The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(89)
But she was not like him. She was afraid.
Later that night, she heard the sirens shrieking and climbed into the backseat of the first ride heading out: Damon Flintov’s BMW.
Alessandra and Nick Brickston jumped in on either side, and Emma Fleed, eyelids fluttering and skirt askew, lay across their laps as if to sleep.
Ryan Harbinger blasted a rap song in the front seat. He was the only person she truly hated, a brutal force in the universe. It was all that was wrong with the workings of life, that he should be grinning and dancing while she sat there trapped in her misery, while Tristan Bloch’s body lay under the ground. The fact that she had once convinced herself to kiss a person like Ryan now nauseated her, and made her hate him with the fiercer intensity of putrefied lust.
They sped through the canyon. With each curve Cally was thrust from Alessandra’s shoulder to Nick’s. She closed her eyes, pulled her seatbelt down across her chest and buckled it. Moments later they crashed. In the aftermath Cally looked down at Emma Fleed, whose body was twisted at a sickening angle. Emma didn’t move. Dead? Eyes shut, spine twisted. Yes, Cally thought, dead.
When that car hit the redwood, Cally herself should have gone straight through the windshield. She should have been injured even more seriously than Emma was, or killed. Just hours before, on the railing, she’d wanted to die. In the car, she had fastened her seatbelt. Intention was one thing; it was the smallest decisions that made any difference.
—
“Oh my God,” Alessandra told her one day in the fall of senior year, as on the serpentine roots of a redwood tree they sat shoulder to shoulder, sharing lunch (a cup of key lime yogurt, a bag of salted pretzels), “you so need to do this.”
“What is it?” Calista asked.
“Write me a play. For the One-Act Festival.”
“I’m not a writer.”
“That’s negative energy. Totally unproductive. How do you know?”
“I’ve never written anything in my life.”
“Yet.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I need a good part. Otherwise I’ll just get cast as a prostitute again, and I’m so over that. I’m so over the systematic subjugation of women by these chauvinist writer-directors I can’t even tell you.”
“Why don’t you write it yourself?”
Alessandra scooted closer, crossed her slim, bare leg over Calista’s. “Oh, sweet Calista, my darling, my love, the muse doesn’t create. She inspires.”
Calista spent the next few weeks writing. On school days they’d pile into Kai’s old Land Cruiser and drive to the beach, to Sunset Ridge, or to the cemetery in the hills above Mill Valley.
At the cemetery they’d gather at the feet of a wooden Buddha in a clearing at the curve of a one-lane road. The Buddha faced away from the hill with its imperfect patchwork of graves, toward the clutch of coast oaks and eucalyptus in the canyon. On the air was the chatter of songbirds, the echoes of car horns far below. Above them stretched a pale blue sheet of sky.
Calista circled ground that was blanketed by wood chips, strewn with yellow leaves. They reminded her of Robert Frost: And both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black. Breezes shifted her hair and the leaves on the trees. She settled on one of six tree trunks arranged around the Buddha, each flat-topped, solid and smooth. It was clear someone had cut and arranged the trunks exactly, and yet she felt there a sense of eternity, of this place having risen intact from the land. The Buddha was said to be powerful, magic, and as they visited again and again through the spring, Calista began to believe that it was. In yellow-toned wood were carved the intricate folds of his robe and the buttons that covered his head. His eyes were closed in a face that was human and beyond human. His right hand was raised with palm facing outward, the second finger bent to meet the thumb. “Karana mudra,” Alessandra explained once as Calista examined the Buddha’s hand. “He’s warding off bad energy, bad spirits.”
There was a hollow in the tree trunk on which the Buddha sat. The hollow was filled with offerings, small, significant: a gourd, a pair of sunglasses, a string of beads. There were school pictures of girls who had overdosed and boys who had driven off cliffs. The offerings were for them. The rule was, you could leave things but not take things away.
Her journal open on her lap, Calista wrote as the others talked and smoked and dozed. She wrote the only story she had to tell.
Tristan Bloch had been smart. After the torment had started, he’d known it wouldn’t end. He’d known that his world would continue to constrict, like those finger-trap toys sold in Chinatown: you stuck your fingers in the ends of the tube, and the more you moved, tried to jerk free, the more tightly the tube closed around you. Mill Valley was so specific in its beauty, in its limits. Kids like Tristan and Calista would never forget how this world had been created for them, how they had been born into this perfect nest and still they had insisted on unhappiness. At thirteen, Tristan could only assume that wherever he traveled, that darkness would travel with him.
In their eighth-grade class photo, Tristan was baby-blond and roly-poly, squinting into the sun and grinning wide. Calista and Abigail and Emma posed in tank tops and miniskirts and scribbled-on Chuck Taylors, with bony chests and push-up bras, coltish legs, baby cheeks. Dave Chu was gawky and lean, in a red polo shirt that hung like a drop cloth on his narrow shoulders. Nick Brickston’s neck was too long for his torso, and his smile was cluttered with metal. Elisabeth Avarine almost disappeared: she was a child’s flyaway ponytail, a blurred face avoiding the camera. Damon Flintov was adorable, chubby under his oversized T-shirt and jeans, eyes big and innocently blue though he jutted his chin to show toughness. Ryan Harbinger was cherubic, dark-gold hair tangled, tanned forehead shining with sweat because he’d recently been playing. It was shocking, how they all just looked like children.