Page 36 of To the Moon and Back

I volunteered to be lookout. Nick did, too. He was a freshman, a Black Cherokee from California. When we’d met, we’d tried to play the what-Cherokees-do-you-know game. (I had waited till Della left the room, as she was sensitive about being terrible at it.)

Nick knew Brett from an event in Bakersfield.

Apparently, Brett had taken a political interest in Cherokees who lived outside of the tribe’s jurisdiction, and made up the majority of tribal citizens.

He traveled around the country, to places like Bakersfield, to try to better engage them.

I’d told Nick that Brett had been my teacher, just my teacher, with enough unnecessary hostility in my voice to kill the conversation.

Now the two of us stood in awkward silence in the dark, waiting for the pong table to be carried past us.

Later, on the edge of the riverbank, Sandra and Della flipped the table onto its side. The ice cracked sharp and fast, too thin to hold any more than itself. The table disappeared downstream, face down.

That night in bed, I thought of my father.

I remembered his voice, his judgment, how fearful I had been.

I remembered him saying that Kayla and I weren’t Indian.

Or we might be, a little bit, but it didn’t matter.

Our mother would tell us stories, and he’d untell them later.

“Don’t get mixed up in that stuff,” he’d say.

“When we’re fighting for space in a fallout shelter, no one’s gonna care what my grandpa was, before American. ”

Now I realized this implied my great-grandfather was from somewhere else, and my mother had not told me where.

At Hollis, my father’s message had merged with other things. Things I had read, or seen on the news, or heard people argue in class—until I felt like I could imagine his view on the world, the one I would have known if we’d stayed with him.

My father would say our mascot war was trivial.

A real war was coming, between survivors of the Earth.

He would look at us on the riverbank in the dead of night, the table sinking through cracked ice.

He’d scrunch his eyes together. He’d say half of us were racially white—unplaceable Indians.

He’d say that if we didn’t live together and walk everywhere in a group together, and minor in Native American Studies, and sign our emails with some version of “thanks!” in our respective indigenous languages—none of this would have happened to us.

I should have just kept my head down. I’d let myself lose sight of too much.

Two days later I walked home from the library.

It was early, still dark. I’d spent most of the night working on a presentation in Russian, a class I was taking in hopes of cooperating better with cosmonauts on the International Space Station.

I hadn’t spoken a word of Cherokee in more than two years.

“Gavareetye pazhalooysta pomyedleeney,” I whispered to myself, practicing my accent.

I was tired, but proud of my progress. I imagined myself in microgravity beside a Russian crew member, both of us in jumpsuits and fuzzy socks, both of us sipping from packets of Capri-Sun.

I liked the wind around the coat my mother had bought me before the school year started, especially how it had come folded between tissue paper in a box with a ribbon.

The coat was cerulean blue like a NASA flight jacket, but long and fitted and silver-buttoned.

It wasn’t practical, which my mother knew I too often was, and—though late—it felt like permission to be happy.

She might have just been glad I wasn’t pregnant.

Kayla hadn’t been presented with a back-to-school coat.

Not that Kayla was in school. She was just at school, hanging out.

Kayla was like a stowaway on a boat, her baby like a stowaway within a stowaway, only nobody cared!

Jason fed them (at least, he fed Kayla) three times a day from his tray in the cafeteria.

Kayla was really, really big now, yet apparently invisible to the Campus Dining staff.

I turned onto Maple Street and walked across the quad. I passed the registrar’s office and the admissions center, first in the line of old brick buildings. They were covered in white flyers. I stepped closer.

My own face was on a flyer, and next to it was a copy of the same flyer, and next to that were dozens more, in straight rows across the walls. On the flyer was a collage, photos pasted over the background of our school’s only censored mural.

The mural could only be uncovered by the special collections librarians, by appointment, usually for Native American Studies or Gender Studies classes.

It was a mural of naked Indian women, live-painted from white women attending Smith in the 1950s.

Under them, the song about the missionary and founder of the school.

Old Sir Ishmael taught them deep in the pines / With the Good Lord’s Word and a barrel of wine.

Pasted over the faces in the painting, for whatever point these flyers wished to make, were our faces.

There was my face, the grainy black-and-white version from the freshman face book.

And Della’s and Sandra’s, and several others.

The twelve of us leaned against trees in the forest, giggling into our hands or holding sprigs of pine over our privates.

A painted, delicate version of my right hand cupped a rounded version of my left breast, in offering.

Back at the house, I stayed downstairs. I was too tired to deal with Della, and how she’d react if I told her. She’d cry or get angry. She’d want to hold hands and process a conflict that was irrelevant to the life I wanted.

Even in the best-case scenario, I’d go upstairs and Della would sleepily roll over to meet me.

She’d lift her shirt, eyes still closed.

There was a hum she did in the mornings sometimes, a kind of helpless sound that killed me.

There was a good chance she’d lift my hand and drag it down her naked body, after my all-nighter, which had come after an exam, and after another protest against the Iraq War that she’d dragged me to.

When I woke on the couch a couple of hours later, I was already late for my own presentation.

I threw my coat on over the clothes I had worn all night and the day before, and ran across campus, cringing under the feel of my own oily skin.

The sky was a gray blue, and the coffee shop across from the admissions building had a line that snaked out the door.

I turned onto the quad, students racing across it between classes, and stopped.

All along the buildings that circled us, professors lined the walls.

Their backs were to us, and they swayed from foot to foot as they worked.

Oxford shoes wet in the morning dew and narrow heels sinking in the ground.

All the khaki, brown, and black in Connecticut.

Facing the theater department and the biology building and the registrar and all the walls in between.

So many of them, their jacketed shoulders touched.

Our teachers, together, tearing flyers from the walls.

Sam called a meeting that night.

I spoke quickly, urging everyone to let the college disciplinary committee deal with the flyers. The flyers were gone now. There was a process in place.

Sam interrupted me to say that, over a private phone call with a dean earlier that day, he’d been told that the frat would not be placed on probation.

Sam had insisted to the dean that the flyers were the frat’s second strike—a second strike that pre-law Jason had declared a Title IX violation—and that either way, a second strike always meant probation.

The dean had said that the flyers fell under free speech, though like the Incident at Homecoming, they were not in line with the values of Hollis College.

I tried again, from another angle. Didn’t we want to graduate? Wasn’t that—wasn’t graduating—the most important thing that we could do? For our people?

Della didn’t bother raising her hand. She stood up. “I think some of us”—she meant me—“are under a lot of pressure to keep up with the other students here on an academic level. I know that can be very hard.”

Was Della telling everyone I was an idiot? Della, my closest friend, my girlfriend , who had cried in my arms that afternoon at having seen her image, once again, in public—Della was telling everyone I didn’t deserve to be here?

“But honestly,” Della said, “we have a responsibility to future Native students, and to their sense of personal safety at Hollis. The administration—the president of the college, specifically—has been very clear that he won’t protect us.”

“Unless we make him,” Kayla muttered.

We? She wasn’t even supposed to be here! Yet here she was, absurdly pregnant, sitting stone-faced on a fucking birthing ball in the corner of the room. She was still planning on an unmedicated dorm birth, which was insane, even after I’d filled out and mailed in her application for Medicaid.

Frozen rain tapped against the window. Nick typed fast on a laptop, heavy-fingered. He was the new nassie secretary. I hated that this would be written down.

“It was nice of the teachers to take down the flyers,” Sam said. “But to change the culture here, we need the attention of the administration. Della’s right. We should demand a statement from the president of the college.”

“We should protest outside his house,” Della said.

Kayla nodded at Della across the room, her head in rhythm with her bounces on the ball. I wanted to throw something at her.

“And we should do it tonight,” Della said, and she sat down.

“Are you out of your mind ?” I said, standing.

In the back of the room, Jason snorted.

Sam banged his gavel. He’d bought it himself at a thrift shop, crazy with power since being elected nassie president. “Sit down, Steph,” he said. He dropped the gavel dramatically beside his dinner plate.