Page 28 of To the Moon and Back

DELLA KIN SELECTION

Sophomore Fall

The night before the first day of sophomore year, the nassies had a guest speaker flown in.

He was an elder. So far it was always an elder, except for the couple who’d taught themselves and their baby Ojibwe, and the Osage business jock with his all-Indian investment company.

This time the speaker was from Montana. He had long, black-streaked gray hair tied back in a worn elastic.

It slid down a little when he bent over sweetgrass.

Or maybe sage? His cigarette lighter was beaded.

I felt jittery, and anxious for the talk to end.

It would be a long wait after this before people went to sleep and I could sneak to Steph’s room down the hall.

When it was my turn in the circle, I cupped my hands and waved the air over the burning something, still unsure how to do it right.

I brushed my palms across my face and felt the oil forever on my skin.

The elder had us say how we’d use our degrees to strengthen our nations. Beside me, Steph gripped the bottom of her chair and let go and gripped again.

Lawyer for Indian child welfare cases.

IHS doctor for urban Indian youth.

Director of a literacy program for Alaska Native youth.

Founder of a theater troupe to promote positive representations of the sovereign Indigenous female body, for youth.

Astronaut.

I escaped to the bathroom.

The mirror was foggy from a recent shower. I couldn’t see myself in it. Someone had taped the periodic table to the door.

It was unclear how I planned on changing the world, or even what I’d major in. I felt my most noteworthy days were behind me. I wasn’t sure I had what it took to be important on my own.

There had been a period of my life when I was fought over and famous. After that I was wrapped up in family, and community, and God’s love. What was I supposed to be now?

I missed my grandmother.

The cemeteries in Poland had changed how I thought about my ancestors, and with my grandmother’s death I felt like branches had been snapped off a tree and burned.

The church valued genealogy, so I knew everything about my adoptive ancestors.

I’d assumed Matthew could teach me about the Cherokee side of his family, but he couldn’t.

He said whatever people knew about the history of families like my grandmother’s came from stories and memories you could hold in your head.

No one had bothered to document them, except their names and ages and assumed blood quantum during allotment.

I didn’t know if people “like Grandma” meant poor people or something else, since I still didn’t understand when Cherokees said “traditional” or “full-blood,” or what other categories there were. I’d been too embarrassed to ask.

Alone in the bathroom, my back against the mirror, I tried to hold her in my head. I remembered the bed we’d shared. Grandma on the right and me on the left. Sometimes, the hooting of owls on the other side of the wall.

As had become our custom, I left Steph’s room at six a.m. with a giant telescope in my arms. If anyone caught me in the hallway, I could tell them I’d just gone to borrow it from her.

At night, we’d reverse this—I’d carry it back, so Steph could borrow it from me.

The telescope was heavy and awkward, but she’d cleared a large space for it on a tripod under her window.

After breakfast, Sandra walked me and Steph to our first class, Animal Behavior.

There was something belittling about being escorted there, considering we weren’t freshmen anymore and Sandra was in our same grade, but she was a premed bio major and had helped us select the class.

I’d needed something with a lab component for my science requirement.

Steph said it just sounded fun to take a class with me.

She had room in her schedule to consider what sounded “fun,” because she’d declared her major in freshman fall.

Her remaining required classes were plotted out perfectly through graduation.

Sandra left us on either side of the wide glass door.

I needed space to keep from kissing Steph in public, and I was embarrassed by all the ways we’d touched the night before.

A year ago, we’d moved fast. Now we had time, hours each night, and I’d spent the last few days burning in both shame and surprise.

I’d been raised to expect a feeling like angels with trumpets in the heavens over my marital bed.

Instead, I was just a body. I wanted someone to want to touch me.

Professor Andrews let everyone call her Lucy, but I couldn’t do it.

I thought allowing that was a bad call on her part, considering how young she looked already.

I calculated how quickly a person could get out of grad school and secure a teaching position—was she even thirty years old?

—before finding myself again distracted by the fact that she was Black.

(I had never had a Black teacher before, not once in fourteen years of school, and had never noticed until then.)

Professor Andrews told stories about animals. She used these stories as a jumping-off point for terms I couldn’t place. Dollo’s law, warning coloration, the Bruce effect. I knew I was missing a whole layer that mattered, that bio-majors nodded to all around me. But the stories shook me awake.

I learned things about animals that were dark and upsetting, but also funny.

I felt myself relaxing into biology each time I laughed, easing into it, even if I only understood things on the surface.

Professor Andrews talked about a study on tadpoles.

Related tadpoles in one pond, unrelated tadpoles in the other.

The finding? Related tadpoles didn’t mate as much. Why not?

“Incest!” I said.

Professor Andrews looked at me. A beat too long, but not unkindly. “Yes,” she said. “But in the biology department, we like to call that inbreeding.”

On Tuesday we had lab.

The lab had tables like the classroom, only they were riddled with microscopes and Bunsen burners, scales and chunky protective goggles. There was a showerhead for chemicals on your body, and two fountains for chemicals in your eyes. Everywhere warnings, everywhere signs.

I approached my new lab group, which Steph had already taken over. “I bet we could ask Lucy for more males,” she said. Lizard males, she meant. “And then we could test how a male reacts to being in a tank with a female, versus with two or three competing males?”

Sam nodded at Steph. He was taking the class as, what he’d called, “an easy A.” Beside him was a white Styrofoam cup of coffee with my name written on it in Sharpie. It was a sweet gesture, if against lab rules in case we poisoned ourselves.

“Della, hey!” he said. “I’m glad you came.”

“Me too,” Steph said. When she said it, it was kind of a joke. Like she hadn’t woken up that morning with her arms around my waist.

I hadn’t spent as much time with Sam lately, not since I’d become a sodomite. I could tell Sam knew things had changed for me in Poland. He’d want to sit down together and ask if I’d told my parents about Steph yet and say supportive things like, They’d be crazy not to love you!

But I wasn’t ready to tell my parents, and Steph hadn’t asked me to. Maybe she thought they knew already?

Neither of us talked about our parents. Steph talked about her sister sometimes, but only out of concern because her sister sounded like a mess.

She was supposed to graduate high school in the spring, and Steph worried she wouldn’t.

Steph said her sister had no shame, which was lovely for her, but she was also hostile to “Eurocentric” models of success.

It was the second part that Steph had no patience for.

When I went to the supply closet to select our first male lizard, Steph followed me in. The Carolina anole was browner than the lime green I’d expected from television, firm where Matthew’s lizard-shaped fish bait had been fantastically gooey. I wanted to name it, but Steph said no.

“Things happen in labs,” she said. As far as I knew, this was Steph’s first time in one. That could have been obnoxious, but I liked the idea that she knew things.

She was like that in bed, too, guiding me along. It was easy to forget she was as inexperienced as I was.

In the supply closet, I sat on the floor and filled out the labels for each terrarium. I told Steph I’d never had a pet. She nodded and leaned against the shelves. It was dark and peaceful.

“Hey, Della?” she said. “Do you wanna be official?”

“Seriously?” I laughed. “We’re literally in a closet.”

“Ha ha,” she said. She pretended to return to work. She looked so young and uncertain to me, cross-legged on the floor.

“I’m playing the long game here,” Steph hummed, as if to the lizard before her. “If one were to want to officially come out and also have a girlfriend, then one might be glad to have been given the opportunity.”

I laughed and leaned back on my hands. “Tell me one thing about me,” I said, “that isn’t, like, part of a game you’re trying to win.”

“What do you mean?”

“One thing.” I looked down at my hands, at the empty white label I’d stuck to my palm.

“If you really think we could be something—and like, I’m not even promising that because some people should just be happy they’re getting what I wouldn’t give them for a year, and getting it all the darn time now, in whatever way they like—”

“Hey!” she said. “You like, too!”

I paused. Nodded once. “If you really think we could be something, I need you to say something about me that’s not to get you to some finish line.”

Steph was quiet longer than I expected, and I didn’t look up from my hands. I wondered if she’d gone back to her inventory sheet.