The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(34)

Dave turned to see what he was looking at. There, in the doorway, stood Abigail Cress. She was staring hard at Mr. Ellison and her cheeks were white and she looked like she might cry, or scream. There was a lady with her—tall, important-looking, with black hair like Abigail’s and a black suit and a black Bluetooth headset blinking at her ear.

“Abigail?” Mr. Ellison said. “Did you need something?”

“Abby?” the important-looking lady said. “Honey, who is this? Is this him?”

Abigail shook her head.

Then the lady’s phone buzzed and she answered it, clicked back into the hall.

“I could have,” Abigail said to Mr. Ellison. “I could have, but I didn’t.”

“What are you talking about?” Mr. Ellison said, glancing at Dave. His voice canted, face like chalk.

Dave knew he was not meant to see this. Some aspect of the rumor was true, and he did not want to know what. He wanted to excuse himself, but the air was ice and he sensed if he spoke he would shatter it.

“I wanted you to know,” Abigail said evenly. “I could have told them, and I didn’t, and I still could. If you ever try to talk to me again.”

Then she turned and left, and Mr. Ellison said that he would see Dave in the morning.

—

The following day, Mr. Ellison’s classroom was dark and a sign on the glass-paned door said, SAT WORKSHOP CANCELLED. The SAT was only two weeks away.

Dave faced the door and fury rose in his chest. Where was Mr. Ellison? This was nothing short of abandonment. The teacher had led him to the cliff’s edge, dropped him into the abyss. He was gone, with no explanation and no excuse, and Dave Chu’s choices had narrowed to one.

—

From behind the counter of the 7-Eleven on Miller Avenue, the old man in the red vest watched teenagers push in and out of the swinging glass doors.

At home, their parents served them three squares a day: heaping plates of quinoa and kale, sustainably farmed chicken and sustainably fished fish, steel-cut oatmeal for breakfast, mango slices for dessert. But here, he gave them what they wanted.

Big Gulps. Slurpees. AriZona Iced Tea. Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and Kettle Chips. Jalapeno Cheese Taquitos, glinting with grease. Top Ramen steaming in its Styrofoam cup. Armloads of candy.

A kid was complaining to the old man about the five-dollar minimum on credit card purchases. “Who carries cash?” the boy said.

“People who don’t have credit cards,” said the old man.

“Who doesn’t have credit cards?”

The old man sighed. “There are fees,” he said. “You still want your Dr Pepper?”

The boy nodded. He added four dollars of candy to his order, swiped his card through the machine, and pushed out the door into the parking lot.

It was 4:00 p.m. Nick Brickston stood at the edge of the lot. He was just to the side of the glass doors, where the 7-Eleven man couldn’t see him. Slim, dark-haired, he wore a black T-shirt, jeans, and the limited-edition baseball cap he’d bought at the ballpark when the Giants won the World Series. He leaned against the trunk of a redwood tree. The tree was so thick, and Nick Brickston so skinny, that it would take four of him to match its girth. Its branches smothered him in shade.

Nick did business here almost every afternoon. The world’s last remaining pay phone was stuck to the side of this 7-Eleven, but he didn’t use it. He was a drug dealer, sure, but he took calls on his iPhone like a normal human being.

Dave trudged down the sidewalk, bowed under his backpack’s weight. He hauled all his books to school each day, just in case, and the pack strained at the seams. He wore his everyday outfit: pressed chinos and polo shirt, sneakers with clean white soles. When he reached Nick, he set his pack on the ground and flicked the hair out of his face. Sweat slid into his eyes; he pushed the heel of his palm over his brows. Regarding Nick, he thought how strange it was that the two of them, and Tristan Bloch of all people, had for six months in sixth grade called each other friends. It had all been orchestrated by their mothers, and had ended when Dave and Nick swapped knot-tying and origami for sports and girls and movies. Tristan had called them traitors and kicked them out of his house, all the while crying like a baby, a slug-trail of snot leaking from his nose.

All Dave asked Nick was: “How much?”

Nick rested his head against the tree trunk, squinted into the sky. “Seven hundred.”

“Seven hundred dollars?” Dave said, trying to calculate sixteen years of allowance, Christmas money, and birthday money in his head. “That’s a lot, isn’t it?”

Nick shrugged. He had so many customers he could afford to be casual. “That’s what it is. I guarantee over 2200, every time.”

Dave digested this. Nick, who was not even taking the SAT prep class at school, promised to earn a nearly perfect score. “How do you do it?”

Nick grinned. “Don’t worry ’bout it. Skills.”

“Well, I only need 2100 to get into Berkeley.”

“Whatever,” Nick said. “Seven hundred for my services, plus fifty for the fake ID. You sure you want to do this?”

“I can get your money,” Dave said.

—

The safe in the basement contained the sixteen years of birthday and Christmas money that Dave had never been allowed to spend.

Each birthday, he opened the card from his parents and the brand-new hundred-dollar bill fluttered out. He was allowed to hold it, the bill like a feather in his palm. He was allowed to examine its face: the obscure seals and numbers like an ancient code that maybe everybody knew but him; Benjamin Franklin’s odd disappointed eyes, nestled in flesh; the strange, scrawled signatures at the bottom. He was allowed to inhale the bill’s faint ink smell and press its cool cotton-linen paper to his cheek. Then he had to give it back.