Growing pains
Think back to what was probably the worst time of your life, when you felt the most outcast, the most lonely, the most gawky and misunderstood. Yep, it’s probably eighth grade to senior year, the subject of Lindsey Lee Johnson’s extraordinary first novel, “The Most Dangerous Place on Earth.”
Johnson, who was born and raised in Marin County and has taught writing to teens, follows a group of kids as they struggle their way toward adulthood, but these are no ordinary kids. They’re extremely privileged, living in Mill Valley, “which Smithson-
ian magazine had recently declared the Fourth Best Small Town in America” and a place where “Kids didn’t have allowances, they had bank accounts.” But under the constant tourniquet pressure from parents and teachers to succeed, and the even more relentless demands from peers to fall in line or risk social banishment, life becomes a tsunami waiting to unfurl.
The novel begins with a tragedy in eighth grade, starring Calista, 13 years old, a bright girl who has a crush on Ryan, who believes his handsomeness has destined him for greatness. When Tristan, a shy, soulful boy, and an odd person out, recognizes how he and Calista might save each other, she freezes. “You might not think anybody in this School sees you, but I do. I mean sees you really,” he writes in an eloquent love letter, complete with heartbreaking cross-outs. Any adult receiving a letter like that would know to grab hold of such depth, but at 13, Calista can’t risk following her feelings, she can’t become more outlier than she already is, and so, in the novel’s most tragic moment, she becomes complicit in a plot with the others to ruin the one boy who not only had real substance, but who really might have made her life richer.
As Calista moves from grade to grade, we meet the other young casualties of growing up. There’s Nick, who keeps inventing dangerous versions of himself that let him believe no matter how terrible today is, the future might be brighter. There is Elisabeth, the most beautiful girl in class, who nevertheless has no friends. We meet David Chu, who yearns for an ordinary life, while his Berkeley alumnae parents want him to rigidly follow the path they’ve chosen for him. “Google this. Google everything,” he writes in notes to himself, trying to be smarter, even as he wonders why he isn’t enough for anyone but himself. And there is Abigail, Calista’s best friend, who “knew she wasn’t beautiful” but somehow winds up in the most scandalous relationship of anyone. They — and others — all come together one night at a party at someone’s mansion, another powder keg that will ignite all of their lives.
But it isn’t just kids who go through horrific changes. Johnson homes in on the adults, too. Molly (Miss Nicoll), one of the teachers, isn’t much older than her junior year students. She grew up in “her father’s cramped two-bedroom ranch house on the outskirts of Fresno, in the nowhere place between beige strip mall and brown farmland.” She wants to be the cool teacher, the one all the kids like and trust. In her need to be liked, to be the kind of hip mentor she wished that she herself had had, she friends kids on Facebook, even as she is dealing with parents who tell her that her “homework is really out of line.” We meet married Doug (Mr. Ellison), the teacher all the kids love because he seems so understanding, but he leads Molly on, and then crosses a line by wooing a student.
Part of the pleasure of the book is in the way it’s written, told through shifting and sometimes contradictory perspectives. Johnson sprinkles in text messages, Facebook posts (“Hmm well u don’t want to be too cling. U don’t want to be that girl.”), revealing student essays and even part of a hilariously written and extremely telling, bad novel by Doug. Everything is split into seasons and years, and chapter headings such as “The Lovers,” “The Striver,” “The Artist,” but don’t be mistaken — Johnson eschews stereotypes. Under those headings boil hidden meanings, exhuming the teenage truth about social media, sex, alcohol and drugs.
Impossibly funny and achingly sad, Johnson’s novel makes you remember every humiliation you ever suffered while in school, and every terrifyingly bad decision you ever made. There’s a reason why teenage years may be our most intense, and in this wise, dangerous, and yes, occasionally cruel debut, Johnson cracks open adolescent angst with adult sensibility and sensitivity. Adolescence here is a prison term, and if you’re lucky you can find your keys and get yourself out, as unscarred as possible, clutching your scrap of hope, realizing, as Calista says, that despite all that has happened, she “is going on and trying, like everyone, to live in this beautiful world.”