Page 24 of To the Moon and Back

Kayla wasn’t impressed. She accused me of something I was desperate not to admit. That I liked these Indians because I thought they were better than me. That I thought the others, all the people back home, were worse.

I should have known she wouldn’t get it.

I missed how Kayla had been just a year ago, before she’d become so defensive.

Now everything she did, even the stupid, rebellious things, were backed up by something she called “praxis” that made her better than me.

I didn’t know who she thought was looking at her all the time, but she seemed to believe someone was.

From Sandra’s, the girl group went to the pre-game together. We stomped the snow off our boots outside Jason Palakiko’s dorm room, like a heavily made-up stampede in the hall.

Jason was a nontraditional student, with no interest in living in the nassie house. He was Native Hawaiian and pre-law and served as most of the girl group’s most unattainable crush. He was also a veteran, having returned from the NATO operation in Kosovo just before starting college at twenty-one.

All the boys had warrior syndrome. They wanted to hear battle stories, to sit beside him and walk too close to him and pester him to come out with them at night.

Jason was good to them, though. He never let them feel too hard their own moments of unkindness.

It was common knowledge that when a certain sophomore boy asked Jason if he’d ever killed a man, Jason took the drink from the boy’s hand and gently set it down.

He spoke slowly, carefully. Jason told him it was a conversation they could have someday, maybe, but it wouldn’t happen a week after meeting, and it wouldn’t happen drunk.

We poured into the room, where the nassie boys waited for us. They passed out drinks and I held mine close to my chest. I breathed slowly through the turning of the walls.

I sat next to Della on Jason’s desk, knowing it wasn’t quite big enough. Our arms and legs touched.

“You’ve got like, the most intense stare,” Della said.

We’d never been alone together until now, if this could count as alone. Sam was, annoyingly, almost always next to her.

This was my own fault. I’d walked Della over to Sam’s big, pitiful, just-him picnic table, because I felt bad for him. For both of them. The possibility that they’d like each other this much—that Della would like him more than she liked me!—hadn’t crossed my mind.

It should have. Sam was easy to like. He had been nice to me early on, when I failed my first test in Exploring the Universe.

“Assholes,” he’d said, after catching me crying in the nassie house basement.

Even though I was the one who’d thought I shouldn’t need to study.

“They oughta call it Exploring My Ass.” Della, watching this, had snorted at the word “ass,” then blushed like a child caught.

Another thing about Sam was that I suspected he was gay. I hoped, at least, this said something promising about Della. If she didn’t like me the way I wanted her to, maybe she’d at least be kinder about it than Meredith had been.

“What changed for you tonight?” I asked. “To make you try drinking?”

Della laughed and shook her head. “Steph Harper,” she said. “Master of deflection.”

“How so?” I raised my eyebrows and sat up straight, so I’d be taller than her. I was aware of the look I was going for. I’d seen it in boys when they flirted with my sister.

“Deflection,” Della said. “Like, you want to be in charge of the conversation, and you’ll rearrange things to make it that way.”

“I know the definition ,” I said. “And that’s exactly what you did when I asked about drinking.”

“Fine. But I can’t talk about alcohol yet,” she said.

Della looked down, either shy or pretending to be. “It’s only been like two hours of alcohol. Who knows if I’ll hate it.”

“But I’m curious,” I said. “Why tonight? Why’d you suddenly decide not to keep—”

Della held up a hand. She shook her head, her face mock-serious even as she held back a laugh. “No, no,” she sang. “Can’t ask that. Too soon to tell.”

“So are you done with other stuff, then?” I said. “Other Mormon stuff?”

“Like what?” Della said. “What kind of Mormon stuff do you think you know about?”

“You know,” I said. I wanted to ask if she was done thinking marriage was an eternal covenant between a man, a woman, and God. Or, at least, if she was done with True Love Waits?

Instead I asked, “Are you going to bear false witness now? Or covet thy neighbor’s wife?”

“Too soon to tell,” she said. But she was laughing, and she leaned toward me and uncrossed her legs. She let her hand fall on my thigh, and then took it away.

I slumped down and held a hand to my forehead. “Ohhh, but I wish you wouldn’t ,” I said. “Everyone at this institution is always coveting my wife. It’s exhausting.”

I was not out of the closet, in the sense that there had been no declaration. The joke, which left me scared and exhilarated, was like my hand reaching out to her.

“There, there,” Della said. Touching my thigh again; little pats. “It’s only exhausting if you wait up for her.”

“Ha ha.” Relief. “Where do you stand on adultery?”

“Depends who’s offering,” she said.

“Can we be serious a minute?”

Della snorted. She turned toward the room and lowered her voice, as if making a statement to the press. “For the record, I’m neither offering nor accepting any services of that kind.”

I nodded at her little joke. “Listen, Della,” I said. “It feels weird not to tell you this? Since it’s been like two months? But I’ve known about you for years . You were on the news all the time when I was in first grade.”

I was trying to tear her secrets out. (Better hers than mine.) I wanted to break something down maybe, so we’d have no choice but to be close.

Della looked at me, surprise and anger there and then gone, hidden so fast I nearly missed it.

There were so many other people in the room, I realized, even on the bed just beside us, shouting and cheering as two boys did shots in some kind of contest. Amid all the noise and the shuffling of bodies and the heat, I wondered: Had I ruined it?

“ Everyone freaking knows that, Steph,” Della said. The looseness in her was gone, and none of her body was touching mine. “You think you’re the first person here to recognize me? They just don’t bring up my contested adoption at parties—because they’re nice to me.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

A silence. I knew I should leave her alone.

“That’s why you’re Mormon, right?” I said. “That came from your adoptive parents?”

“It’s rude to make fun of other people’s religions.”

“I wasn’t making fun.”

“You think it’s weird, though. Obviously. Like my cross necklace. You keep looking at it. You obviously hate my necklace.”

“No!” I said, too fast. Part of my early success in girl group, I thought, was that I hadn’t been noticed. I could stand toward the back of the group and even make faces sometimes at things I thought were dumb, and no one would notice me. Here Della was, noticing me, and I wasn’t prepared.

She didn’t look away. I was starting to think she didn’t hide from things, not like I did. She pushed right through them to take something she wanted, something for herself.

Della said, “Tell me about the Nation.”

“Where I’m from?”

Della nodded. “Where we’re from, technically.”

“So you’re interested?”

Della looked at me like I was clueless. She nodded at the room of Indians. As if to say, I am here on purpose .

“Right,” I said. “Sorry. I didn’t used to get asked that. And then here it’s like we’re all asking and answering where we’re from all the time, describing something we’ve never had to describe before? It makes me wonder if the rest of our lives will be like that, talking about where we left.”

I was talking too much, and too honestly. I worried about my pitch and my accent—I often worried about my accent. Sandra took Sam’s fist and waved it in the air. He swayed in his seat. Everyone cheered.

“Maybe?” Della said. “But that’s just if we never go back.”

“That’s the plan!” I said. “What about you?”

“Why is that the plan?” Della said.

“Wait, are you going back?”

“I want to,” Della said simply. “To Tahlequah, not Provo.”

“And your adoptive parents are cool with that?”

“I call them my parents. And stop it, Steph. You still haven’t told me why you hate Oklahoma.”

“I don’t exactly hate it,” I said. “And anyway, I just left. Too soon to tell.”

Della stared up at the ceiling, at the neat lines of warm yellow lights.

Like this was a garden party in the English countryside, and not what it was.

The windows were open and it was snowing outside, hard, but still far too hot in the room.

She looked faraway in her eyes, despite her small hand firm on my arm, then my shoulder, then my neck.

I had seen her father on television a few times, crying on a bench in a courthouse or swaying Della back and forth in his arms. I’d pretended my own father, my real one, had been like that. That he’d wanted us that bad, more than he’d wanted to escape the end times.

He had something in him he couldn’t change. My mother had told me that, but still she’d abandoned him. I’d look at photos in the newspaper of Della’s dad being an absolute wreck, sitting at a kitchen table with his head in his hands all devastated, and I’d let myself think, My dad, too .

Della was taken from her father. We had left ours for somebody else to bury.

“Can I ask a lighter question?” I said, when I needed to stop remembering. “If you’re comfortable with it… I’ve just always wondered. What has it been like with your parents, after what they did?”

“Fuck you,” Della said, with the shaky softness of a pretty girl who’d never cursed. “That’s not a lighter question.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You say sorry a lot, for someone who never means it,” Della said. But she didn’t leave.