Page 33 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH WINTER CARNIVAL

Sophomore Spring

In January, four months into us being official, I took Della to Dominic’s Pizza Kitchen.

I told her I loved her. She told me she loved me back, and even kissed me on the mouth inside the restaurant where anyone could see.

My neck burned over the tea light candle between us, and I pulled back. Della held my hand across the table.

All was going according to plan. Della was officially a bio major now, which would be good for her long-term happiness.

I had waited an appropriate amount of time to declare my love.

While I’d assumed Della wouldn’t tell her parents about me quite yet, not till we graduated and she came along with me to grad school, it turned out she’d already told them.

This had happened over winter break, her first visit home since she’d left for college, and she said it had gone well.

“That’s so cool of them,” I said.

Della nodded, ordered dessert, and changed the subject to me and my sister. How much fun had it been, the two of us reunited?

As an only child, Della loved the idea of sisters. She and Kayla sometimes instant messaged each other, despite never having met in person. They seemed to really like talking to each other, behind my back.

“I barely saw her,” I said.

“Don’t you two still share a bunk bed?”

“When I visit ,” I said. I wished I hadn’t shared that detail with Della, now that I knew she’d been one of those girls with a princess canopy over her bed.

“Kayla’s busy,” I added. “She spent a lot of nights out at parties. Plus, she’s got a boyfriend and a job, and her blog has been picking up.”

“I know, I saw her post about hitting fifteen hundred subscribers! I bet colleges will like that.”

The dessert arrived, a chocolate mousse, and I stabbed my fork through it with a loud clack.

I hadn’t had a mousse before. I hadn’t expected it to be soft, like lukewarm ice cream.

Della was better than me at knowing what to do in nice restaurants, which she always paid for with her parents’ debit card.

Her money came from her parents’ seemingly unshakable belief that whatever she spent money on must be important, and the trust that Della had built with her frugality.

I patted the corners of my mouth with the heavy napkin, like I’d seen Della do. “I’m sure they will,” I said brightly. “She’s just ironing out where to apply.”

This wasn’t true. Kayla had dropped out of high school almost one year ago, which she hadn’t told Della. (And which, frankly, never would have happened on my watch. Our mother was asleep at the wheel.)

But in Della’s world, everybody went to college.

And Kayla still could. It was better to give it time.

That’s what my mother had said over the break, when I’d complained about Kayla not being parented.

Why was Kayla posting photos of custom-order jingle dresses on her blog at four a.m.?

My mother said, “You’ve gotta let your sister forge her own path. ”

Whatever happened to our mother’s rules—the old ban on boyfriends, all the ways she’d once tried to protect us?

It felt like as long as Kayla stayed geographically close to our mother, and maybe spiritually close to our tribe, she could run wild.

I deserved a prize for being the good child, the one with an actual plan, but no such recognition was in sight.

Della didn’t need to know any of this. I asked for the check, and Della signed her full birth name in loopy cursive on the bottom of it. I thought about asking if it bothered her to have to do that, to write Emma . Did her parents use money, maybe, to remind her where she belonged?

I didn’t ask. Her trip home had gone well, and I had enough on my plate.

All I could do was read Kayla’s blog posts each day, watch her subscriber count steadily climb, and write dumb but encouraging things in the comments section like “wowza” and “great art!” I sent her brochures for community colleges and tribal colleges with visual art programs, and even for a four-year school (Haskell, in Kansas), hoping Kayla would perk up at the Indian Nations University in its name.

She was a bad student but a good Indian. Where would that get her?

Then in February she fought with our mother, quit her job at the diner, and moved in with her least-mature friend, Brittany.

Two days later, the friendship forever ruined, Kayla took forty-six hours of Greyhound buses to Hollis for winter carnival.

She picked the lock on the door to my room, asked to join Della on her way to swim laps, talked poor Della’s ear off about the Indian Child Welfare Act, sat next to Jason Palakiko at the weekly nassie meeting, had unprotected sex with him three hours later, and got pregnant with his baby.

Then she walked herself to the bus station, let herself into our mother’s house, reenrolled at her old high school, got her old job back, and didn’t say anything to anyone for months.

When Kayla told me about the pregnancy in May, I was in the library googling Jupiter’s moons.

She sent me an email that came out with both things right away—about the baby, and about the keeping of the baby—and I cried into my hands.

Kayla wasn’t going to Haskell Indian Nations University.

Incredibly, for someone with just three remaining credits, she refused—again—to finish high school.

I hated that part most of all, how her pride felt like spite.

Her life, I figured, was over. I put my head down in my arms on the gray metal table. A librarian brought me a thin plastic cup of warm water, which collapsed in my grip.

I walked, still crying, to the phone booth on the first floor and called Della’s cell. She already knew. My sister, seeking advice and confidentiality back in her first trimester, had told Della first.