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.
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: