Page 32 of To the Moon and Back

Something fell inside me. She could have made some vague gesture of compromise, knowing it wasn’t a promise. Something like, We’ll figure it out together .

She didn’t really think it was too early to plan. I’d seen her color-coded lists of every active astronaut, their bios, and what degrees they had from which schools.

But maybe I was being unfair about commitment. Was this the natural order of things, for gay, godless college sophomores who hadn’t said I love you yet? Was I still too afraid of losing people? Or of people choosing to leave me behind?

Sam turned off the CD player and banged his fists on our shared wall. He shouted about going to the cafeteria.

I slapped my hands fast against the wall, a little drumroll, and told him to wait for us.

Steph followed me to the door, swinging her winter boots by the laces. “Just think about what I said?” She kissed me hard.

“Do whatever I want?” I said.

“Yes. Whatever I want.” She kissed me again, stepped back, and held open the door.

Parental investment is not equal across the board. Human males invest years of energy into providing for the extended childhood of feeding, protection, and education we have recently come to ask of them. Human females, too, though it’s considered less heroic.

Then there’s the minimum. The minimum investment required of a human male is the fertilization of an egg. Without medical support, the minimum investment required of a human female is about thirty-seven-weeks’ development in utero.

I started to think about having a baby. Not that night, of course. That night I thought about the ocean and everything in it—how much I wanted to see it for myself.

But the more I learned about animal reproduction, the more I imagined what that might be like. I could be the start, sort of, of someone’s family tree. One person on earth who would know me, need me, and share my genetic history.

The minimum investment, I realized, wasn’t minimal at all.

I started to imagine that I would, someday, be pregnant.

I imagined that, when no one was around, I’d call the fetus inside me “baby” and “love.” I’d spend two thousand hours lying in bed with my arms wrapped around myself, wrapped around my child, and I’d know that the woman who carried me had felt this once.

Somewhere in Oklahoma, somewhere in two thousand hours already decades gone—maybe—I had been loved like that.

A week after the poet’s visit, the Christmas lights came out. Everywhere on campus, still, were oversized American flags, faded in the rough weather we’d had since September.

I passed easily twenty of them on my walk to Professor Andrews’s office to pick up the take-home final. She gave me her home phone number and told me to call if I had any questions. She said she’d stay near her phone for the next eight hours while our class was working through the test.

I got a B- on the exam, and a C+ for the semester.

I went out with the nassie girls on the night the grades came in.

We were all one step closer to something, whether or not we knew what it was.

For that night, anyway, we stood close in a circle and danced in high heels through the throbbing in our feet and the sticking-unsticking of years of spilled beer on the frat basement floor.

We left the frat together, laughing at the mess of our knotted coats.

Sandra and I had matching black Patagonias, and when she realized she was wearing mine, she spent the rest of the walk home pretending to be me.

She hung on Steph’s elbow and shouted horrific fake facts about the reproductive lives of pandas, scaring a freshman on the street.

There were other jokes that followed, poking fun at every part of me, until Sandra fell screaming into a snowbank.

But none were about my case, or about lesbians, or even about Mormons.

Laughing, one in a chain of girls who said, “One-Two-Three, HEAVE!” to pull Sandra from the snow, I felt known.

We went to sleep around four, spread across the living room. We were wrapped in comforters and throw blankets and Pendletons dragged down the stairs from our beds.

I showered and jumped into sweatpants and snow boots.

I nearly tripped over April and Jess, who touched foreheads in sleep but were not gay.

I ran to the biological sciences building and made my way to the fourth floor, then down a hallway painted brown.

It was so different from the carved wood and woven rugs of the English building, and the glass walls and metal beams of the chemistry building.

I entered a room with a large, cluttered table. Two empty coffee pots. On the bookcase perched a brown taxidermied owl. Beside it was the casting of a small species of freshwater shark. Everything smelled weird. I loved it.

Professor Andrews sat on the edge of the chair beside me, looking anxious to return to her own office. She reviewed a printed list of major requirements, which I would have two and a half years to complete. “For the next six months,” she said, “you can still change your major.”

Part of me wanted to reassure her, to reassure myself, of how sure I was. How biology had built a frame around me, a scaffolding. I could put the pieces of my life on it, because this was the study of life. There was space even for one like mine.

I could be happy with other things, I now knew.

Other majors, other careers. In allowing myself to love this— to not become a social worker or a teacher or a nurse—I had filled in yet more of the details of that shadow-life we carry alongside us, the choices we could have made.

Every year of my new adulthood, I thought, I would choose something, and I would un-choose something else, and the outline of that other woman I hadn’t chosen to become would stand close to me, breathing softly at my shoulder, her hand gentle on the small of my back.

I had choices. This was the part of my life that I got to choose—so much of it is, I realized, when you are finished being a child—and I chose this.

I didn’t need to explain that to Professor Andrews. She would have her own reasons for being a scientist, like Steph had hers. Like Sam, too, and Sandra.

Professor Andrews recommended I register for the bio intro class in the spring, Exploring the Cell. I wanted to make Steph laugh at that, how it was basically the opposite of her old class Exploring the Universe.

Professor Andrews signed my major card and wished me luck.

As I walked across the quad, I bent to pull my wool socks higher. Cold morning air blew straight against my skin through my shirt and unzipped coat. My cheeks stung from the slap of the wind, a winter storm on the way. I was ready to go home.