Page 35 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH I SPENT A STAR AGE IN FLAMES

Junior Fall

Homecoming brought the Native Alumni Association to campus. We called them Big NASA and they called us Little NASA. They were there to make us spaghetti and to network and advise. None of them were astronauts.

My sister, dressed in all-black, sat at the head of the table.

She leaned back on a pillow in her chair, at the only angle she said let her breathe while pregnant.

Jason was in the kitchen, piling food for her on a plate.

Della and Sam and Sandra sat on either side of her, also dressed in all-black. Had I been left off an email?

When I asked about it, Sandra laughed like I was joking and said, obviously, it was in protest of the op-ed. Kayla had stolen all my friends.

I’d fought hard to get to Hollis. I still had to fight to distinguish myself for my eventual application to be an astronaut.

Meanwhile, I saved money for grad school.

I let grad students do experiments on me.

I ate ten almonds a day for six months with weekly urine samples, listened to classical music while people looked at my brain, and even sold plasma on what I’d come to call Plasma Mondays.

I got very close to becoming a rich person when I was approved to sell my eggs, but Kayla tattled.

Our mother said it would kill her, knowing her grandchildren wandered the earth in anonymity.

When I tried to complain to Della, she was disappointed in me.

“Steph, they would be your genetic offspring,” she said.

“It’s a biological imperative that you care for them, which I hope is worth more to you than five thousand dollars. ”

In great contrast to my willingness to succeed in college by doing whatever it takes , Kayla had just shown up.

Free. She was squatting in Jason’s dorm room, except when they revisited the fight about how she hadn’t told him about the baby until August, or the one about how she still didn’t have a job.

When that happened, she slept in Della’s room, since Della slept in mine.

Over a paper plate of spaghetti, Sandra told Big NASA about the op-ed. She got louder as she talked, excited, her beaded headband slipping back from her hair. The op-ed referred to the latest ruder-than-it-had-to-be article in the Hollis Examiner , a conservative student publication on campus.

In the op-ed, the editor wrote that the nassies’ recent event for Indigenous Peoples’ Day—in opposition to Columbus Day—was an attack on America when America was still in mourning.

In this historic moment of collective American pain, the Native American Student Association must stand either with our country and its fallen patriots, soil still fresh on their graves—or with al-Qaeda.

“And y’all voted not to retaliate?” asked one of the alumni. “You won’t even publish a rebuttal?” He had shoulder-length, graying hair in thin braids that ended in tiny wet curls.

“ Some people were strongly against it,” Della said.

She glared at me, but I knew it was only half-real.

Della and I had voted on opposite sides of the issue the night before, even raising our voices during open debate.

But afterward she stomped to my room, pouting; took her clothes off, forcefully; threw them at my head, laughing; and fell asleep in my arms.

The alumni made fun of us. “Ohhh, you might wanna rethink that vote,” one of them said.

These were people who had known real trouble on campus, far beyond the op-ed.

They were some of the first Native students to enroll back in the seventies, and the first thing they’d done was fight to have the school’s Indian mascot banned.

They spent years burning its effigy in the lot behind the football stadium on game days, even chaining themselves once to the president’s gate.

They made local headlines with a hunger strike, though it ended quickly for final exams.

Now they said, darkly, “It’s never over.”

They said, “You have to fight back when these people give you trouble, or they’ll never stop coming for you.”

One of them put his hand on my knee, and my stomach dropped straight down to the basement, but he didn’t squeeze. “You’re a part of this now,” he said, staring straight into my eyes. “And it’s never gonna stop. If you don’t want to let it take over your lives here, you have to act.”

“We come from warriors,” said a man at the end of the table. He wore a ripped, faded American Indian Movement shirt, which looked older than he was.

“We are warriors,” he added, nodding at Jason and Sam.

Jason, a literal veteran, nodded back. He stood behind my sister and held her shoulders in his giant hands—not romantically, but protectively.

Sam gave me a (rare) knowing look, like, oh cool, straight guys. It was the kind of thing he would have normally shared with Della, but Della was culturally straight and fully taken in by this display.

I didn’t feel like I was a warrior, not that the men at the table thought I should. I didn’t feel like I came from warriors, either. I felt like I came from exhausted women.

Every year, on homecoming weekend, the seniors built a bonfire and made the rest of us run circles around it. The event had been canceled the year before. This year it was back on, in order to “not let the terrorists win.”

Some students at the bonfire wore red, white, and blue in support of the troops in Afghanistan.

Some wore all-black, in protest of the coming war in Iraq.

And some wore Hollis-crimson, like it was any other year.

The nassies had voted to skip it, in protest of the op-ed, but I went on my own out the back door.

It was always when I felt the least secure in something that I was the most defensive of it.

I wouldn’t admit it to Della, and especially not to Kayla, but the op-ed had left me feeling shaky about my place in the greater Hollis community .

Skipping the bonfire felt like surrendering to the idea that they didn’t want me.

I wanted to be part of a Hollis tradition, like everyone else was.

I wanted to paint red streaks under my eyes and run in circles like I belonged, until I believed it.

I started my one hundred laps, my neck weighed down in plastic necklaces that slapped my chest. One side of my body froze in the chill night air.

The other side, the fire side, dripped sweat down to my socks.

I was one of hundreds ! Hundreds of the smartest kids in the country! I was also, immediately, out of breath.

A line of boys ran into the circle, all in red Speedos. Maybe thirty of them? Maybe a frat? They melted into one another.

They were shouting, singing—it was the school’s old, banned fight song. “HOO WA HEY! HOO WA HEY! UGA WUGGA UGA WUGGA HOO WA HEY!”

A girl I’d been following for many laps, her hair pulled back in a gold-and-red scrunchie, was picked up and thrown over a boy’s shoulder. She laughed and cheered and beat her fists against his back in mock-resistance. “Ha,” I said, trying it out. Look at me, being chill.

Rough fingers pinched my waist. I screamed. I jerked away, and a hand scratched my hip. I ducked under the police tape that separated the runners from the crowd.

I shivered on the lawn outside the library. There was a little dip in the grass outside the building, with a grate I thought of as my own.

That was something my mother had taught me: find a place to be yours. “It could be a sewer, for all I care,” she’d said. “Just so long as no one can find you there.”

Since my first month at college, the grate had been mine. Even a year later, when I’d started dating Della, she’d never had to know about it. I could finish up in the library and sit directly over it, warm air venting up from the ground. I could look at the sky and be with myself for a while.

I was tired of being with myself.

I sat on the grate and picked the red paint off my cheeks with my fingernails. I thought about Della sipping cocktails at the bar in town right then, the fizzy sweetness, laughing with our friends and the alumni.

I thought about my sister’s baby in the room with them all, in a way—the baby was supposed to have working ears now, and was so close to being born.

What kind of world would they meet? I worried about the war in Iraq, though we’d already invaded Afghanistan.

I worried about weapons of mass destruction, though I didn’t know if they were in Iraq.

They were already here, meaning everywhere, twenty thousand of them positioned around the Earth.

I worried about nuclear war, and how little we’d done to save ourselves on Mars or the moon.

When the time came, there’d be nowhere to run.

The next morning, the president of the college sent an email to campus.

“The Incident at Homecoming,” though not strictly in violation of the Hollis College code of conduct (and therefore not strictly meriting any disciplinary action), had indeed not been in the spirit of the Hollis College value of community respect.

Sandra decided we should steal the frat’s beer pong table. The pong table had been a focal point in the basement of Alpha Omega since the seventies, disposable cups knocked over the face and chest of a painted Indian girl.

This time, there wasn’t a vote. Sandra waited till midnight, started out the door, and assumed (rightly) that we would follow her.

With a thick knit scarf wrapped around her arm and elbow, she broke the window in the basement door of the frat. As the heir to all of Minnesota’s Subways, which Sandra had finally admitted to after Jess googled the cost of her snow boots, she agreed she could afford to risk getting in trouble.

Sandra reached through the jagged opening and turned the lock from the inside.