Page 31 of To the Moon and Back

DELLA THE MINIMUM INVESTMENT

On the last Sunday night before reading period, NASA had another guest. He was a Navajo poet—a young, attractive one, which was obvious from the event poster taped to the house refrigerator.

“ What a hottie,” said Sandra. She looked at me. “Oh. Oops, sorry!”

Sandra was uncomfortable with me being gay.

Maybe especially with me being gay in the room above hers, though we weren’t nearly as loud as some other people.

Still, Sandra was a good friend. Because she’d grown up in a religious world with some overlap to mine, I knew exactly what she was doing.

“Love the sinner hate the sin,” “in the world but not of it,” etc.

Which was fine. I’d done that, too, before Poland.

I forgave Sandra, solemnly. Behind her back, I made a face at Steph. She was smiling at me, trying not to laugh.

I liked her so much. My girlfriend! I would never be sad again.

Steph and I went to lectures together at least once a week, and to almost every event sponsored by the astronomy or biology departments.

She had cleared out several drawers for me, more than she’d left for herself.

I’d even moved my lizard into her room so I could spend time with him and she could select the poor crickets for death.

I’d named him Walela, off a list of Cherokee words I’d found on the tribe’s website.

When Steph came home from the library, no matter how late, I would wake up and reach for her.

I was happy, happy enough that when Steph pulled me close, I could set aside my parents and Matthew and my grandmother and God.

I’d finally taken off my CTR ring, and eventually even my gold cross necklace, because it felt disrespectful to watch it bounce on my chest when I was on top.

Lately, all I could think about was animal behavior, and how much I depended on Steph.

The female poison dart frog lays eggs on the rainforest floor.

The male fertilizes them. He stands guard until they hatch.

Tiny tadpoles wiggle up onto the mother’s back, and she starts a days-long journey up one-hundred-foot trees.

She carries them to a safe haven, to collected pools of rainwater in thick, green leaves.

As a child I demanded to be carried. The Cherokee Nation social worker and then the Provo child psychologist said it was a perfectly normal reaction to early childhood trauma. It would fade with the baby talk and the whining and the hiding my face in my father’s pant legs.

I had sat on wooden benches in my shiniest shoes, through waves of court decisions and microphones in my face. When it was over, someone would pick me up and carry me away. Mom or Dad or Matthew. Always, I was chosen.

The poet read aloud for half an hour, which was too long.

His poems were boring and had too many sheep in them.

His hands gripped his chapbook so hard his veins stood out, green, and as I followed them down his wrists and up his arms, I thought about how risky I’d been with my life—earthly and celestial—since my decision to come out.

What if I liked men, too, like this one, who really was so handsome?

Sandra was right. What would it be like to have sex with him?

Would he hold my arms above my head and smile approvingly, like Steph had done the night before?

Was that what was wrong with poor Ethan, that he wouldn’t have done that?

And if I liked that, if I liked maybe any gender of person who might make me feel good doing things I felt bad about, could I still get sealed to a man in the temple?

Did I want to? Or would I rather call Mom (like I’d told Steph I planned to, but that she had never checked in on) and make an official announcement, something about being GLBT?

The poet shut the book; I snapped back into the world.

The poet answered questions. He talked about his inspirations and his writing process, the rough time he’d had growing up and how much his grandmother had meant to him.

When he was put in foster care she tracked him down, then raised him herself with just the earnings from her weaving.

Every time he wrote a poem, his grandmother had taped it to her bedroom wall, even though she’d never learned to read.

His grandmother gave him a lamb, a real one, for him to help care for, and when his first poem was accepted by a literary magazine, she cooked the lamb for dinner.

It was a bit much. Or I was jealous and missed my grandmother.

We went around and said what jobs we wanted, again. This time I stayed in the room, but lied. I said something about getting involved in social work back home, which was a phrase I’d started experimenting with to mean Oklahoma. As in, “there are harmful effects of colonization back home .”

Afterward, Steph followed me upstairs. She closed her door behind us, a little too hard. “Come on,” she said. “Over my dead body will you major in psychology .”

I fell back on the bed, exhausted. “You might not realize, but I spent a lot of time with social workers when I was a kid. A few of them were Cherokee Nation employees. Who even knows where I’d be today, if it weren’t for—”

“You’d be here , Della. You got into Hollis ’cause you got good grades. Not through the collective struggle of the Cherokee people.”

I stared her down. Steph never went to the gym, but her body was sturdy in a way that looked grown-up. She looked ready to push her way through anyone, even me.

“I’m gonna ignore how weirdly hostile you are about being Cherokee,” I said. “Because what matters—”

“Della—”

“No. What matters is that I don’t want to be a scientist.”

“Respectfully, you do. An animal behaviorist. I don’t know, maybe you’ll specialize in some ecosystem or species. But all signs point to you being a bio major.”

Immediately, I thought of frilled sharks. They were my latest obsession, though I’d shared them with no one. It embarrassed me that I was so into them, and that I’d still never been to the beach.

Frilled sharks lived deeper than humans could reach underwater, some of them even in the Mariana Trench, and only once so far had one been seen alive. Their family lineage dated back to the Paleozoic Era, and they’d survived a mass extinction event that killed 80 percent of marine species.

“I’m not even good at science,” I said.

“ No one is good at science!” Steph was almost shouting. “It’s just the scientists who stick with it. Sandra says the highest average in Chem II right now is a C-plus.”

Two floors below us, the drum circle started up.

A few of the boys practiced on Sunday nights.

On the other side of the wall, Sam played a song on a CD player about a man whose girlfriend had left him.

At night the man left every light in his house on, in case she changed her mind.

Once a month Sam bought a new country album, listened to it, then mailed it to Afghanistan.

He told me he felt guilty every day for leaving for Hollis when his sister had asked him for help.

I told Steph I needed to do something for our tribe, something crucial to the story of our survival. “Think about it. The last thing Cherokee Nation needs is a marine biologist.”

I realized, as I said it, that this specificity had come from me. Steph had said animal behaviorist, which was close. But now that I had been asked, I knew. I wanted to be a marine biologist.

Steph let out a long sigh. “You know what my old science teacher said to me once, back in high school?”

“Wait, Steph, you mean your dad?”

There was a blink of pain on her forehead, the smallest of creases smoothed out. “Yeah, sure,” she said. “Brett.”

I didn’t get where this was going. Steph’s dad was really a stepdad, and she was almost as weird about him as she was about her bio-dad.

That said something, coming from me! She’d told me her bio-dad died in a car accident, but she refused to answer questions or ever discuss him again.

With her stepdad, she brought him up casually maybe twice a semester and kept his telescope pointed at the sky out her window.

I didn’t think he was dead, so maybe the telescope had been a gift.

“What’d Brett say?” I asked.

“He said to stop thinking of our tribe as its history.”

“Huh… what does this have to do with you bullying me into being a bio major?”

Steph leaned back on the bed and closed her eyes. “Della, I know you think I’m selfish.”

“What?”

“For wanting to be an astronaut. My sister thinks so, too. And my mom. It’s fine. It’s all fine. You don’t have to be a scientist.”

“You’re giving up on my science career? Already?” I laughed, but Steph didn’t join me.

“I don’t think it’s about being crucial to the story of Cherokee survival or whatever,” she said, her voice too close to mocking me.

“You do something, you’re Cherokee—cool.

Brett would say that’s part of the Cherokee story.

I just think you should be allowed, like any person without your, um, your past , to do what you want? ”

Steph lifted her arm over her head, an invitation, and I laid my head down on her shoulder.

She kissed me on the head. We both looked up at the ceiling, quiet, and listened to the music on the other side of the wall.

The man with the glowing house sang that if he ever got over his ex, she’d know it when he turned the lights out one by one.

“What if I want something different from what you want?” I said.

“You definitely do !” Steph said. “If you ask me, the ocean is overrated. Earth, too.”

“I mean something that could get between us. Like, what if I decide to stick with science, and then we get into two different grad schools?”

When Steph answered, there was less warmth in her voice than before. The difference was so slight, I wondered if I’d imagined it. “Della, we’re sophomores,” she said.