuck your fingers in the ends of the tube, and the more you moved, tried to jerk free, the more tightly the tube closed around you. Mill Valley was so specific in its beauty, in its limits. Kids like Tristan and Calista would never forget how this world had been created for them, how they had been born into this perfect nest and still they had insisted on unhappiness. At thirteen, Tristan could only assume that wherever he traveled, that darkness would travel with him.

  In their eighth-grade class photo, Tristan was baby-blond and roly-poly, squinting into the sun and grinning wide. Calista and Abigail and Emma posed in tank tops and miniskirts and scribbled-on Chuck Taylors, with bony chests and push-up bras, coltish legs, baby cheeks. Dave Chu was gawky and lean, in a red polo shirt that hung like a drop cloth on his narrow shoulders. Nick Brickston’s neck was too long for his torso, and his smile was cluttered with metal. Elisabeth Avarine almost disappeared: she was a child’s flyaway ponytail, a blurred face avoiding the camera. Damon Flintov was adorable, chubby under his oversized T-shirt and jeans, eyes big and innocently blue though he jutted his chin to show toughness. Ryan Harbinger was cherubic, dark-gold hair tangled, tanned forehead shining with sweat because he’d recently been playing. It was shocking, how they all just looked like children.

  On one of her long and lingering afternoons in the cemetery, before she left the feet of the Buddha, Calista left an offering of her own. She wanted something unobtrusive, a small token to nestle with the others in the hollow of the trunk.
She chose, of course, the origami crane of silver paper, precisely folded, gleaming still.

  —

  When Calista had finished writing, she changed the names and submitted the draft not to the One-Act Festival but to her English teacher from the previous year, Miss Nicoll. She didn’t know what she expected. Miss Nicoll seemed smart and open. Last year, Calista had often seen the teacher talking and laughing with Calista’s classmates, during breaks and after school. And she had seemed interested in Calista, once. After graduation, Alessandra and Kai were going to plant trees in Ecuador and wanted Calista to go with them, but she hadn’t committed; a small but urgent part of herself envisioned an ivy-covered college on the East Coast, a small class gathered on a warm lawn, poetry piled at her feet. Maybe Miss Nicoll would read Calista’s story and show her how to move beyond it, to reach this other place. For a week she waited, allowing herself to dream.

  Miss Nicoll found her in the hallway. The teacher looked different, somehow—her hair cut short, her outfit unfussy. Her manner was relaxed too; she wasn’t searching Calista’s face as she used to do, with that hopeful, desperate need.

  “I’m so glad you shared this with me,” Miss Nicoll smiled, handing Calista her story. “Thank you. I have to get to class now, but I’ve written you a little note on the back.”

  Calista thanked her, then hurried to her locker to read. The note was there as promised at the end of the story, handwritten in red cursive:

  Dear Calista,

  Thank you for sharing your writing with me. I would like to congratulate you on your lovely natural writing voice, which I recall from when you were a student in my class. There are many beautiful metaphors and similes in this story.

  However, there are a few issues that I hope you won’t mind my pointing out.

  1. I am wondering if the tone and vocabulary of the story match the age of the protagonist. If this girl is only thirteen years old, would she really know advanced vocabulary words such as “calcified” and “indelible”?

  2. In one section of the story, the protagonist describes, in great detail, the little boy’s bike ride to the Golden Gate Bridge. Well, I am wondering, how could she possibly know all these details if she wasn’t there? It seems very unlikely. Is there any way this can be explained, such as having the boy leave a note explaining what he did? Or perhaps you might delete this section altogether?

  3. There is an awful lot of foul language, especially for eighth graders to be using!

  Calista, I truly wish you all the best. You are a very fine writer.

  Warmly,

  Molly Nicoll

  —

  On the last Saturday of senior year, Calista stood with Jess and Kai and Alessandra on Mount Tam’s Sunset Ridge. In a clearing they’d stoked an illicit fire—Alessandra’s idea to torch their textbooks and notebooks, a gesture to show that their old lives were over.

  The yellow hills dipped to shadows—below them lay Muir Woods, a famed redwood grove strictly for tourists. Beyond the western ridge, the sun dipped into the Pacific. Calista’s friends were sharing beers and blunts around the fire, but she was only watching, taking pictures on her phone to freeze the moment.

  In a few months more, Calista and her classmates would all be gone from there. Calista would be pulled by Alessandra’s enthusiasms across countries and continents. Her former best friend, Abigail, was off to Dartmouth. Dave Chu and Elisabeth Avarine were going together to UC Berkeley. Nick Brickston was moving to San Francisco to do who knew what. Some of them had already gone: Emma Fleed had transferred to the alternative high school after the accident, and from there had vanished in the miasma of Central Marin. Damon Flintov had been sent to juvie, then to a wilderness boot camp in some wild and faraway place—Idaho, Montana, West Virginia. And Ryan Harbinger had disappeared just before senior year, leaving a wake of wild rumors behind him.

  Across the fire, Alessandra tucked a lock of hair behind Kai’s ear and they lay back in the grass and began to kiss.

  Calista stood and, with no particular direction in mind, turned and hiked up the hillside in the gathering dark. She went barefoot over sun-baked dirt. The trail dipped under giant redwoods; the ground turned cool and damp. A familiar dankness took her, without warning, back under the deck at Abigail’s—the sharing of bad beers, the buzzing in her blood, how they had laughed and laughed, nothing had ever been funnier. And she felt her heart untether in her chest. It began to melt, she could not hold it. It was like trying to pool streaming water in her palms. She was crying. She blamed it on the withdrawal of drugs from her system, on the sight of Alessandra’s fingers in Kai’s hair, on the knowledge that this was their last night all together as they were right now, on the darkness of these woods, on their unrelenting beauty. At a clearing in the trees, she lay her head on the dirt. The stars wheeled above her in a twilit sky.

  No magic in it, but as she closed her eyes Calista felt the mountain around her. The screams of red-tailed hawks, the creaks of grasshoppers, wind shivering the redwoods behind her, whispering through grasses at her ears. As life whirled on without her, she lay there and listened.

  It came from the mountain or it came from within herself. There was no meaning in lying down. There was no explanation, no relief, in anything anyone else might tell her. She wanted to die for what she had done, but she was eighteen years old: she wanted to live.

  There was only the decision to get up. There was only standing and brushing herself off, only turning and hiking back to her friends whose hoots and laughter carried through the trees, to her friends who were flawed but, yes, living; there was only digging through her bag for the last remnants of high school, throwing them into the fire. As the flames ate the papers to curling black, she knew there was only this, and whatever moment would come after, only Calista Broderick going on and trying, like everyone, to live in this beautiful world.

  For Susan and David Lee Johnson

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My sincere thanks to:

  Susan Golomb, constant ally and wisest guide, who plucked me from the slush and changed my life. Noah Eaker, who has been the editor every little girl dreams of (or maybe that was just me): brilliant, relentless, and always kind. Susan Kamil, who lent her editorial advocacy, her inspired ideas, and her shawl when I was cold. The Random House and Writers House families, especially Gina Centrello, Avideh Bashirrad, Jessica Bonet, Maria Braeckel, Sanyu Dillon, Deborah Dwyer, David Ebershoff, John Hastie, Cynthia Lasky, Wade Lucas, Leigh Marchant, Sally Marvin, Steve Messina, Bridget Piekarz, Ron Shoop, Theresa Zoro, Nina Arazoza, Emma Caruso, Allyson Lord, Caitlin McKenna, and Scott Cohen. And to Soumeya Bendimerad Roberts, who sent these California teens around the world.

  The Rose and Thistle Writers—Kate Hope Day, Kevinne Moran, and Rita Michelle Pogue—who shepherded this book into being with their unfailing support and unfailingly honest critique (and who are always right). Mitra Parineh and Melanie Catherine Nead, bright lights and kindred spirits, on whose sublime optimism and profound empathy I have come to rely. Margo Beth Fleming, most trusted reader of manuscripts and queries, whose counsel has steered and steadied me. My teachers at UC Davis and the University of Southern California—especially Elizabeth Davis, Janet Fitch, Gina B. Nahai, Gabrielle Pina, and Rita Williams—who gave me the tools for a writing life. My teachers at the Attic Institute of Portland, Merridawn Duckler, Karen Karbo, and especially Jennifer Lauck, who opened a window. Anthony Doerr, who bestowed his generous enthusiasm and sage advice when this book was little more than a list of ideas. The Portland Writers’ Dojo, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, which provided much-needed community, and the Panera bakery-cafés of Beaverton, Oregon, and Culver City, California, which allowed me clean, well-lighted space to write. Neelanjana Banerjee, Katrina Carrasco, Matt Cunningham, Jenée Desmond-Harris, Alex Espinoza, Michael Fleming, Jason Harris, Joy Johannessen, Dorothy Johnson, Chris Lacroix, Maggie Heaps Lauffer, Zoe Vandeveer, and Heidi Williams, who gave vital n
otes and encouragement along the way. Jaime and William Heaps, teenager whisperers, who made this book possible, and so much more. Seth Greenland, who read all the bad drafts, and waited a decade for me to just tell him a story.

  My husband, Ben DiPardo, whose abiding love sustains me, and whose unwavering support inspires me every day to work harder, to do better, to be more, and to be more myself. (You are the best good.) Anne and Mike DiPardo, who welcomed me into their family with open arms and conversation about books. Ardyce and Jay M. Johnson, Meredith Johnson Sagolla, Tyler Johnson, Erica Ireland, Linda and Jeff Lockwood, Linda Mai, Ashley Sanders, Laurel and Holly Shear, Gina Uriarte, and Lindsay Van Syckle, whose friendship and faith have bolstered this writer for years longer than was reasonable or, possibly, deserved. Austin Bah, who took my writing seriously when I was fifteen years old (and that made all the difference). And my parents, Susan and David Johnson, who made me believe—not that this could happen, but that it would.

  Finally, I am grateful to the teenagers of Marin County, who brought me so much joy.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LINDSEY LEE JOHNSON holds a master of professional writing degree from the University of Southern California and a BA in English from the University of California at Davis. She has served as a tutor and mentor at a private learning center, where her focus has been teaching writing to teenagers. Born and raised in Marin County, she now lives with her husband in Los Angeles.

  lindseyleejohnson.com

  @lindseyleej

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