The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(90)
On one of her long and lingering afternoons in the cemetery, before she left the feet of the Buddha, Calista left an offering of her own. She wanted something unobtrusive, a small token to nestle with the others in the hollow of the trunk. She chose, of course, the origami crane of silver paper, precisely folded, gleaming still.
—
When Calista had finished writing, she changed the names and submitted the draft not to the One-Act Festival but to her English teacher from the previous year, Miss Nicoll. She didn’t know what she expected. Miss Nicoll seemed smart and open. Last year, Calista had often seen the teacher talking and laughing with Calista’s classmates, during breaks and after school. And she had seemed interested in Calista, once. After graduation, Alessandra and Kai were going to plant trees in Ecuador and wanted Calista to go with them, but she hadn’t committed; a small but urgent part of herself envisioned an ivy-covered college on the East Coast, a small class gathered on a warm lawn, poetry piled at her feet. Maybe Miss Nicoll would read Calista’s story and show her how to move beyond it, to reach this other place. For a week she waited, allowing herself to dream.
Miss Nicoll found her in the hallway. The teacher looked different, somehow—her hair cut short, her outfit unfussy. Her manner was relaxed too; she wasn’t searching Calista’s face as she used to do, with that hopeful, desperate need.
“I’m so glad you shared this with me,” Miss Nicoll smiled, handing Calista her story. “Thank you. I have to get to class now, but I’ve written you a little note on the back.”
Calista thanked her, then hurried to her locker to read. The note was there as promised at the end of the story, handwritten in red cursive:
Dear Calista,
Thank you for sharing your writing with me. I would like to congratulate you on your lovely natural writing voice, which I recall from when you were a student in my class. There are many beautiful metaphors and similes in this story.
However, there are a few issues that I hope you won’t mind my pointing out.
1. I am wondering if the tone and vocabulary of the story match the age of the protagonist. If this girl is only thirteen years old, would she really know advanced vocabulary words such as “calcified” and “indelible”?
2. In one section of the story, the protagonist describes, in great detail, the little boy’s bike ride to the Golden Gate Bridge. Well, I am wondering, how could she possibly know all these details if she wasn’t there? It seems very unlikely. Is there any way this can be explained, such as having the boy leave a note explaining what he did? Or perhaps you might delete this section altogether?
3. There is an awful lot of foul language, especially for eighth graders to be using!
Calista, I truly wish you all the best. You are a very fine writer.
Warmly,
Molly Nicoll
—
On the last Saturday of senior year, Calista stood with Jess and Kai and Alessandra on Mount Tam’s Sunset Ridge. In a clearing they’d stoked an illicit fire—Alessandra’s idea to torch their textbooks and notebooks, a gesture to show that their old lives were over.
The yellow hills dipped to shadows—below them lay Muir Woods, a famed redwood grove strictly for tourists. Beyond the western ridge, the sun dipped into the Pacific. Calista’s friends were sharing beers and blunts around the fire, but she was only watching, taking pictures on her phone to freeze the moment.
In a few months more, Calista and her classmates would all be gone from there. Calista would be pulled by Alessandra’s enthusiasms across countries and continents. Her former best friend, Abigail, was off to Dartmouth. Dave Chu and Elisabeth Avarine were going together to UC Berkeley. Nick Brickston was moving to San Francisco to do who knew what. Some of them had already gone: Emma Fleed had transferred to the alternative high school after the accident, and from there had vanished in the miasma of Central Marin. Damon Flintov had been sent to juvie, then to a wilderness boot camp in some wild and faraway place—Idaho, Montana, West Virginia. And Ryan Harbinger had disappeared just before senior year, leaving a wake of wild rumors behind him.
Across the fire, Alessandra tucked a lock of hair behind Kai’s ear and they lay back in the grass and began to kiss.
Calista stood and, with no particular direction in mind, turned and hiked up the hillside in the gathering dark. She went barefoot over sun-baked dirt. The trail dipped under giant redwoods; the ground turned cool and damp. A familiar dankness took her, without warning, back under the deck at Abigail’s—the sharing of bad beers, the buzzing in her blood, how they had laughed and laughed, nothing had ever been funnier. And she felt her heart untether in her chest. It began to melt, she could not hold it. It was like trying to pool streaming water in her palms. She was crying. She blamed it on the withdrawal of drugs from her system, on the sight of Alessandra’s fingers in Kai’s hair, on the knowledge that this was their last night all together as they were right now, on the darkness of these woods, on their unrelenting beauty. At a clearing in the trees, she lay her head on the dirt. The stars wheeled above her in a twilit sky.
No magic in it, but as she closed her eyes Calista felt the mountain around her. The screams of red-tailed hawks, the creaks of grasshoppers, wind shivering the redwoods behind her, whispering through grasses at her ears. As life whirled on without her, she lay there and listened.
It came from the mountain or it came from within herself. There was no meaning in lying down. There was no explanation, no relief, in anything anyone else might tell her. She wanted to die for what she had done, but she was eighteen years old: she wanted to live.