Page 15 of To the Moon and Back

If I could figure out the money and the applications and the getting myself to college, I decided I would be gay. Or bi, maybe? At schools like Harvard, they let you figure that out.

I called everyone back to the dirt path and tried to push Meredith from my mind. My coworkers were still making up stories. I joined in.

We said we threw a virgin—“a little girl,” corrected Miss Marie, suddenly concerned with little ears—to the creek spirits to keep mosquitos away.

We ate a charred frog heart in the week after a baby was born.

We painted with all the colors of the wind.

Anthony didn’t mind that we laughed. He laughed, too.

When Mr. Andy said I was something like an Indian princess, Anthony lost his shit. A princess? Her?

Does your dad have his own peace pipe? Does your dad scalp his enemies?

Does your dad have a war bonnet? Anthony wouldn’t pause for answers.

He was a stream of questions, all of them about Indians.

Indians danced day and night in his head; they ran wild in the suburbs of Tulsa.

(“Thank you,” his mother had said to me earlier.

She whispered it to me back at the creek, where Brittany had sat in my usual spot and pretended to weave baskets.

“Anthony’s been driving me up the wall with this stuff since his dad passed.

He’ll grow out of it, but for now he just needs to do the ‘Indian’ thing. You know little boys.” I didn’t.)

At the gate, Anthony ran out of words. He looked up at me, eyes wide, waiting for something.

“Yep,” I said, “my dad’s a chief.”

Brett was a young, relatively new tribal council member, preparing for the first event of his first campaign. I suspected he’d lose.

And he wasn’t my father, not officially. I sometimes wished my mother had agreed when he’d asked to adopt us. Whatever he had been, I worried it was ending.

“In fact,” I said, leaning down toward Anthony and his smile, his dusty sneakers, the little burrs caught on his turned-down yellow socks, “after this I’m gonna go see him, for a ceremony in our tipi.”

At the end of the tour Anthony’s mother asked if we could take a group picture, all the visitors and any village staff who were willing.

I hurried to stand next to Meredith and we put our arms around each other, her hand at my waist, both of us smiling forward into the camera. After the flash, we broke apart.

Polo-Shirt Man called me a smart, delightful young woman, and Anthony’s mother side-hugged me goodbye.

She smelled like whatever citrusy lotion my sister used, and maybe laundry detergent, and I stepped back quickly because I knew I smelled like sweat and dirt and creek water dried stiff on buckskin.

I went to the locker room and stood in the shower and watched the water run brown, then clear.

I had barely left the parking lot when Will drove up beside me. He waved for me to pull over. I tried to sound relaxed. The day had been fine, I said, things were normal and good. Inside, I really felt like they could be.

I asked about Shannon, who was fine. “What a relief!” I said. “So the snake wasn’t venomous?”

Will said my hijinks were unacceptable. No, it didn’t matter who had told him. He said my last paycheck would be ready in a week. My behavior had been shameful. I’d played right into what they think of us.

But why did he assume they had played me, not that I had played them? Or, with them? Or that we had, all of us together?

I needed the money for my college applications. And, assuming I got in, I needed the money for a one-way ticket to a school in the Northeast. I was still out about five hundred dollars, but Will was firing me.

I said yes whenever I had to, and sorry more times than I was proud of. Will and I talked through the windows of our cars, each facing a different direction. His harsh words hit me one after another until finally I said, “Thank you,” and sped down the road.

Out of his sight, I pulled over again. I parked and wrapped my head in my arms. I shook. The sun was pushing in hard. I whispered to myself that I had to keep moving, though I wasn’t sure where to go.

I drove slowly down the road through many tall trees, past the museum that had fired me. I kept going.

The woods opened, and I stopped outside the memorial. Before me, in the grass, were the three last standing brick columns of the Cherokee Female Seminary. The rest of it had been destroyed in a fire.

This was where the women in my family had studied over a century before. I had come from many students and teachers, and they had come from here. The second-oldest institution of higher learning west of the Mississippi. One of the first in the country to educate women, beyond the domestic arts.

Maybe, after all the trouble I’d caused at the museum, I could try to be more like my sister.

Generous with our ancestors. Curious about them.

They’d been people , after all. I didn’t have to, like, feel their spirits in the wind, to understand that they’d been people.

People could be impossible. I could be impossible.

I touched one of the brick columns with my finger. Gently, almost afraid I’d knock it over. A family drove by in an SUV, probably leaving the museum. A hit country song blared out their open windows and faded just as fast. I pulled my hand back, embarrassed.

I tried again, pacing in a wide circle around the columns. Over the last three or four centuries, the tribe had been nearly , and yet not at all, destroyed. I imagined people showing up, finally, in this very spot after Removal. Building and opening a school of their own. Choosing to begin again.

I let my forehead rest against a column. It was rough, gritty with dirt. I closed my eyes.

There was more to it, I knew. Ideas my mother hadn’t told me, that Brett had tried to carefully introduce. One night after dinner—after our mother had waxed on about the seminary—he’d come to talk, very quietly, to me and Kayla.

“You know, very few full-bloods could afford to go there,” he said. “The ones who did probably got scholarships, and when they’d show up, most students were mixed-bloods.”

He meant the people Kayla and me had come from. The lecture continued.

“Classes at the seminary were taught in English. At that point half the tribe spoke English and half spoke Cherokee, and the two halves struggled to speak to each other without interpreters.”

“Ooo… kay?” Kayla said. She didn’t look up from her sketchbook.

“The school was a real achievement for its time,” Brett added. “Your mother is right to be proud of it! But it was a school for elites. I wouldn’t want to be a poor kid there.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Kayla whispered after Brett had kissed our heads and left the room. “He always talks like he’s the moral authority on being Cherokee.”

“And who is?” I said. “ Mom? ”

“So some Cherokees taught some Cherokees English. Christianity, whatever, stuff I bet they thought they’d need in a white world. Does he think they’d have done that if it weren’t for the colonizers?”

“Well—” I wasn’t sure why I had to answer for him. This was their fight, and I’d been pushed into it.

“I don’t think Brett—I don’t think you , actually—get what our people were up against. They assimilated to survive. People will do anything. And if the school existed in traditional times, everyone would have been equal. Also, if it were traditional times, women would have been in charge.”

I was tired. I had work in the morning. This was before I’d been fired.

Kayla kept going. She said the seminary wasn’t like the government boarding schools, kidnapping Indian children and cutting off their hair.

It had been run by Cherokees. Its staff and students were deeply proud of being Cherokee.

The hope was that they would finish their schooling and stay, to better the circumstances of their people.

I turned my back on the columns and got in the car. I slammed the door behind me. I was hot and mad, and the window wouldn’t roll down.

There was more than one way to survive, I thought. People will do anything.

I could leave.

Kayla would visit me. I’d still have her. We’d sip cups of espresso, which we had never had, in cafés that lined sidewalks of cities we’d never seen. And I wouldn’t be Indian. Right then, the Nation felt like a hand pressing down on my chest.

How easy it would be—or at least how possible , looking how I looked—to let that part of me fall away? To, absurd as it sounded even to me, opt-out ?

To be an astronaut—to be myself—without the weight of everything that came before.

I stepped quietly into the museum gift shop, holding the door chime tight in my fist. It made a half-hearted click. Ten minutes to closing.

Each woven basket had a cream-colored, handwritten tag. Cursive. The artist’s name, the little biography, the price. Just a few baskets would cover everything I needed.

I worked fast. I pulled them from the shelf, choosing only the wider ones and fitting them into a shallow stack. Slipping it under my shirt, I turned to go.

The bell jingled. Meredith came in. In the back, Brittany slumped over her grocery cart of sodas. She was refilling the fridge at the counter.

Brittany said, “Hey,” to both of us. Barely interested. So she hadn’t heard I was fired.

“Bathroom,” I said. “I know we’re closing, but I’ll be fast.”

I walked sideways to the back of the shop, pretending to examine items on the wall. I held my hands over my stomach.

I locked myself in a stall, frantically trying to plan my escape. I heard the wide swing of the restroom door.

A whisper. “Steph?”

Meredith stepped forward, her dusty moccasins pointing into my stall. She whispered again, even quieter this time. “Steph? It’s me.”

I stood up and zipped my shorts. With every shaking breath in, the rough and tight pattern of reeds pushed against my belly. I leaned against the door between us.

“Hi,” I whispered.

“Put them back,” Meredith said.