The Most Dangerous Place on Earth
Lindsey Lee Johnson
The pot at the end of the rainbow is not money. I know because I have it.
—Marin County woman featured in I Want It All Now! An NBC News Special Report, 1978
The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
—John Milton, Paradise Lost
Nobody talks to children.
—Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause
Eighth Grade
THE NOTE
Cally Broderick lingered in the doorway of the resource office, waiting to be noticed.
She would have been easy to overlook. She was short and skinny, and her dirty-blond hair had begun that year to wave and shine with oil. Her hazel eyes were pretty, though too wide-set, her nose thin but too long. Every four weeks her face produced a constellation of pimples that loomed and gleamed when she turned her cheek to the mirror, disgusting and enthralling her. Her face was a question she considered daily, widening her eyes in the mirror on the inside of her locker, sucking the flesh of her cheeks between her teeth. Her mother said—or used to say—that Cally was “striking looking,” a description Cally rejected: it was not only vaguely violent sounding but also patently untrue.
She was a restless girl, anxious to rewind her life or jump it forward. In service of the latter goal, she’d made a list of skills to learn before adulthood—how to swallow pills without gagging, to buy tampons without blushing, to shake the hands of her father’s friends without giggling and glancing away. But as the years passed, the list only grew longer: life presented more questions as she lived it, more and more doors to unlock. These questions she didn’t share with anyone. She wrote them in a battered journal, then stuffed the journal in a pillowcase and shoved it under her mattress lest someone—her brother Jake—find it and expose her. She would not even show it to Abigail Cress, her best friend. Prior to Abigail, Cally would have said her best friend was her mother, but that was now impossible, for a multitude of reasons too complex to explain. In fact there was little about her life that Cally Broderick could explain, to herself or to anyone else. She was a girl in middle school. She was thirteen years old.
The resource office at Valley Middle School was small and dim—the resource teacher, Ms. Flax, had a moral objection to fluorescent lights, preferring to squint in the amber glow of a ceramic lamp—and stank of mold, and of the pesto pasta that steamed at the teacher’s elbow as she marked papers at her desk.
Ms. Flax, over thirty but under fifty, had an apple-shaped body that she wrapped in hippie scarves and tunics and long mud-colored skirts. She was not pretty, Cally decided, but prettyish, with featherweight hair and deep brown eyes that turned down at the corners, making her look on the verge of tears even when she laughed. Across from her sat Tristan Bloch, who flipped through a stack of shiny colored papers on the desk. He was fat and pale with blond hair buzz-cut so close she saw bits of scalp through the glistening bristle; on sunny days at recess his head would glow as if on fire.
Everyone knew that Tristan spent hours in Ms. Flax’s office, during homeroom, study hall, sometimes recess and lunch. No one knew what they did in there for all that time. Probably she helped him with his work, but it seemed just as likely that he helped her with hers.
“Ms. Flax?” Cally said. “I got this note? You wanted to, like, see me?”
Ms. Flax started and looked up. “Oh, yes,” she said, shifting her weight, and the chair cushion squeaked and farted beneath her. This embarrassed Cally. And it happened every time—pushing hair out of her face, Ms. Flax would pretend not to notice the noises as she begged Cally to change her ways, as if Cally’s “applying herself” would determine the course of Ms. Flax’s own sad life. “Come in, please. Have a seat.”
“No thanks,” Cally said. She knew what Ms. Flax was like: to step inside, to sit, was to condemn oneself to an inquisition.
“Cally, please.”
Seeing no way out, Cally relented, stepping into the room and taking the seat next to Tristan Bloch’s.
“Mr. Hoyt says you’ve been copying algebra homework,” Ms. Flax said. “You are an extremely bright girl, Calista Broderick. Why would you do this?”
“I don’t know,” Cally said. She looked to see if Tristan was listening, but he did not react. Hunched over the desk, he was folding a sheet of silver paper again and again. All the while he tongued the corner of his mouth. His white T-shirt was tucked into the oversized sweatpants he wore every day, in colors that seemed chosen to assault the eyes: apple red, lime green, and even, horror of horrors, yellow. He wore yellow now. Fruit punch stained his thigh, the splash darkened to a sick bluish gray. Cally’s mother would have told her it was rude, but she couldn’t stop staring at that spot. It was like one of those inkblots psychiatrists showed you to see what kind of crazy you were.
Everyone knew that Tristan didn’t have a father, only a dumpy mother with his same squinty eyes and an aura of frizzed red hair. She’d find any excuse to come panting through the halls, bringing Tristan homework assignments, sweatshirts, Slurpees. At least once a week she’d stride into the front office, hot cheeked, indignant, to yell at Principal Falk about Tristan’s special academic accommodations. Then she’d trudge down to the resource room to conspire with Ms. Flax, as if they would be able to turn Tristan into a normal human being just because they wanted to. But Cally knew what Tristan’s mother didn’t—she was only making his situation worse, she was exactly as weird as her son, what he needed most in life was to get away from her.