Page 23 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH DATE A LESBIAN, I’M BEGGING YOU

On the day we met, at the welcome barbecue for Native American students at Hollis, Della Ericson was wearing the wrong moccasins.

(They were Chickamaugas, a cheesy Native-inspired brand famously started by a mostly white cult in Oregon.) No one said anything about them, but they did all stare at her feet, which gave me time to guess who she was.

Non-Cherokees might remember her as “Baby D,” but where I was from, people still talked about her case.

People knew her full names, both of them, from her two lives.

It seemed like now she’d mushed them together.

I pulled her over to a picnic table to eat with me and Sam Sherman, a Prairie Band Potawatomi boy I’d met minutes before.

He seemed awkward but innocuous. Della said very little and looked down often at her plate.

But she made us laugh at one point, just once, and Sam drew a map of Connecticut for her on a napkin.

He was from a small town and had never left Kansas till that morning; he just felt it was important to know all the states.

Two months later, Della and I had still never been alone together.

But we were often in the same big gatherings, as members of the Native community.

(I, truthfully, had tried hard to make friends in what the school’s president called the greater Hollis community , but had recently given up.

The greater Hollis community shared things with one another that I did not, like wearing identical black Patagonia fleece pullovers and being better than me at writing long but coherent essays with two nights’ notice.)

When Sandra invited all the girls to her dorm room before a party, Della arrived a little after I had.

Sandra took one look at her and said, “You are so wearing the wrong underwear.”

I would have died. But this was how girls were, it seemed, in girl groups.

I’d never been part of a girl group before and now I was, with no effort on my part, just by showing up to Hollis and being Indian and a girl.

By being a nassie. (Nassies were members of NASA, the Native American Student Association.

When I called home in September, I’d told my mother about that and she’d laughed and laughed before saying, “Well, Steph, you’ve made it. You can come home now.”)

Part of being in a girl group was that sometimes someone would tell you to take off your underwear and you’d laugh like it was the most normal thing in the world. That’s what Della did.

Sandra tossed Della’s underwear—cotton, high-waisted from a pack, like mine—into her own laundry hamper and replaced it with a thong from a drawer bursting with lace.

Sandra was Ojibwe from Minneapolis. Her accent was weirdly rez-adjacent, and she said she’d be the first in her family to earn a doctorate.

Sam thought her dad might own every Subway in Minnesota.

She had a black Patagonia pullover that she often announced as thrifted, and she’d taken a gap year during her reign as Miss Indian World.

“Much better,” Sandra said. “Now they won’t see the line of your seam through the fabric of that skirt. Trust me on this.” She nodded approvingly at Della’s butt.

“They” meant the boys. For as long as I had been in a girl group at Hollis, “they” always meant the boys. Or “white people,” sometimes, but that was complicated, so no one talked about it.

Sandra caught the cross at Della’s neck in her hand, and the two launched into a talk about Jesus and their personal relationship with him.

Sandra said she was “nondenominational,” which just meant Christian.

What I thought of as the regular kind, and what my family had sort-of been (if only because our mother had thought church could help get us friends).

I stood against the wall, observing the culture of girl group. The conversation turned back to boys, with whom I had even less of a personal relationship than I did with Jesus Christ. Della finished her own eye makeup and pulled me in to face her while she did mine.

I tolerated it, the bristles of brushes along my cheekbones and eyelids, because I wanted to be a good citizen of girl group and I wanted Della to touch my face.

I’d wanted that since we’d first met in September, even before I’d realized who she was.

Della put her hand on my waist for a moment, as if to steady me, but I wasn’t falling. I leaned, slightly, into her touch.

“Ethan’s on mission,” Della said, in answer to a question I hadn’t heard. “So we write.”

Sandra laughed. “He’s in Japan the entire year, and you’re like, what? Pen pals?”

“I think it’s cute,” April said. “Email or regular?” April was Lakota, from Standing Rock.

“I think it’s cute, too,” Jess said. She was Inupiaq, from Alaska, and already a unit—platonically, of course—with April.

I wished I’d gotten in on that. They were always leaning into each other and following each other across campus; they laughed at jokes with hidden doors and windows, and passed notes in our first-year writing seminar without me.

“I’ve got a heck of a lot of stationery,” Della said.

“ Even cuter ,” April said.

I said, “What do your parents think?” I just wanted to know who Della considered to be her parents.

I’d been trying to ignore that Della was Indian-famous, that as a child I’d seen her on TV.

I mean, the almost-end of the Indian Child Welfare Act!

The National Guard! The photo of that night, Della crying in a dress with purple roses embroidered along the hem.

Della’s grandmother holding her in her arms—one fist of roses, one wrinkled hand over dark-haired head.

Behind them, steady, the barrel of a gun.

The photo was printed everywhere after Della’s transfer, even in newspapers overseas.

My sister had used it recently in a mixed-media piece to raise awareness on violence against Native women and girls.

I’d seen it on her blog. How she embroidered tiny purple roses onto the delicate black magazine paper.

How she dipped the bottom edge of the photo in cow’s blood, procured from the butcher father of a grass dancer she had slept with.

(Did Kayla have to be so dramatic?) I told myself, again, to stop worrying about my sister. To let myself be where I was.

Della looked at me, mascara wand balanced in the air, like she was deciding where it was supposed to go. On my eyelashes! I wanted to say. I felt like a child, like I wanted to impress her however I could.

“My parents love Ethan,” Della said. “I got to know him at camp, but we met before that. He’s from our ward.”

“ Both your parents love him?” I asked, hoping she’d mention her bio-dad.

That was as far as I could push it. All I really wanted was to know this girl who smelled like the limoncello in the bottle Sandra had held to her lips at the door, whose breath was hot on my neck when she leaned in closer to line my eyes in black.

Her palm was sweaty but firm on my chin.

I’d known the ghost of her at the sidelines of my life.

On televisions, once or twice on magazine covers in the check-out line. Now she had a body.

Della didn’t pause, or step back, or betray uncertainty in her voice. She said, “Yes. They’re both excited. It’s like a thing for us. Us Mormons? We write letters on mission, and then we date, and then if that’s working out—obviously if we want to, like with anyone—we get married.

“But I’m not there yet. I mean, like, I’m literally here .” She waved her hands around Sandra’s room, indicating her college experience.

“I mean, I bet he’s there already,” Sandra said. “The abstinence thing is so much harder for boys.”

April and Jess laughed behind me. They pretended to read erotic love letters from invisible scrolls they held out at arm’s length. They poured shots and spritzed perfume and dabbed lipstick on tissues. Three other girls crowded around Sandra’s bathroom mirror.

Della finished my makeup and crossed the room. She clinked a “Proud Hollis Parent” shot glass with a senior girl I didn’t know. Before the first frat party of the semester, Della had proudly announced to the girl group that she didn’t drink alcohol and never would.

Was she done with all the Mormon rules now, or just some of them? And why tonight? Did the boyfriend know? Ethan? If Ethan found out, somehow, would he break up with her?

Della made a terrible face when she swallowed. She coughed and laughed and glanced across the room at me. I’d been staring. She looked away.

I leaned against the wall and watched her, and kept watching her, even after she caught me again. Each time this happened she would blush, look away, pretend to be engaged in something as simple as twisting on and off her green-and-silver ring.

How to translate a hand on my waist? How to recognize the kind of girl I stood a chance with, when I wasn’t sure I’d ever met one? People like me didn’t live in Oklahoma.

I knew I wasn’t straight. I told myself that was half the equation. Della was something to be puzzled out. I had the upper hand in a game unspoken, and I wanted to win. I stared, daring her to do something or to have something done to her, to let herself be seen.

On my September call home, I had talked to Kayla the longest. I said I had friends now, easily ten, and that most of us lived together in a house for Native students.

Sam had driven all the girls to a secondhand store, and sometimes we shared clothes.

Once a week we held Indigenous Women Activists meetings, where we watched documentaries about things like the Kanehsatà:ke Resistance and planned fundraisers for the Hollis powwow.

We beaded peyote-stitch earrings in a circle on the floor.