The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(87)

Cally would wake sheet-tangled, shaking, and soaked in cold sweat. Sometimes she hated Tristan. Cursed his selfishness. Middle school had been close to over—he could have waited it out. Sometimes, strangely, she missed him, imagined him with her and some new group of misfit friends. Was it too much to believe she could have talked him out of sweatpants, convinced him to grow out his hair and keep his tongue inside his mouth and his mom out of the school? Was it a fantasy to think he could have learned to be a little cooler, to care a little less? It was too late, anyway.

—

Sophomore year, Cally took to eating lunches sideways on a splintered wood bench in the outdoor amphitheater at the outer edge of campus. Here she met Jess Steinberg, Kai Alder-Judge, and Alessandra Ryding. They were so-called Bo-Stin slackers, Bolinas and Stinson Beach kids who were bused over Mount Tam every morning. They all took drama, and Alessandra was president of the HIV Awareness Club, but that was the extent of their participation in life at school. During spirit rallies they slept behind Ray-Bans in the uppermost rows of the theater; at morning break they wandered off campus to smoke. Often they ditched their afternoon classes and drove up the mountain to Sunset Ridge; they’d photograph one another in halos of sunset, and drink until the sky swam over their heads. Sometimes it seemed that they were the only ones who realized this was a paradise they lived in.

“How could you sit in a classroom all day,” Jess wondered one late afternoon, pinching his blunt between two fingers, drawing its bright tip across the mountain’s green-gold panorama, the pink-striped sky over hazy water far below, “when this is all around you?”

“Fuckin’ insanity,” said Kai.

“Eyes wide shut,” said Alessandra, stretching her arms overhead. Then they all nodded knowingly, Cally silently longing to be told what this meant.

Cally grew to love to hear her talk. Alessandra had plans. She was going, for one thing, to start visiting Christian centers for pregnant girls, to infiltrate and investigate.

“You know, Calista,” she said as they faced each other cross-legged on a bench, sharing lunch (a salty baguette, a plastic crate of strawberries). She had small, perfectly round brown eyes and long lashes. “Those places advertise in our school paper, promising pregnant teenagers help and guidance and, like, all the options”—she pulled the school newspaper out of her tote bag and shook it fiercely—“and then, when you go there, it turns out they just want to lecture you about Jesus and, like, indoctrinate you and make you look at pictures of tiny aborted fetuses and their tiny aborted limbs and scare you into keeping yours. It’s so deceptive. It’s, like, criminal.”

Cally sucked on her strawberry, listening to Alessandra’s emphatic voice. It amazed her that Alessandra believed the world could be a better place in this one specific way, and that she herself could make it better.

The fall of Cally’s sophomore year drifted toward the winter. A collection of small moments let her know she was no longer alone: Cally sat passing a flask between Kai and Jess in the school theater, watching Alessandra beam heat from the center of the stage. (She always played some tragic woman—Lady Macbeth or Antigone or Tamalpa, daughter of the mountain witch, whose story Tristan Bloch had referenced in his note.) Alessandra looped her arm in Cally’s as they wandered off campus together. Cally and Jess lay side by side on the mountain, smoking and watching the fog roll over the sky, when he reached out to caress the silver chain that Cally wore around her neck. In his car Kai leaned in close, pursed his lips, and blew a fallen eyelash from Cally’s cheek. At Muir Beach after midnight, Alessandra stripped off her skirt, thighs ghostly beneath her oversized shirt as she ran into low waves laughing and calling—“Calista!” Once or twice they’d all made out at parties. Casually, giggling all the way. Jess snuggled her in doorways or nuzzled her on couches; Kai kissed her briefly, softly, on the lips to say goodbye. Never a discussion of what any of it meant.

By the end of that school year, Cally was one of them. Her hair faded and tickled the scoop of her spine. She threw away her lip gloss and mascara; her skin took on a gentle tan. She let Alessandra draw elaborate, vaguely Asiatic patterns on her forearms and hands, painted her fingernails putrid green, stacked silver rings on her thumbs and hammered-silver bangles on her wrists, went to the Salvation Army and covered her body in costume: short, flower-splattered dresses; silk vests and patched denim; gauzy lingerie; dead men’s shoes.

—

Junior year. She was high most every day. She drifted through her classes. The teachers just kept passing her along. Some, young and earnest like Ms. Flax had been, would stop to pull her into classrooms, tell her she was wasting her potential.

“You are a perceptive, intelligent girl,” her English teacher, Miss Nicoll, told her one day during lunch. “Why not try?” With her deep brown eyes and optimistic blazers, Miss Nicoll seemed so innocent, so hopeful—Cally couldn’t bear to tell her who she really was, or what she’d done.

Miss Nicoll worried, Cally’s mother worried, her father worried. One brother, Jake, called her a freak, while the other, Erik, began to watch her with a new, grudging respect.

On school days, Cally daydreamed through the morning and at lunch went into an abandoned potting shed behind the school to smoke weed with Jess and Kai and Alessandra, then swam through the day till the day was done. She hated being trapped at school. The English classes were the worst. Romeo and Juliet, All Quiet on the Western Front, A Clockwork Orange, The Great Gatsby, Macbeth. Did the teachers realize that all their books were obsessed with death? Giddy with it. The why and the how of it. People thrusting knives into each other, severing heads, crushing each other with luxury cars, blasting off limbs in the name of God and country, stabbing their hearts in the name of love. Cally preferred poetry: