The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(53)
She liked the videos of a spiritual healer who performed deep chakra cleansings with no tools but his just-washed hands: he placed one hand at the base of the patient’s spine, the other at the location of each chakra, a spinning disk of energy and light that hovered in the air several inches from the skin. Then he circled his hand to spin the chakra faster, sloughing off the toxic residue the patient had accumulated through the simple act of living. The idea was to cleanse the patient’s energy fields in order to fix what had gone wrong inside. People said it was a hoax, but Elisabeth wanted to believe it. The concept was simple, complete: spin out the bad stuff, and the rest of the body would heal itself.
She liked this idea of healing. She could be a surgeon, maybe: she wasn’t sure about the med school part, but could see herself slicing into a body, in search of the source of the pain. She would specialize in heart surgery: crack the sternum to open the bones, reveal the jumping, fist-sized muscle, meaty and red. She loved that this human machine could be opened, examined. Could be held in the palm of a hand. Revealed, repaired, even replaced, encased in its jewel box of bone and sewn closed, and the person’s whole life would be different. All her old problems would cease to exist.
—
Now it was happening, Saturday night: Elisabeth’s house was full. Kids crowded the deck and the kitchen. Her mom’s easel, paints, and brushes were stowed away; alcohol cluttered the counters instead. To Elisabeth’s surprise, many had brought their own racks of beer or handles of vodka. Still, Nick commandeered the cases of hard lemonade and Red Tail Ale that her three hundred dollars had paid for and sold the bottles one by one, pocketing the cash.
He opened one for Elisabeth. She drank and the bitterness coated her tongue. Wincing, she tried to pass it back.
“Just drink it,” Nick said. “You’ll like it eventually.”
She sipped. More and more people pushed into her house. She hid in the kitchen and watched as they paraded through the White Room, followed the trail of celery-colored towels she’d laid across the white carpet to the kitchen and the deck.
Dave Chu came in with some guys from the soccer team and picked carefully over the towels toward the deck. He was tall, like her. He wore a red polo shirt with a little embroidered horse logo and chinos and clean white sneakers. As he walked, he flicked his shining black hair out of his eyes. She was surprised to see Dave. He seemed too anxiously well behaved to have any fun at parties. On the other hand, he had paid Nick Brickston to take the SAT for him, so he must be more than the compulsive front-row note-taker she saw every day in class. As she shook out a garbage bag and began to fill it with used cups, she felt him watching her.
Abigail Cress came in with her best friend, Emma Fleed. Emma was short and baby-faced in a ballerina skirt of tiered chiffon, and Abigail was skinny and stylish, with a black silk top and tight dark jeans and a black quilted purse over her shoulder. They paused in the doorway and it was strange to see Abigail so quiet, so still. Wary. Everyone had been talking about her and Mr. Ellison, who’d disappeared the month before. Elisabeth herself had always felt funny around Mr. Ellison—there was something strange about the way he lingered by the girls’ desks in SAT class, reaching down to mark answers on their test sheets, cresting his arm over theirs. And Elisabeth had seen him with Abigail once, she thought, while eating her avocado sandwich in the courtyard—squinting up at the clock tower and spying through the narrow, arched windows the figures of a man and girl embracing. Elisabeth herself hadn’t even kissed a boy since Ryan Harbinger in eighth grade—when, in an empty classroom one afternoon, Ryan had out of nowhere grabbed Elisabeth and kissed her, a kiss quick and alien and wet, an anxious tongue darting around her teeth as if probing for something hidden there. Then, just as suddenly, Ryan had pulled away. Burning with embarrassment, Elisabeth had seen, gaping in the doorway with a Slurpee in his hand, Tristan Bloch. From then on, the rumor had circulated that Elisabeth had “stolen” Ryan from Cally Broderick; no matter the fact that Elisabeth and Ryan never again kissed or spoke, this rumor refused to die. Was it Tristan who’d started it? She’d never know.
She wondered if Abigail Cress had really gone all the way with Mr. Ellison. Had she seen him naked, and allowed him to see her? No wonder, she thought, that Nick Brickston had turned the affair into a joke. If you took it seriously, it would make you sick.
As Abigail and Emma followed the trail of towels to the deck, the Bo-Stin beach kids crowded in behind them, laughing and reeking of weed. They paid no attention to the towels. Cally, who she knew had always hated her because of Ryan, padded her pink and dirty feet across the carpet.
—
The storm surprised them, pushed everyone inside. The rain was fierce, drilling the rail of the redwood deck. The guys cursed, crushed cigarettes under their heels and sheltered plastic cups beneath their arms; the girls screamed and palmed the sky above their heads, ducking to save their hair. Only Cally Broderick and the beach kids welcomed the storm; they laughed and arched their faces to the sky, danced and tried to catch the raindrops on their tongues, embraced the falling water until their shirts sheered through, clung to their bellies and breasts.
The party spilled into the White Room. Elisabeth saw them coming, a rolling tide, and knelt to straighten the trail of towels. To save the white carpet was a hopeless effort; she knew this even as she tried. Abigail Cress and Emma Fleed ran in first, apologizing as they stumbled over Elisabeth but laughing too, so it was clear they didn’t mean it. Then Damon Flintov and Ryan Harbinger were yelling and knocking people out of the way to claim the white couch and love seat in the middle of the room. After them came everyone, freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, a mass of kids and yet somehow divided, the familiar groups and cliques of school asserting themselves as Ryan, Damon, and Nick dominated the couches in the living room, Abigail and Emma corralled the junior girls around the kitchen counter, and freshman girls circled on the carpet to share a bottle of vodka, drinking and passing with dizzying speed. Dave Chu stepped in from the deck, lingered near the windows as if looking for his assigned seat. The soccer team was playing flip cup at the dinner table, but he didn’t join them; instead, seeing Elisabeth, he began to trace the room, collecting abandoned red cups and carrying them one by one into the kitchen.