The Most Dangerous Place on Earth Read online

When Mr. Gifford charged out of the locker room, eyes on his clipboard, Ryan released Tristan and vaulted out of the water. He was back with the boys before the teacher looked up. Tristan broke the water’s surface, heaving for air.

  “Tristan Bloch!” Mr. Gifford yelled. “What the hell are you doing in the pool?”

  Everyone laughed, so Cally did too. She guessed Tristan would regret having given her the silver crane, would be disappointed at the kind of girl she had turned out to be. She’d saved herself.

  —

  Cally found the note in her locker the next day after school. A sheet of binder paper folded into impeccable quarters, her initials neatly printed on the front in pale blue ink. The handwriting was not what she’d hoped for: Ryan’s hurried scrawl.

  She unfolded the note.

  Dear Cally Calista Broderick,

  You might not think I watch you but I do.

  Every day in class, and at recess, and when you come to Ms. Flax’s room when I’m there because of my acommodations. In PE I see you when you run the mile around the marsh and you cut through the long part and go into that clump of trees with that asshole Ryan H. (I’m sorry Calista but he really is an Asshole.)

  You might not think that anyone in this School sees you but I do. I mean sees you really. Did you know that you have the World’s most beautiful skin. It smells like rasberries. And you have the smallest softest blondeish hairs on your arms. I know this because I touched you one time, in algebra remember? You were reaching for a fresh pencil and I reached across at the exact same second and Boom!! I touched your bare skin. You might of thought that was an accident Calista, but what if it wasn’t?

  Sometimes when I’m watching you I think about

  I think that you are Perfect. People say Elisabeth Avarine is prettier than you just because she has a better nose but you shouldn’t beleive them, I don’t. First of all your hair is longer and wavier than Elisabeth’s. And second, when you look at you, you can tell that you aren’t Brain Dead. I mean I can tell that you think about things, like I do.

  Calista, sometimes when I’m watching you I think about this day back in sixth grade. We were all standing on the flats during PE and looking up at the ridge of Mount Tamalpais, The Sleeping Lady. You know the Legend: The Mountain Witch sent her daughter Tamalpa to cast an evil spell on a Miwok warrior who went up the Mountain alone. But Tamalpa stole his gold headdress and all his power. The warrior didn’t care because he was already in love with her. Tamalpa fell in love with him too. She couldn’t help it. But she knew that she would only destroy him, so she poisoned herself with Deadly black blossoms. Then three girls came and covered her with a purple blanket, and the Mountain changed itself into her shape. Like a wizard. Or a ghost.

  You know how the Mountain is always Beautiful, but it’s hard to remember its Beautiful because it’s always there? It’s like a poster that you hang up in your room because you like it so much, but after a while you don’t see it anymore. And when someone asks you what does it look like, you have to think. So that day in sixth grade we were trying to see it. The Mountain was deep green like jewelry. The sky behind it was bright blue. We were squinting to see The Sleeping Lady’s nose, boobs, waist and legs. You said, “Why do we call her Sleeping when everybody knows she’s Dead?” Everybody laughed but I liked it when you said that. Because no one else in Mill Valley would even think of it.

  Calista, the Truth is sometimes I don’t know if I can stand to stay here in this Town. Miss Flax says I am smart and special and can be anything I want. But the thing teachers never explain when they say that is, How do you find out what you want? When the Lawyer people become Lawyers, is it because that is what they always wanted to be? When they were in Kindergarten playing with their Legos, did they daydream about Lawyering? If they did, then I am even weirder than people say. I must be like an Alien or something. Because I never thought about being a Lawyer, or a Doctor, or a Top Executive. I mostly think about how the Universe is these forever blues and blacks and blinking stars, how it looks like the inside of a big open umbrella but in actuality goes on forever and swallows everything, my house and my street and Mill Valley and California and America and the Earth and the Sun and all the Planets and the Galaxies—I think how the universe is this huge forever-big and at the same time small enough to fold up in my brain like an Origami box, where I can imagine it all. I think, how is it that these opposite things could both be True? I guess this is what Miss Flax is getting at when she tells me that I’m Special. I guess I know she doesn’t want to be mean to a kid and that is why she chooses to say Special, which is really just a nicer way of saying Alien. I wonder if you think about things like this too. There’s no way to explain it but I feel like you do.

  Calista I want to talk to you. Every day I think about talking to you, but you’re always with Abigail Cress walking to her house after school, or else you’re stuck in the middle of that whole big group of other girls who are Nothing compared to you.

  Calista I Love You do you think you could love me back? I could help you with your algebra homework sometime. If you wanted.

  Tristan Bloch

  The blue words blurred on the page. Cally’s breaths came shallow and fast. She was dizzy, and wondered if she should stick her head in a paper bag. (She had seen this on TV.) Tristan Bloch had called her Calista, which was her real name, private, and only for her mother to use. He knew about her and Ryan. He knew that she went to Abigail’s every day after school. Had he followed them? Had he peeked in the window while she and Abigail and Emma Fleed lay head-to-foot and pumiced each other’s calluses or stuffed their faces until they puked or debated who Ryan was going to choose as his girlfriend, Cally or that bitch Elisabeth Avarine?

  Cally did not know what to think about the note from Tristan Bloch; she did not know what to do. If her life weren’t what it was, she might have asked her mother.

  —

  She took the note to Abigail. While privacy was a fantasy at Cally’s house, at Abigail’s they had nothing but. Abigail’s vast bedroom had turquoise wallpaper and a queen-sized bed and a mini-fridge stocked with Cokes and her older brother’s beer that they’d steal and share outside, in the dank space beneath the deck. The beer was bitter, but she loved its buzzing at the base of her skull and the backs of her knees, and she loved scooting close to her friends in the dark and conspiring. She was grateful for Abigail, for her giant, echoing house and parents who were always at work. (“They’re on New York time,” Abigail explained, which made no sense, but Cally was happy to be in a house like Abigail’s, so she kept her mouth shut.) If the Cresses did come home, they’d say hello and click off to their master suite across the house, not caring what the girls were up to as long as they were quiet.

  Sometimes they all went to Emma Fleed’s house on the mountain, but Emma was often busy with ballet class and rehearsals and couldn’t truly be counted upon, as Abigail liked to say meaningfully to Cally when Emma wasn’t around. At this Cally would feel a proprietary thrill: she was Abigail’s, Abigail hers.

  That afternoon, in Abigail’s bedroom, Cally sat beside Abigail on the queen-sized bed as Emma stretched on the floor. It seemed perfectly safe for Cally to pull the note from her pocket and hand it over.

  When Abigail read the first line, she laughed out loud. She was the only person Cally knew who actually said “ha” when she laughed, barked it. “Ha! Oh my God, dude,” she said. “This is hilarious.”

  “Yeah,” Cally said. The note made her stomach turn, but if Abigail thought it was hilarious then it probably was.

  Emma stood up and grabbed the note. “What’s this crossed-out part?” she said. “ ‘Sometimes when I’m watching you I…’ Nasty.”

  “Don’t read it out loud. God.” Cally felt as responsible for each sentence as if she’d written it herself.

  Abigail pushed on. “You know what this means. You’re what he thinks about. When he—you know—”

  “Gross.”

  “In his room at
night,” Emma said, “after that creepy mom of his tucks him in—”

  “Okay, I get it.”

  “Maybe he does it at school! Maybe you’re running the mile and he’s sitting there watching you, hand down the front of those sweats, going at it.” Abigail squeezed her eyes shut and gaped her mouth, acting out a strange kind of pleasure-pain that Cally had never felt.

  Emma shrieked with laughter. Cally blushed, hid her face in her hands.

  Abigail asked, “What do you want to do?”

  “Forget it ever existed? Is that an option?”

  “It kills me how innocent you are,” Abigail said. “Do you think he’s going to forget it?”

  Cally shrugged.

  “What if he, like, comes after you?” Emma said.

  “He wouldn’t.”

  “He wants you. What if he won’t take no for an answer?”

  “I don’t know.” Cally remembered Tristan’s gaze, his thumbs stroking origami paper to life, what he wrote about her bare skin. What if he wouldn’t?

  “Well,” Abigail said. “You know what you have to do.”

  —

  Ryan Harbinger answered the door in dirt-smeared baseball pants and sweat-sheered T-shirt, and he didn’t ask them in.

  “Who is it, honey?” his mother yelled from inside.

  Cally and Abigail stood together on the stoop; Emma had abandoned them for a late rehearsal. Mothers had a way of hating Cally and Abigail on the spot, but Cally believed if she were Ryan Harbinger’s official girlfriend, his parents would learn to like her. She’d spend weekends at his house—his mother would cook waffles shaped like Mickey Mouse and his father would ask pointed yet encouraging questions about her future, as though college were next week and not a million years away.

  Ryan looked them over. “Nobody!” He palmed the back of his head. “ ’Sup?”

  “You have to see this.” Abigail nudged Cally, who held out the note.

  As he took it from her, his thumb grazed her skin, but he didn’t look at her. He never did, exactly. He looked at her earlobe or the top of her head, and when he was kissing her amid the willows by the mile loop, his eyes stayed closed, his eyebrows worried, like it hurt.

  You think about things, like I do, Tristan Bloch had written. “Yeah, he thinks about fucking you,” Abigail had said, and Cally had shoved her and told her to shut the fuck up, yet the picture clicked stubbornly into focus: Tristan’s face contorted in the pleasure-pain Abigail had shown her, hips thrusting against her—sweatpants didn’t have buttons or zippers or anything…

  Ryan laughed. “Calista. What the fuck.” His eyes were merry, golden-flecked. “Moron got your name wrong.”

  He read on. He was gorgeous to watch. There were little lines around his mouth, and dark gold tendrils of hair against his temples where sweat had curled it.

  “No fucking way.” His laugh jumped higher, and Cally burned happily. She had given him this pleasure—it belonged to her.

  “Tristan fucking Bloch,” he said. “Is he serious with this shit?”

  “It was in my locker,” Cally told him. “I just, like, found it.” She did not say, I wanted it to be from you.

  “What a fag.”

  “So, what should she do?” Abigail asked. They’d discussed this in Abigail’s bedroom—they’d find out what he thought because Cosmo said guys liked when you asked for direction, it made them feel important.

  “No worries. I got this.” Ryan leaned into Cally for a kind-of hug that veered sideways as his mother yelled in her anxious pitch, “Ryan! I need you! Right! Now!”

  “Okay, Jesus, calm the fuck down!”

  As he pulled away, Cally realized she’d been holding her breath. He had crumpled the note in his fist. She wanted to grab it back, but he had closed the door.

  —

  Cally and Abigail walked from Ryan’s to the 7-Eleven on Miller to buy Red Vines, Tostitos, Reese’s Pieces, and Big Gulps.

  In Abigail’s bedroom they closed the blinds and ate until the sugar made them giddy. This was their secret. Only the Red Vines would they ever bring to the baseball field—they would loop the vines around their fingers and tongues and every boy would stop to watch.

  “Let’s see if he has a Facebook,” Abigail said.

  “Who would friend him?”

  “Just his mom.”

  “And Ms. Flax.”

  “Oh my God, they’re probably doing it!” Abigail screamed, delighted. “She probably takes him into that little room and fucks him all through seventh period.”

  “Get your mind out of the gutter,” Cally said, but she was laughing too.

  Cally and Abigail sat shoulder to shoulder in front of Abigail’s computer. They found Tristan’s profile in two seconds. “What the fuck is this picture?”

  “You can’t even tell it’s him, his face is all blurry.”

  “Oh, it’s him,” Abigail said. “Check out those pants.”

  Cally laughed again, in a hard way that made her throat hurt. In the photo Tristan wore his trademark yellow sweatpants and white T-shirt. His skin gleamed with sweat, and his nipples pricked under the shirt as he stood in hero pose—leg hitched, chest puffed, arms extended—atop a boulder on Mount Tam. The day was bright, and he squinted into the camera, grinning.

  Abigail turned and looked at her, so Cally said, “What a freak.”

  “Let’s friend him,” Abigail said.

  “You have to do it,” Cally said. “If I do, he’ll think he has a chance. He’ll, like, show up at my house tonight or something.”

  “With a wilted little condom”—Abigail was cracking herself up—“that he keeps in his pocket just waiting for the day when the hot, sexy, beautiful Calista Broderick—”

  “Shut up, you’re such a bitch.”

  “Ha, you love me,” Abigail said. It was true. If not for her, Cally would be alone with the note, rereading it, waiting for its curious horror to fade. She’d have to feel what Tristan’s words opened in her, the shame that became a kind of pleasure, nothing like the anxiousness she felt when Ryan kissed her, or when he flicked his thumb over her nipple like he flicked quarters during the boring parts of algebra. It was a discomfort she’d tried to will to pleasure because it was meant to feel good, she was meant to want it, she was thirteen and pretty and it was the only logical thing to want. If not for Abigail, Cally would’ve kept the note, read the words again, traced them with her fingers: No one sees you but I do. I mean sees you really.

  The note was like Ms. Flax’s office, a stifled room where she was trapped with Tristan. It occurred to her that Ms. Flax might know about the note. Maybe she’d even told him to write it. Teachers like her were always encouraging hopeless kids like Tristan to inject themselves into the social scene with ridiculous gestures—declarations of love, blind stabs at friendship—as if middle school were a safe haven in which to conduct these experiments, when in fact it was the most dangerous place on Earth.

  “Okay. I’m gonna do it,” Abigail said, and clicked Add Friend. Seconds later, she yelped. Tristan had approved her immediately; he clearly didn’t understand the concept of waiting so as not to seem desperate.

  It turned out he did have Facebook friends—not his mother or teachers but kids from their grade who would not have said one word to him at school. There was, incredibly, Emma Fleed. And Elisabeth Avarine, Dave Chu, Nick Brickston, Damon Flintov, and even Ryan Harbinger, approved just twenty minutes before. On Tristan’s Facebook page they read:

  Tristan Bloch and Ryan Harbinger are now friends.

  Ryan Harbinger: hey yo trisstan wut the FUCK

  Tristan Bloch: ?

  Ryan Harbinger: yu know wut im talking about

  Damon Flintov: ya triSTAIN u no wut hes talking about dont u

  Tristan Bloch: I am sorry I don’t.

  Ryan Harbinger: CALLIE fuckin BRODRIK mutherfuckr

  Cally caught her breath. Her name online, more permanent than ink.

  Damon Flintov: hey trisss nice pic u
think callies seen it yet?

  Ryan Harbinger: ha ha thats sum sexxxy shit

  Damon Flintov: callys fuckin wet now bro

  Abby Cress: omg lolz

  “Abby!” Cally said. “What are you doing?”

  “It is fucking funny, Cal,” Abigail said. “You have to admit.”

  “Don’t write anything about me, okay?”

  Abby Cress: Cally says don’t talk abt her ok?

  “What the fuck?” Cally slapped Abigail’s arm. “Now they know I’m here!”

  “Fucking chill,” Abigail said.

  Ryan Harbinger: tristans the one talking abt her rite TRISS?

  Ryan Harbinger: u might not think I watch you but I do

  Ryan Harbinger: u have the world’s most beautiful skin

  Ryan Harbinger: calista i love u do u think u could love me back?

  Damon Flintov: awwwww

  Tristan Bloch: Hey guys will you please not.

  Ryan Harbinger: u said it trisSTAIN

  Ryan Harbinger: i have ur note, callie gave me it

  Ryan Harbinger: callie sez tell u ur a fat fuckin loser

  Ryan Harbinger: and ur notes fuckin hillarious btw

  Ryan Harbinger: calista i think that u r perfect

  Jonas Everett: LMAO

  Nick Brix: wut the fuck

  Emma Fleed: Cally Broderick is Hott!!

  Steph Malcolm-Swann: callie brodrick is a Bitch u guys

  Tristan Bloch: Where did you get that.

  Tristan Bloch: I didn’t write that.

  Emma Fleed: and hes a liar to? lol

  Damon Flintov: fuck this fag

  Dave Chu: guys ur being kind of mean now.

  Ryan Harbinger: hey yo trisstain were just telling u the truth

  Damon Flintov: trisstan block is a fat freak perv

  Jonas Everett: he he

  More and more new comments flashed onto the screen.

  “This is getting harsh,” Abigail said cheerfully. “Ryan Harbinger must really want to fuck you.”

  Once when Cally was a kid, her family had gone water-skiing at Lake Tahoe. When it was Cally’s turn, her mom had jumped in too, floating beside Cally in the cool water as she guided her feet into the skis’ slick rubber fittings and handed her the rope. Then her mom had swum to the boat, climbed aboard, and leaned over the stern to grin and wave so energetically it seemed that she would crash into the lake. Cally had clenched her teeth and waved back, believing she was ready. But when the boat took off, she was paralyzed, unable to stand, unable to release the rope. The water coursed over her body, flooding her nose and her mouth, and she knew it then: the world was going to drag her where it wanted. When the boat stopped and the water subsided, she coughed and gulped the air and was surprised to find that breathing was something she was still allowed to do.