The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(33)

It was hard, he thought, to be responsible for all this happiness. He was angry but he was also sorry.

“I’ll try harder,” he told her. “I will try to be better.”

—

Drifting to sleep that night, Dave imagined another life in which he was allowed to wear happiness in the simple way that felt native to him. He thought of his future secretly, as if his parents would peer through the crack of his open bedroom door and deep into his brain (he usually left the door open because closing it triggered a string of questions he couldn’t stand: “Why do you need to close this door? What are you doing in there?”). He saw not a high-powered job, not a doctor’s white coat or a lawyer’s striped suit, but himself, Dave Chu, in chinos and polo shirt, in the middle of an ordinary life. Some job. A home. Enough money to see the newest superhero blockbuster every Friday night, not at the art-house theater in Mill Valley but at a strip-mall megaplex with stadium seating and IMAX screens. He wanted the hero to get the girl. He wanted to eat Milk Duds and popcorn and sip Sprite from a straw that he shared with his girlfriend or wife.

Dave could not help but imagine Elisabeth Avarine in this role, a girl he’d never talked to but who was so unearthly gorgeous that it was difficult to look at her. She had sugar-blond hair that hung straight around her face and down the narrow space between her shoulder blades. She had eyes like sea glass, skin like milk. Dramatic, dark blond eyebrows. A little divot in her pink lower lip. She was tall, as tall as Dave himself. At school that day she’d worn a thin white T-shirt slung wide over her shoulders, revealing a strip of collarbone, and cutoff jean shorts. The shirt had shrugged up as she’d crossed the classroom, her belly button winking beneath the shadows of the cloth. She’d slid into her desk and the hem of her shorts had pressed into her thighs. She’d crossed her ankles and the bones there were delicate, flanked by fine grooves. A gold chain draped over one ankle, dangling two small hearts. This was all the jewelry she needed. Her feet were naked but for a pair of brown thong sandals slid through little crooked toes.

With closed eyes, on the cool cloth of his pillow, Dave watched Elisabeth as she bent to rifle in her backpack. The sun caressed her shoulders, white and soft. Her hair swung like a movie curtain over her cheek, and a bra strap, pink as a shell, unhitched and fell down her arm. Seeing him, she cocked her head and smiled, waved him over—

People said Elisabeth was a bitch, stuck up, but Dave sensed a sweetness lying deep within her, like the black-cherry filling at the bottom of a yogurt.

In his dream-life, Elisabeth would tuck her hand into the crease of his elbow as they walked into the movie. He’d never had a girlfriend, but when observing other couples, he was fascinated by this easy intertwining, wondering how it felt and whether Elisabeth would sense the nervous sweat that lined the crease of his elbow beneath her hand. Was it possible she would feel the sweat with her slim, clean, pink-polished fingers and simply wouldn’t care?

Elisabeth would kiss him, muss his hair. They’d have two children, maybe three. A house filled with small clothes and toys and the pleasant hum of voices in the other room. He thought of this, treasured it, a wish he knew could not come true.

He told himself that his parents knew best. There was something about living that he didn’t understand yet; there was a reason that the small life that he wished for was not right. Perhaps it was true—as when in childhood he’d desired nothing more than the simple sweetness of vanilla ice cream but his father urged him toward the rocky road—that Dave did not know what he wanted, that the happiness he yearned for would elude him, until he learned to dream of more and better things.

—

That Thursday, Mr. Ellison handed back the results of the practice SAT. After class Dave approached the teacher’s desk, clutching his score report. Mr. Ellison was slicing someone’s essay with red pen—as the teacher himself liked to say, grinning conspiratorially at whichever class he happened to be in front of, he was “making it bleed.”

Dave rustled his score sheet. “Excuse me, Mr. Ellison,” he said. “Can you tell me, what are the tricks?”

“Tricks?” Mr. Ellison slashed out a paragraph of the essay on his desk.

“I need to score 2100.”

Mr. Ellison put down his pen. He looked up, blinking behind his glasses. Dave’s face made him sigh. “At some point, Dave, you have to say you’ve given it all you’ve got. You just have to know the stuff, or at least have a sense for it.”

“A sense?”

“Instinct. And your score has already gone up two hundred points, hasn’t it?” Reaching over his piles of papers, he pulled the report from Dave’s hand. “Yes. You’re at 1750 now. That’s very respectable.”

“I need at least a 2100. That’s the cutoff.”

“Cutoff?”

“For Berkeley!”

“Aren’t you being a little hard on yourself?” Mr. Ellison leaned forward in his chair, projecting humanness instead of teacherness. It made Dave uncomfortable.

“If you will tell me the tricks, I can learn them,” Dave said. He was startled by his own voice, loud and pleading. “Please.”

“Okay. How about this? Stop by tomorrow before class. We’ll sit down and go over your test together.”

Relieved, Dave started to thank him, but Mr. Ellison stood up abruptly, looking past Dave to the open classroom door.