The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(76)

Her life had now been split. There was the girl waiting alone in this open-air car, roasting in the sunshine of a June afternoon in Mill Valley. Then there was the girl on the Internet, the girl in the pictures.

Fifteen minutes passed, and her dad did not return. She picked up her phone and texted:


Dad where R U? Boilling to death out here!!



She waited. Of course he didn’t answer. Parents could be counted on to respond to texts about thirty percent of the time, and often hours or days late or right in the middle of class.

Then, across the parking lot, an army of her peers spilled onto the pavement. She hadn’t realized it was lunchtime. Crazy how she’d been out of school for only two weeks and discovered the rest of the world went on during those eight hours. Strange how she’d already forgotten the rhythm of classes, the regular running of bells. They were headed her way.

Emma watched as the kids crossed the lot. She knew most everyone. Even the kids she didn’t know most certainly knew her. But the ones who knew her before may have forgotten that person and replaced her with the girl on the Internet, the girl in the pictures. This thought made her sick: she was the girl to be leered at or pitied or defended or mocked. The piece of news. The hashtag. The girl that some adults were condemning outright. Holding her up as a symbol of “What Has Gone Wrong with Our Kids.”

They had said it on Twitter, on Facebook, on blogs: Emma Fleed was a rich girl. A privileged child for whom this whole town had been orchestrated so that her life might be easy and safe. Whose tragedies were petty and self-inflicted. Avoidable, if:

She hadn’t stepped into that car.

She hadn’t had so much to drink.

She hadn’t danced in the living room.

She hadn’t dressed in a skirt.

She hadn’t gone to that party with a good friend to watch her but stayed at that party alone.

A girl like Emma, the people determined, had no claim on heartbreak. She ought to be counting her blessings.

Just last month, Emma’s English teacher had asked her, during a “reflection period,” But why do you think those children ended up in Rwanda and you ended up here? What if you had been born there and they had been born here? And Emma had stopped texting long enough to cock her eyebrow at the teacher, like, What did that even mean? Why was she in Mill Valley and not Rwanda?

“Because this is where my parents live?” she’d said. Was she supposed to feel bad about the life she was born into? Was she supposed to go live in Rwanda? Or was she just supposed to know? That she could just as easily have ended up anywhere else. That it could just as easily have been some other girl sitting in the back of this shining Mercedes, watching her friends travel past her in packs she last week belonged to and now sat apart from, wondering, Am I a victim? Am I a slut?

—

Emma couldn’t sit in that open convertible—exposed, pathetic, trapped—while all of Valley High paraded past. What if people stopped to talk to her? What if they didn’t?

She’d taken her painkillers. She’d practiced walking with the physical therapist in the hospital. She thought she was strong enough.

She pushed open the car door. Reached into the backseat (stabbing pains in her gut and hips; she gritted her teeth), grabbed her crutches and lifted them over the edge, stood them on the asphalt, leaned against the car. Then she turned, clutched her thigh, and lifted her leg out, setting her foot on the ground. Every movement hurt. She stopped, breathed until the knives relented. She reached for the crutches and pulled herself up, dropped her weight on the supports under her arms. The pain was a shock. She fell forward on her crutches and the world washed in black for a second. She had not lost consciousness. She blinked the sun out of her eyes. Breathed in and out, in and out, until she had the strength to move again.

Now she saw that the crowds had passed, and heads turned back to stare as she swooned on her feet. Freshmen mostly: nobody she could allow to see her fall on the asphalt, or drop back into that car, or cry. There was nothing left to do but to lift her chin, to feign a sense of purpose, to hobble with as much dignity as she could muster toward the fluorescent bustle of the grocery store. She had to find her father, and get out.

Emma’s former friend Cally Broderick lounged with the beach kids on stone benches around the entrance to the store, their faces to the sun and eyes shielded by Ray-Bans. They were, as usual, in some other dimension and it was easy to avoid them as she went inside. There, the mood was jovial, frantic. Kids everywhere, shouting, laughing. Cutting lines that snaked back through the aisles, angling for position. Clustering at the deli counter, behind which middle-aged ladies in white aprons cupped their ears, straining to hear shouted orders. Boys strolled around with their fists in bags of Cheetos, cellophane crackling. Girls huddled together, clutching tubs of sushi, gazing into iPhones. Talking to each other, texting people elsewhere. They had only forty minutes before they would be locked up for the afternoon. They had to cram their lunches quickly, their socializing too. They had to find out what was happening before they were cut off from each other again, corralled in classrooms, forced to text half-blind with iPhones hidden in their laps. Then there were scattered adults who, like Emma, had forgotten that it was the lunch hour, who edged around the crowds, wary as gazelles while skirting a pride of lions.

Emma searched for her father’s head above the crowd. Two freshman girls by the soda case saw her and giggled, huddled over their phones. Then. It was as subtle as the ripples from a cast stone: around the store, phones trilled and were pulled from pockets, one by one, eyes scanned texts, eyes lifted to follow Emma as she passed, then looked away when she stared back.