Page 14 of To the Moon and Back

“Beading has always been my favorite craft, growing up here in the mountains,” I said.

I gestured around me at the dry-dirt earth.

“Ladies like Meli here,” I said, turning to Miss Marie, “thread tiny glass seed beads onto wool, cotton, and linen. They bead beautiful designs onto things like moccasins, or bandolier bags. It demands patience. But as you can see, it’s worth every hour.

Besides, our people have been beading for… a really long time. Meli’s a pro.”

The little boy’s mother took him by the hand. She brought him closer, for a better look at the half-beaded moccasin cuff in Miss Marie’s hands. Two tall white guys—both in Tulane basketball shorts—followed suit, but an older white man in a polo shirt stayed back. He raised his hand.

I nodded.

“I read on the computer,” he said, “that this exhibit is based on a Cherokee village from the early eighteenth century.”

“Right! Agidoda—that means my edoda—well, he says the year right now is 1704.” I was panicking, proving I could conjugate a word they didn’t know.

“Well, you see,” he said, “glass beads arrived in the area with European trade, and that started only fifty years from then. I mean… ago?”

I looked to Miss Marie for help. She kept beading, but did not hide her amusement.

“Sure. Right, we uh, traded to get these.”

“When are we going to the tipis?” said the little boy. He tried to balance on one foot.

The tour only went downhill. I got carried away with my description of blowguns, only to be corrected by Mr. Jack when it turned out we’d never used poison in the hunting darts. “Think about it,” he said. “Would you wanna eat a squirrel with poison in it?”

One of the Tulane guys said to the other, “Would you wanna eat a squirrel, like, in general?”

Mr. Jack narrowed his eyes.

Little Boy said, “May I please see a tomahawk?”

Polo-Shirt Man caught me in an error at nearly every booth we came to. He had the village brochure in hand and a heavy paperback under his arm, and he read along as I spoke. With Polo-Shirt Man, it was never “You’re an idiot.” He said, “Do you think maybe—” or, “Funny you should say that because—”

I said I was young. Still learning. “I usually defer to my elders.” Miss Marie glared at me, because often I did not.

We stood in front of a thick-walled house. I told the group that my family lived in this one, with a firepit in the center and a hole in the roof for smoke, when it was cold. We had a less insulated version for the summer. “It’s across from the stickball field,” I said, pointing.

“You’re telling stories,” said Little Boy. “You live in a tipi. I read it in my books.”

“I live here,” I said. It was a lie, but it was truer than tipis and tomahawks.

“No you DON’T!” he said.

We went back and forth a little, the other guests starting to quietly back away. What kind of person argues with a child?

I wanted to scream. This is not my field of expertise! I’m supposed to be an astronaut!

I wanted to show them the gold medal I got at the state science fair in May.

I wanted to tell them about the Native American student recruiter with his dusty truck and his Choctaw Nation license plate, his three-piece suit and his crimson-beaded lanyard, his long black braid and the crimson hair elastic at the end of it.

How he said Hollis College would be “lucky to have me.” I figured that meant Harvard might, too. Harvard was even better than Hollis.

If either college really chose me—or MIT or Yale or Dartmouth or Princeton, etc.—if they chose me, even knowing the life I’d come from? It would be a sign. I could let myself believe again in me on Mars, in a way I’d struggled to since losing Exeter. I could rededicate my life to NASA.

Little Boy lay in the dirt and cried. He slapped the ground; tiny dust clouds flew up from the palms of his hands. “It’s not fair ,” he moaned. “Not fair! The Indian lady’s not real !!!”

His mother bent to meet him. She touched his shoulder and talked low, her voice suddenly deep and serious. The child quieted but stayed down, crying softly.

I kneeled. “Hey,” I whispered. “What’s your name?”

He let out a sob.

“Anthony,” said his mother, answering for him. She looked at me carefully. Like I needed to back away, fast. This wasn’t my place, and I knew it.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Anthony, today we’re gonna call you Runs-with-Thunder. That’s your Indian name.”

He turned his head. Sniffed. “But my Indian name is Buffalo Fire?”

“Even better,” I said. “Are you having a hard day, Buffalo Fire?”

Anthony sat up. He told me about the tipis, and the tomahawks, and the bow and arrows. None of them were here. He read about Indians all the time; his bedroom wall was covered in pictures of them. Some were from the library computer and some he drew in school. I was trying to trick him.

“ Anthony ,” said his mother firmly, “we don’t say ‘tricking.’ We say, ‘I’m feeling confused.’?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Anthony. Then, pointing at me, “She’s feeling confused.”

I stood and motioned for the group to follow. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go see some bow and arrows.”

When we got to Mr. Andy’s station, I talked about killing our enemies with arrows. About scalping them.

“I got a few good scalps I keep in a box under my—my sleeping grass,” I said. “They’re good medicine, for when the bad spirits come.”

Mr. Andy, who hadn’t talked much that whole summer, didn’t look up from the flint he was carving in his lap. “And buffalos,” he said.

I looked at him. “Sir?”

He smiled and turned to Anthony. “She’s making us sound bad. We don’t like to make enemies. We kill a lot more buffalos than people.”

Mr. Andy was enjoying himself. He hadn’t laughed much since his only son told him he was gay and had a boyfriend and was moving to Spain forever—at least that was the rumor Miss Marie had spread in the break room. But here he was, beaming.

“We use the whole buffalo,” I said, “when we shoot it. I wash my hair with buffalo guts for the protein.”

“Cool!” said Anthony. He galloped around and grabbed at his chest; he was a buffalo shot in the heart. Polo-Shirt Man nodded at me. Mr. Andy laughed, hid it in a cough, and laughed again. He put down his tools and leather mat and ambled over to our next station.

Like that, we collected people. Mr. Bobby said we didn’t harvest anything from the three sisters garden, on account of it making the corn goddess mad. “It’s like ripping her arms off,” he said.

Mr. Andy said, “That’s why we only eat buffalo.”

“And squirrels,” I said.

I was doing it for Anthony, because he was a child.

But it wasn’t only that. This job had asked too much of me.

And then, looking at the elders I hadn’t ever talked to enough—at Mr. Andy and Mr. Bobby and Miss Marie and Miss Diane and the others—I was surprised by what it meant to me, to see them have a good time.

At the finger-weaving station, Miss Diane said she could feel the spirits through the yarn if she wove certain patterns, like thunderbolts. “That’s how my hands got like this,” she said, holding up arthritic knuckles for Anthony to inspect. “I got in touch with a real bad one.”

Anthony said her hands were awesome. He asked to touch them, and she said, “Sure thing, chooch.”

By the time we made it to the stickball field, the whole village was with us.

We didn’t wrap things up after a quick explanation of the game.

We broke into teams, men versus women, with visitors included.

The Tulane guys had been baseball players in high school in Arkansas, and they got a kick out of what they called our “baby lacrosse sticks.”

Mr. Andy hurried down the field, limping on his bad leg. Miss Marie reached to tackle him, and he hopped out of her way. Just as he caught the ball, she shouted something lewd about his little stick.

“Watch it, girl,” he said, aiming for and missing the fish at the top of the pole. “I hear you’ll take any damn stick you can come by.”

Meredith sidled up to me.

Inside, I panicked. Meredith spent her work hours with her fellow stickball teens, who never invited me to the woods with them.

In the locker room, she always waited till I was dressed and out of there before she’d take off her clothes and shower.

Now, weirdly together, we squinted up at the wooden fish.

Meredith said, “Brittany said Kayla said you already wrote your college essay?”

“Just the first draft,” I said. “I’m applying early.”

“Me too,” she said. “Applying early, I mean.”

I was—stupidly—surprised. It hadn’t occurred to me that my classmates would also apply to college. That they’d have plans just as I did.

“I haven’t started my essay yet,” she said. “How’d you decide what to write about?”

“Brett helped,” I said. “We’ve been going to the library a lot, sending off for applications, that kind of thing? He went to OU.”

“So he gave you your essay idea?” she said.

“No,” I said. Quickly, defensively. “I chose that myself. But on the internet I read some advice that we could write about, like, overcoming adversity?”

“Oh,” she said. Her brow furrowed.

I wondered if she thought it was morally wrong to write out my sufferings for admission to school. After all, I thought it was. My essay—my real essay, and not the decoy I’d shared with Brett—was pretty asinine. It was a clear manipulation, which I considered my best hope.

I couldn’t think of anything normal to say to Meredith, nothing friendly or kind. Only WHY WON’T YOU LOVE ME on repeat in my head.

“Okay, then,” she said. “Forget I asked.”

She was a part of the game again, shooting across the field. I could still smell her lotion or body mist, like in a store in the mall. Like apples, lingering in the open space beside me.

No one had touched me since our school play, not like she had. In Oklahoma, I thought, no one would.