Page 30 of To the Moon and Back

DELLA SEXUAL REPRODUCTION

A month later, the war started. American flags were everywhere.

Sam’s sister, who’d been working on her GED after getting sober, was deployed straight from basic training to Afghanistan.

He was furious about that, and wasted days trying to contact the recruiter who’d presented a Go Army slideshow for the residents at her halfway house.

Jason told Sam it was pointless. “Then tell me,” Sam said, “who the fuck else can I yell at?”

The rest of us, slowly coming to understand that there would be more death, and it would happen to people far from here, stopped watching the news at night. We turned our attention to other things.

My coming-out was not as dramatic as I’d expected.

People were mostly nice about it when Steph kissed me on the cheek in hallways and library study rooms, way nicer than they would have been at BYU.

I had already lost my friends from the LDS Student Association, during my faith crisis.

The worst part about coming out would be coming out to my parents, but I planned to tell them in person. Winter break was still two months away.

Sam came out, too, but only to me. He said it was the war that had changed things.

He was buzzing with anxiety and needed one person to know.

What was the point of telling everyone—“throwing myself a parade,” was how Sam said it—when he was determined to stay single?

He worried about his sister all the time, and whatever energy he had leftover went toward his classes.

“I can date when I’m a doctor,” he said.

I felt accidentally chided, for letting Steph become the focus of my life when space travel was the focus of hers. For waiting alone in her room at night, to see her the moment she came home.

After that, I started joining Sam in the library. I even stayed late, which Steph did, too. But I made it a point to stay away from the basement level, where she liked to study alone.

The lizards wouldn’t mate with our faces against the glass.

Steph had the idea to set up a video camera in front of the terrarium.

We sat under the table, huddled around a television that was attached to the camera.

We watched the male lizard flare up and approach the female.

I squinted at its toes, its back, its tail, the way its feet raced forward and then froze.

We replaced the lizards and began again. I’d come to like that, how everything we thought we knew still had to be tested. I moved to prep the next trial, something the bio-majors in the group always raced to do themselves.

Sam jumped to his feet. “I can take care of that. These guys can be hard to get a good hold of.”

“I got it,” I said, tired of being useless. I already had a corner of the mesh terrarium top open. My hand slid down the warm glass walls, hovering above the lizard.

It stopped. Waited. Ran.

I swung my arm to the side, sweeping across the terrarium. I slapped forward, catching it by the tail.

“ Got it! ” I said. But the others were reaching out and throwing themselves on the floor, cupping their hands and cursing when they missed. There was the lizard, a little gray blur speeding across the floor. Steph caught it. I looked down. I was still holding the tail.

Sam walked slowly back over to me. “It happens,” he said.

“They can give up their own tails?”

“Yep,” Sam said. “But it’s never something we want to happen. Growing a new one takes a shit-ton of metabolic energy. And it won’t grow back as bone. Just cartilage.”

The next day I came home to a terrarium on my dresser.

There was the lizard, tailless still, with a palm-sized Hollis College diploma taped to the glass.

He had graduated with high honors and a major in biology.

The diploma had a gold gel-pen border and a background of red colored pencil. It was in Steph’s handwriting.

Beside it was another terrarium, plastic and much smaller. Inside it, many live crickets.

Once a year, gray whales migrate from the coastal waters of Mexico to their Arctic feeding grounds.

The mothers cannot head north until their calves are strong enough.

The older whales and male whales leave. The mothers stay behind for weeks, nursing their calves until they’re ready to make the journey.

Sometimes, this is when the orcas come in.

A pack of orcas will coordinate an attack, each taking part in an hours-long battle to separate calf from mother.

Sometimes the mother fights. She swings her tail and beats away the danger.

Sometimes the calf is separated from the mother and killed. The mother swims on alone.

The footage would come to haunt me. I found it online after class one day, and returned to it when I was being unkind to myself. Sometimes I’d think, dramatically, what would it be like to be loved like that? To be protected?

If I thought too carefully about kin selection, and the careful order of the world of living things, I knew I was an outlier.

Biology had taught me I didn’t belong. I was made of traits and behaviors inherited from people who did not know me well.

Who might not ever want to know me at all.

What did it say if I knew the evolutionary history of greenish warblers but couldn’t give a doctor my own family medical history?

I asked myself where I felt known and wanted—it had to be both. The answer, louder each time, was Steph.

I didn’t know where my biological mother was.

After she’d been made to testify in court, the newspapers had called her a bad mom.

The case ended, and for the second and maybe last time in my life, I was taken out of the room she was in.

She had since made herself impossible to find.

I sometimes woke in tears over this, still sometimes, after all these years.

Steph turned over in bed. Every time, instantly. She pulled me into her arms and held my face to her chest. Shh, shh .

The night before our midterm I fell asleep in Steph’s room with a textbook under my arm, waiting for her.

She was in the library. She often stayed late there, much later than I did—because I was becoming someone who needed people, and she was becoming someone who didn’t.

We’d had to move sex to the early mornings, which I didn’t like as much as at night, because it better fit Steph’s tyrannical study schedule.

“Sure, I could chill out,” she said, when I gently hinted that she was killing herself. “But if I chill out, and my ten thousand competitors don’t, one of them will go to the moon.”

“Wait, what?”

“Did you know,” Steph said, “statistically, I have a better shot at having triplets than becoming an astronaut?”

“I thought you didn’t want to be the, um, carrying partner?”

“Exactly.”

We walked together to the exam, holding hands. I bought us both caramel macchiatos on the way and wrote xoxo good luck! on the sleeve of her cup. She did great. I got an F.

Professor Andrews summoned me to office hours. She said, “Your midterm.”

I said, “Yes?”

“Before we delve into it,” she said. “On the day you took this exam—was there a death in the family?”

There would be no writing off her class. Before this semester, she had never opened the course to nonmajors. “It would be a shame,” she said, “if you made me regret my change of heart.”

Professor Andrews went through my midterm with me.

I remembered studying, how I’d memorized each animal study she’d told us about in class.

My head was full of them. The midterm had been nothing like that.

It was all graphs and charts and math problems. Analysis.

Like there was a second, murky layer to everything, like groundwater. It flowed under my feet, undetected.

Professor Andrews said I had to turn in a first draft of every lab report and short essay, giving the TA enough time to make comments and return it to me for edits before the deadline.

I had to record her lectures on a tape recorder and listen to them with headphones, which I did during group beading sessions at the house.

I still sat in a circle with the other girls, but I was somewhere else.

Whatever they talked about I missed, for all the biology pulsing through my ears.

Ring species. Food caching. Concealed ovulation.

Once a week, Professor Andrews had me come to office hours. Always the same day and time. I’d give her a summary of each unit. In the beginning, I made the same mistake I’d made on my midterm. I stayed on the surface, airy and full of human bias.

“When a male lion joins a pride,” I said, “the first thing it does is kill off all the defenseless cubs. And when a baboon—”

She stopped me and set her hand down firmly on the desk. Her nails were short, neat, and manicured with see-through nail polish. She wore her hair in braids, swept into a loose ponytail at the nape of her neck.

“Hold up,” she said. “Why are you telling me this? What’s the point?”

“The lion…” I started. Stopped.

I tried again. “Well, we were talking about kin selection, which is about helping your genetic material get passed on. This new lion is the head of the pride, and he has no shared genes with the cubs hanging around.”

“Take it further,” she said. “What does that mean?”

“Survival is difficult. The burden of feeding and defending the pride will fall on him. The lion doesn’t want—the lion won’t —spend his energy fighting for genes inherited elsewhere.”

Professor Andrews leaned back in her chair. She looked out the window, then back at me.

“He’ll need to invest in his own offspring, when they come.” I was careful not to say “children.” I knew better.

“And there you go,” she said, looking back at me. There was a change in her tone, a finality, and I knew we were done for the day.

“I realize you could recite back every story of the semester,” Professor Andrews said. “And that’s a good thing. A sense of story is important in a scientist, and not everyone realizes that.

“But you need to focus on analysis now. On data, on patterns. When you’re reviewing your notes, try to clarify what lies behind the story. I want you to ask why things are the way they are.”