Page 4 of To the Moon and Back

Kayla snorted. Daniel stood and reached out a hand, pulling Kayla up beside him.

She saw me. Her face fell.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Kayla said. “Steph. Can we talk alone for a second?” She stepped toward me, and Daniel stepped toward her. She shook him off. Daniel reached for her again.

I caught the way Daniel draped his hand over her shoulder, his fingers dangling a few inches above her chest like it was nothing. The bow on her bikini had been tied and retied, haphazardly. Loose strings dangled over her belly. She was twelve years old.

“Steph, we were just—”

“Being mean to me?” I said. “Or letting Daniel molest you in the woods? Which is it?”

“Shut up !” she said, gripping her own shoulders. Then, softer, “Please, quiet down. Let’s go talk somewhere.”

“Let’s talk about this logically ,” said Daniel.

“Shut up,” said Kayla, and me. Daniel held his hands up and stepped back. He ran a hand through his hair. It was thick and black and wavy. No, disheveled . I wanted to hit them both, but I had to keep Kayla safe. I yanked her by the arm and pulled her body behind mine.

“We’re supposed to be at swim time,” I said. I was looking at Daniel but talking behind me, to my sister. My younger sister. I felt her breath just under my neck. She was shorter than me.

“You’re just jealous,” she said.

That was unkind. Hadn’t she been a toddler on my lap, hiding in a closet?

When our father locked us outside the house, I’d sat with her by the door.

I would have taken her away with me, if I’d been older and known where to go.

Now I really could run, soon, to Exeter—they were wrong, I still had time.

But it was sad to know I’d be leaving her behind.

She seemed fine with that, though. She didn’t remember what had happened to us.

I could barely believe what had happened to us. The fact that it had , the unthinkable part on the night we ran, made nothing that could come after it unthinkable. Our planet and everyone on it, sucked into darkness in the space of a breath.

“Kayla, don’t be gross,” I said.

I didn’t know what I meant by that—if I was taking aim at her attitude or her body. It was true that I was jealous. Not of how her body looked, but of how freely she used it. How at home she was in it, how unafraid. She had, unlike me, no memory of what could go wrong.

I left Kayla and Daniel in the woods. Back at the creek, I sat down next to Brett.

He had black hair and brown eyes and pink skin.

He wore rolled-up blue jeans and a gray T-shirt with a tiny rip by the neck.

Beth gave it to him, because she worked at the mall and got things free if there was something wrong with them.

She was always giving us presents with something wrong with them.

Once she gave me a purple water bottle that said Shoot for the moon!

Even if you miss, you will land among the staIrs.

I looked down at our feet in the water, wishing our legs would look broken like a spoon in a cup because of refraction.

It was the wrong angle, and the water was a kind of green that looked black.

I listened to the kids swimming, far-off sounding in the echo of shrieks and splashing water.

The snorkels were muddy, tossed in a pile on the bank.

I wondered if my mother would drive to Walmart and try to return them that weekend.

I could already see her standing over the bathtub, scrubbing them down, laying them out on a towel to dry in the yard.

At Exeter, I thought, you can take scuba diving for PE.

Kayla was right; my acceptance letter had still not arrived.

Brett turned his whole self to look at me. He was smart, and he thought I was, too. He let me use his telescope whenever I wanted.

“Ahnawake,” he said. It was my Cherokee name, though only he used it. His mother had given it to me since my mother couldn’t.

“Mhm?” I said.

“What’s going on, Ahnawake?” he said. “Why aren’t you speaking proud in our camp language lessons? You know all this—it’s baby stuff for you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “No need to show off.”

Brett took one foot out of the water and folded it under him. He knew I loved to show off. “Are you sure that’s it?”

I thought about telling Brett the truth. How I was terrified I hadn’t gotten into Exeter, with the first day of school in just ten weeks. Shouldn’t I have heard from them by now?

I thought about telling him how Space-Culture Camp was humiliating to me. How the things he and my mother cared about were not going to get me to space. How they were irrelevant outside this town, which would make my life small and unimportant.

Brett put his hand on the top of my head. “Ahnawake?”

Sometimes Brett said my Cherokee name so many times in a conversation it was like he was maybe trying to tell me something.

He’d been the first person to treat us like we belonged when we got here.

Our mother in the early days had no friends, and no local close relations, so she would do things like show up at events and name-drop our more famous Cherokee ancestors.

“Nancy Ward’s Cherokee name was Nanyehi!

” she’d say. “We’re related to her!” So were forty thousand other people.

Seven years in, though, and Brett was still clearing out a space for us.

Kayla took it, like our lives in Texas had never happened.

Her life, her Cherokee life, was the only one she knew, and she had nothing to prove.

“I’m fine, Brett.”

“Tsalagiha hniwi,” he said. Say it in all-Cherokee .

I rolled my eyes. “Tohigwu.”

In the early days of their relationship, our mother had asked Brett to cover our house in labels, bright pink index cards taped to every surface.

Galohisdi. Gasgilo. Digohweli. Ganihli. They worked, to a point.

Kayla quickly realized how happy her learning these words made our mother, and how important they were to our people’s continued existence.

She set about being the most enthusiastically Indian child our family had seen in generations.

Our mother learned almost a hundred words in Cherokee, but they were all nouns in a language of mostly verbs.

Still, she asked Brett to speak it to us on whatever level we’d understand.

If it was frustrating—this wall of language she built around herself—she didn’t let on.

She’d say, “Keep going, I like to hear y’all talk. ”

Once, when I was ten or eleven, I heard them fight about it. I was on the floor of the bedroom I shared with Kayla, my ear pressed to the cold metal grate of the air vent. I heard “sure” and “fine” and “what do you mean” and “what do you mean what do you mean.”

“Hannah, come on. Just say it’s ’cause I’m traditional,” Brett said.

The heave and jerk of a drawer on bent runners slammed shut. The snap of air caught under a sheet. My mother was making the bed. It was a Friday, and she did laundry on that day ever since learning the Cherokee word for it: tsungilosdi. Wash day.

“Just say that’s why I’m here,” Brett said. “If it’s really just for the girls, heck, if that’s all you want— Hannah, stop, listen to me— we could figure something out. I wouldn’t leave them.”

Water shot through pipes in the walls. I imagined her standing at the mirror, tapping lotion onto her cheeks with the tips of her fingers. I imagined her flossing, rinsing, taking her time.

I was almost asleep when she spoke again. “I’m not with you because you’re traditional,” she said. “I love you.”

Brett said something I couldn’t hear. I could almost see my mother, sitting up in bed, the way she’d let out a breath and close her eyes and hold up the palm of her hand. “But it’s not not that you’re traditional. I like what you give my girls.”

“ Our girls, Hannah,” he said, and my heart broke open. Then he said, “Language practice.”

“ Grounding ,” she said.

Kayla came in and caught me then, said didn’t I promise I’d stop?

Didn’t I know nothing good could come of this?

I climbed onto the top bunk, and she flicked off the light.

I fell asleep to the bright green patterns of glow-in-the-dark stars I could reach with my fingertips, to the low hum of my mother’s voice through the grate.

I used to think my mother was self-conscious and shallow, that she would stop at nothing to belong.

Not realizing—not for a very long time—the strength it takes to say what you want.

The ambition of wanting a certain life, of demanding it.

After camp that day, I sat on the ground by the mailbox with a book. The mailman came an hour later, sweating like crazy even in the shorts version of his blue uniform. My mother brought him out a plastic cup of water, as she always did in the summer. There was no letter for me.

I barely spoke on Tuesday. Only Meredith noticed. She touched my arm in the hallway, gentle, and looked at me with so much kindness. She smelled good, like the chlorine from pool time. I could stay here, I thought. I could swim in this.

“I told you, I’m fine ,” I said, pushing past her to go cry in private about Exeter. But I couldn’t find anywhere that wasn’t taken over by other people. Meredith didn’t follow me like Brett would have, like—maybe?—my sister, and against all reason my feelings were hurt.

After lunch, Brett asked my mother to teach us what a solar eclipse and lunar eclipse were.

Despite practicing at the dinner table the night before, she struggled through her explanation.

Then Brett told us a traditional story about a frog eating the sun or moon—the word is the same for both, nvdo, which offended me—and how that’s what an eclipse is.

Nvdo walosi ugisgo translates directly to sun/moon the frog eats it the round thing habitually.

Kayla already knew the story from her visits with Brett’s father, our sort-of grandfather, and she decided to show off.