The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(85)

No one was going to stop him.

He chose an empty row. Set down his backpack, scooted down in the seat and plugged his earbuds in his ears. It was Flint’s favorite: Tyler, the Creator. (He thought of Flint, trapped now, awaiting his fate.) The beat pounded Ryan’s eardrums. The voice shuddered his heart and tightened his throat—that slow, thick bass, saying whatever the fuck it wanted.

The bus coughed and rumbled to life. His seat quivered beneath him. He rested his head on the scratchy fabric and turned to watch out the window as they pulled away from the curb and headed south on Miller Avenue. They passed the baseball field. His teammates were white stick figures warming up. It was like watching himself on that field, a dozen copies of the boy he’d always been.

The bus traveled out of that little green valley that had been his whole life, that small town circumscribed by mountain and bay and fortresses of ancient trees, and wound toward the freeway, out of the gentle fog and into the hard blue sky, the open expanse of the land. He didn’t really know what he was going to, but he didn’t care. The main thing was that he was going. Was this how Tristan Bloch had felt, he wondered, while on his journey to the bridge?

Ryan’s life was opening all around him, whirling and spinning, whispering into his ear all the things it was going to be. And who he was going to be in it:

Anyone.

Anything.

—

He was a prisoner of the heat. Sweating little rivers in his palms and through the hair curled at his temples, in his pits beneath the borrowed robe and in the crease of his ass beneath his briefs. Cream makeup spackled and suffocated the pores of his face. Two fans limply spun as he waited on the teenage-bedroom set that looked weirdly like his own but not—it was some adult’s best guess, a twin bed with a blue plaid blanket, a desk with a cardboard box painted to resemble an ancient computer, a hair-band poster hanging cockeyed on the wall. A bored-looking girl in sandals and shorts reflected light into his face with a silver screen. The cameraman crouched behind his blank machine. The director yawned in his chair. Only Martin, hovering in the darkness beyond, watched Ryan’s every move with a fierce attention that felt like love.

Beyond the camera was a fluorescent hallway leading out. Ryan squinted to see, but the girl kept flicking silver light into his eyes and he knew now that Out There was nothing but hot smog and noise. He took off his robe. His little-boy briefs embarrassed him, but Martin’s voice carried out of the gloom to tell him they were perfect, he was perfect, he was beautiful, special, there was no one in the world like him. His costar, steroid-bulked and buzz-cut, marched on set yelling into a cell phone, guzzling a Coke. When he saw Ryan, he hung up, hawked into his can.

“Let’s do this,” he said.

As Ryan sat on the edge of the bed, the costar kissed him. Ryan had thought about this but he wasn’t used to it, he was used to girls, the sweet, waxy taste of their lip gloss and gum, the way their soft lips faltered and nipped. The costar led with his jaw, his lips chapped with sharp crusts of skin, and he pushed until their teeth clanged and then forced his tongue inside. Ryan’s heart was kicking, a small caught animal inside his chest. He was backing away, or being pushed, and he was getting hard like he didn’t know he could and didn’t want to but it was too good and too bad and too fast to stop. The costar released Ryan’s face and the sudden light stunned and dizzied him as the costar moved down, pulling at the waistband of Ryan’s briefs. Ryan let him. He closed his eyes until out of the shadows Martin said, “Don’t.” So he opened them, and stared into the dark, gleaming tunnel of the lens.

—

It ended eventually. His payment in his pocket, eight hundred dollars in cash. He’d had money before, always, but this money belonged to him.

Outside, the sky lay low and smoggy and soft, and stucco buildings glared white light. Grit scattered in the street. The sidewalk was empty, and cars sped by not seeing him.

He wanted to check Facebook but his iPhone was off, untraceable. A pay phone was across the street, clawed to the side of a squat motel. He’d heard of these things but never used one. He crossed and read the ancient instructions, dug for quarters, dialed the only number he knew by heart.

As it rang, he wondered what she’d say. What her voice would sound like small and jagged and scared. Ryan, is that you? Where are you, baby, we’re going crazy here worrying—

She interrupted him. “Hello! You’ve reached the home of Ellen, Steven, Ryan, and Nell! We’re four busy bees, so leave your message at the tone!”

Her voice was bright, smooth, oblivious. Contained in the machine, it was like another person’s mother in another person’s life. At the same time, he heard it in a deeper place and with sudden force remembered being small, the sweat and powder of her body as she’d opened her robe in the morning and he’d wrapped himself inside, pressed his ear to the soft cotton nightgown to hear the steady throbbing of her heart. He knew her, a determined kind of woman: given the slightest clue to follow, she would never stop searching for the boy he wasn’t anymore.

He believed that it would be his first unselfish act, his kindness, to lay the phone in its cradle and walk away.





MISS NICOLL


In the deal that was struck, Molly was allowed to keep her job but not her classroom. The following fall, she was relocated to the school’s most modern building: two stories of steel and glass, gray walls and bright hallways. Her classroom was large and air-conditioned and more functional in every way, yet Molly missed her old home in Stone, that musty, sunny, hundred-year-old hall.