The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(59)

His answer was to release the spring, let the stapler’s jaws snap shut with a bang that made the teacher jump. Or the counselor. The therapist. The private educational consultant his parents were paying two hundred an hour to figure out what was wrong with him. Old ladies and hippie dudes tryna be down. They kept asking why couldn’t he be quiet and good and listen, and he just sat there counting down the seconds, thinking he’d die happy if they’d let him get outside.

For example. A few weeks before he got arrested, he got called into the principal’s office, just because he’d called his asshole math teacher an asshole. In the office he sat and drummed his pencil on Ms. Norton’s desk. Out the window there were freshman girls traipsing out to lunch, their short, wispy skirts flashing shadows on their thighs, and Ms. Norton, who coulda been hot once but now looked faded in her uglyass tomato suit, clasped her hands like she was begging him for mercy.

“Please, Damon, tell me what you need to be successful,” she said. “We all want the best for you, Damon. We’re trying to understand, Damon.” Saying his name over and over, like that would prove she knew him.

His boys who knew him called him Flint. Ryan and Nick—his partners in crime. He loved the motherfuckers. They got how all he wanted, all he needed, was to make something happen. When they were bored, they’d go up the 101 freeway to Novato and take turns lying on the off-ramp, jumping up and running off right before a car sped around the curve, just to feel the rush of it, the way the blood thundered in their ears.

Ms. Norton said, “Damon? Damon? Are you listening to me?”

He grinned real big because she had no clue what she was up against. He started telling her some bullshit story about his favorite grandpa that just kicked it, but stopped when little clear tears wobbled in her eyes.

“Oh, Damon,” she told him. “I didn’t know—”

“Forget it,” he told her. “It doesn’t fuckin’ matter.”

Okay, he’d done some shit. Like his dad always told him, he was no angel.

There was that kid in eighth grade. He and Ryan were just fuckin’ with the guy, they didn’t mean anything. Tristan was a freak to begin with, then he wrote that note going after Cally Broderick, who everybody knew was Ryan’s. After it happened, the school came after Damon, but his dad went off on them—threatened to sue the school, the police, anyone in Mill Valley who was gonna accuse his son. Saying Damon had done nothing but act like a normal eighth-grade boy and that he didn’t need to be punished because the other kid couldn’t cope. Plus, it didn’t even happen on school property, so what right did they have? He was only saving his own face, but the school backed down. The worst thing that happened to Damon was he didn’t have to go to school for a week.

That was how he knew. That nothing could touch him. And if nothing could touch him, then nothing he did mattered.

Since then, he’d been smoking weed and drinking whatever and for a long time Molly was his jam. It helped him relax. Made his anger melt and transform to love. Love for his friends who partied with him and love for the girls in their silky tank tops and tight jeans, love for the rap on the radio, love for the world. It wasn’t a problem till Ski Week, when he and Nick hosted a function and the cops showed at the wrong fuckin’ time.

The whole thing was Nick’s idea. He did this thing where he found some bigass mansion somewhere that was empty because the people were selling it, then threw a party there, selling hella tickets to all the kids in Marin. He always made bank.

This one house sat high on Mount Tamalpais, spying on the San Francisco Bay, and it was on the market for $5 million. The function was Nick’s idea, but when the cops showed, it was Damon outside pissing on the lawn, drunk and high and ecstatic, with the plastic pouch stuffed into his sock. He was having so much fun that he forgot to be afraid. They found the pills in five seconds, hooked the cuffs around his wrists, palmed his head into the back of their black-and-white car. He sat in the cop car and its lights swirled red and blue around the street. He was waiting for Nick to come out in the cuffs, to slide over to make room for his friend’s skinny ass. But Nick was too smart for that. He found a way to disappear. Only Damon took the fall.

Damon’s dad had a reputation to protect, and he wasn’t tryna have a kid in juvie. That’s why he worked out with the judge that Damon would go to this special rehab place on Mount Tam. After that he’d be golden, as long as he stayed clean.

When Damon first got to rehab, he was amped. It looked more like a resort hotel than a place to get punished. But as soon as he saw what he’d be doing all day, he thought the jail time woulda been better. At least in juvie he’d just hang out in the yard in his orange jumpsuit or whatever—and the people there would expect him to be what he was, they wouldn’t be all up in his face about changing.

At rehab, his counselor was this big, bald black dude named Lance, and it took him a minute just to stop laughing about that. But Lance must have known how faggy his name was, because he didn’t get heated about it, just sat back in his swivel chair with one tree-trunk leg crossed wide over the other and scribbled on this yellow notepad he liked to carry around. He must’ve been writing shit about Damon, but Damon didn’t mind. He was used to being sized up—assessed. He’d been assessed so many times his mom had a file cabinet full of little papers all tryna explain to her what her own son was like. She must’ve read them, but it didn’t make a difference. The years kept passing and everything kept going on the same.