The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(80)

The afternoon bell rang, signaling the end of her free period and the end of the school day. She headed inside to gather her things. As she walked toward her classroom, the tide of students pushed the other way. She heard and felt but hardly saw them. She did not stop until she’d reached her room. There she grabbed her satchel and sweater and keys, then locked the room and hurried down the back steps to her car. She had to be alone, to think. How could the things that Beth had told her be right, and how could Molly have been so wrong?

She was stopped at the long red light in front of the school. The kids filled the front lawn; some filed under the arches and spilled onto the sidewalk. A few girls and boys crossed the avenue, the girls tugging down their miniskirts, the boys tugging up their sagging jeans. But most massed in front of the school, huddled in conspiratorial circles, the shells of their backpacks turned toward her. She peered through the windshield; she could not tell the ones she knew from the ones she didn’t know. She might have seen Calista Broderick’s caramel waves of hair; she might have seen Nick Brickston’s narrow shoulders. Prior to this weekend she would have thought she’d know them instantly. Now she could not be sure. She could not be sure of anything. She thought she saw the tide of students ebb, prepare to dissipate. As the light turned green, the circles shifted. The students moved away from her, and she drove on.





Senior Year





THE PRETTY BOY


It should have been Ryan Harbinger’s season. He should have spent his summer at the beach, should have jumped in the Expedition every day after baseball practice, swung by for Nick and Flint, and mobbed over Mount Tam to Stinson Beach. They’d surf or swim or just sprawl on the hot sand and chill as gulls wheeled and cried overhead and the waves shushed them into a kind of trance. Blaze a couple blunts and pass them around and wait for the world to lift from their shoulders, to evaporate, breezes carrying kelp smells and faint sprays of salt. Sun glazing his skin and then burrowing under. He’d feel his cells splitting, molecules dancing. His skin tingling, each breeze raising the fine brown hairs on his arms and legs.

But in the weeks after the car crash, Ryan suffered from whiplash, bruised ribs. Stiffness in his shoulders and neck and torso, a deep ache in the muscles he used to laugh. Flint was somewhere he didn’t even know, in jail or at the far-off wilderness boot camp that was his parents’ last-ditch effort to make him what he wasn’t. Without Flint there to laugh at their jokes, Nick and Ryan were uneasy with each other, not enough to kill their friendship but just enough, along with the memory of the accident—Ryan’s crying and Nick’s bloody face—to make Ryan hesitate to call.

After school each day, in the three weeks between the accident and the last day of school, Ryan’s mom picked him up and took him home and sent him to his room. He could walk, but she encouraged him to eat in bed, where she served him bowls of tomato soup, plates of steak, even racks of ribs. She’d wet and microwave an old bath towel, spread the hot, damp towel over a cool, dry one on his lap and let him tear into the food until his plate was clear, then drag the damp towel across his mouth and scrub his chin and hands.

“Jesus, Mom, get off!” he’d yell, pushing her away.

“Now, what else do you need?” she’d ask, determined, undeterred.

Even as his parents coddled him, they punished him. Took away his car and grounded him. They wanted him home. To reflect. He would be forgiven, they told him, but he had to understand what he had been a part of on the night of Elisabeth Avarine’s function.

“Think of what might have happened to you,” his mom said.

His dad said, “Think of that poor girl lying in the hospital.”

But Ryan did not want to think about Emma Fleed. He had seen her after the accident, in the store across from school, his ribs still swaddled in Ace bandages. Hunched on her crutches, she’d looked up at him with uncharacteristic pleading in her eyes. Girls had often looked at him this way: as if there were something they desperately needed from him but couldn’t even name. Some answer. Some purpose or somewhere to land or some making sense of their unsteady place in the universe. They wanted him to what? Claim them? Protect them? Tell them what to want and what to do? Tell them that he loved them? He didn’t, of course—and they didn’t love him—so why did they expect it? Why did they ask him to lie? He was sorry that he’d had to walk away from Emma, that he’d left her there when no one else would look her in the eye. Basically, he liked her. But in the middle of that store, her body bent and broken, she was a damaged object that he didn’t have the tools to repair.

After Flint’s BMW had slammed into that tree, and Ryan’s body had slammed against the airbag, as the world ground to stillness and he struggled to breathe and Flint blinked at him out of a shocked, drained face, in the clamor of Cally Broderick’s screams and Alessandra Ryding’s calls to God, Ryan realized that the nauseating thud against his seat had been a human body, Emma, and he had not looked back to see her. He had not looked back in that moment, and he could not look back now.

—

Starting in the last week of June, Ryan’s summer league team met at the Valley High baseball diamond. The ball field had been built, they said, on top of marshland, and was sinking perpetually yet imperceptibly under Ryan’s feet as he stood on the pitcher’s mound, waiting for the next at-bat.