The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(50)
In the White Room a wall of bare, floor-to-ceiling windows faced the redwood deck and the forested canyon below. When her mom went out at night, Elisabeth would sit alone on the love seat and scan the dark canyon for signs of life. She knew any hiker could look in and see her. Strange men might peer through the glass, knives glinting. Kids from her school, hunting for a secret place to smoke. Wild animals. One night, when she was waiting for her mom to come home from yet another date, a deer appeared just outside the window. The deer stood sideways and pressed its brown flank to the glass, cropped hairs flattened and fanning out, like it would push through if it could. It turned its head toward her and stared. Ears perked and flicked, nostrils trembled. It seemed to know her. Trained its gaze on her like it had something crucial to tell her. But what? Elisabeth stood and stepped nearer to the window. The deer spooked, and clattered down the wooden steps into the dark.
Despite Elisabeth’s pleas, her mom refused to fit the windows with curtains or blinds. She said the view made the house. She said, “Don’t be silly, Liza-Belle, there’s nothing out there but trees.”
The most important room in the house was the Gold Room, her mom’s dressing room. It had cheetah carpeting in tan and white, light yellow walls, white shelves edged in shimmering gold leaf. There were racks for dresses, skirts, blouses, pants. White drawers, gold-handled, for her lace and satin underwear. White velvet boxes for her jewels. Shelves of shoes with toes pointed down: flats, sandals, pumps, low boots, tall boots, over-the-knee. One pair of flip-flops for yoga, slim black thongs to flaunt red-polished toes. No sneakers. Nothing that Elisabeth’s mom did not love. There was an oversized ottoman upholstered in gold fabric. A trifold set of full-length mirrors like in the dressing room at Nordstrom, and a small white pedestal to stand on. There was no black anywhere. Nothing Elisabeth’s dad might deem reasonable.
When creating the Gold Room, Elisabeth’s mom had seemed to be pursuing something bigger than Elisabeth could understand. “For the first time in my life, I am going to have exactly what I want,” she’d said, as if this explained it all.
—
“Okay,” Nick Brickston told Elisabeth. “First rule, hide everything.”
It was Saturday afternoon. She had waited until her mom left for a wine country weekend with Steve, an anchorman from the local news. Now she stood with Nick under the skylight in her mom’s studio-slash-kitchen, trying desperately to seem at ease as he hauled in the last case of alcohol and stacked it with the others on the floor. White fog eddied over the pane of glass above their heads, and redwoods smacked drops of wet onto the glass. Nick palmed a delicate green glass vase that her mom had bought at the Fall Arts Festival. “Anything breakable. Anything valuable.” He turned, assessed the room. “Hide the easel, the paintings. Plus the paints and brushes and shit. Who knows what fucked-up ideas people are going to get.”
Elisabeth nodded.
“Do you have any money around?” he asked. “Cash, credit cards? Your mom’s jewelry? You should get it out of here.”
“Okay.”
“Okay. Then there’s the weird shit. The shit you wouldn’t think.”
Elisabeth followed him across the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator. Inside, along with the milk and condiments, were two liters of Smartwater, a takeout box from Sushi Ran, a bag of raw spinach, and a watermelon. “Will your mom expect all this to be here when she gets back?”
“Are you saying,” Elisabeth said slowly, “that someone is going to steal this watermelon?”
Nick shrugged. “Last month Jonas Everett got wrapped over a missing crate of farmers’ market strawberries. He’s allergic—when he said he ate them all himself, his mom knew he was full of shit.”
“Hide the watermelon, then, definitely.” Elisabeth had hated watermelon ever since she’d puked it all over Mr. Hamilton’s sixth-grade social studies classroom during her oral presentation on ancient Chinese foot-binding.
“Now the most important thing.” Nick lifted the phone off its receiver on the kitchen counter. “Where can this go?”
“The phone?”
“Trust me, the last thing you want is this thing rings and some drunk asshole picks it up to say hello. Get it?”
“I think so. And we’re going to keep everyone out here, right?”
Nick nodded. “Kitchen, bathroom, deck. No one goes down the hallways. No one goes in your room or your mom’s room.”
“Or the Gold Room,” Elisabeth said, blushing as soon as she heard herself say it. No one knew about the room names and no one should. “I mean, my mom’s dressing room. It has to be off-limits.”
“Sure,” Nick said. Then he grinned, draped his arm across her shoulders. “You know, you’re gonna have fun tonight, girl,” he told her. “If it kills you.”
—
There were 175 kids in the junior class. Most of them didn’t like her.
Since middle school, girls had pricked up around her, as cats prick up at danger, and edged away. Once, when she was in seventh grade, three eighth-grade girls had cornered her behind the snack bar, surrounded her and pressed her to the wall, so close she felt their hot, sweet-and-sour breath against her neck, and demanded to know why she thought she was so fucking superior. When she hadn’t answered, the biggest of the three had smiled calmly beneath her dark, center-parted hair, braces glinting, then reared back and slapped her face. A sting that mellowed to an ache. Loose tears. That night, a plum-colored bruise had bloomed high on her cheek, and she’d wished that it would make her ugly by the morning, but it hadn’t.