Page 5 of To the Moon and Back

“If an eclipse happens,” she said proudly, “we have to get out pots and pans and whatever, and make noise to scare the frog away.” Brett nodded. Our mother beamed.

Brett gave us watercolors to paint pictures of a frog with a sun or a moon in its mouth.

Kayla’s frog was so realistic that a small line of campers asked her to paint portraits of them during our lunch break, her first work on commission.

I painted a regular moon, all set to tell my mother that the frog was there, but it was frozen and suffocated and dead, its body too small to see on the moon at this scale.

But Brett got to me first. He tugged at the collar on his unbuttoned button-down and leaned over my shoulder to pass Daniel a clean paintbrush.

“I’m painting the frog next,” I said quickly, “after the moon.”

On Wednesday Kayla put her head on Daniel’s shoulder during the basket-weaving demonstration, and I thought about what it might feel like—his cheek warm against my hand, my hand tight around his waist. Our mother stood very still by the pile of dried hickory bark, her arms crossed, watching them.

We weren’t allowed to have boyfriends till we were sixteen.

Kayla knew that. It was kind of our family’s only rule.

I was surprised that Kayla wasn’t in trouble, because she and Daniel were so obvious!

When it was quiet, they laughed. When the rest of us laughed, they touched their noses together and whispered seriously into each other’s mouths, eyes closed.

At craft time, Daniel ran a dry paintbrush across the back of her neck.

On Friday, the last day of camp, I decided to tell my mother about Kayla and Daniel. How they were dating, which was against the rules.

I told myself I was worried about Kayla. Tattling would protect her. The very little I had understood of our life before Tahlequah colored everything in this new life worse than it was. There was no telling what a boy could do to her, if Kayla decided to let him.

I asked my mother if we could talk alone. “Sure,” she said, “when we get to the climbing gym in Tulsa.”

At the climbing gym in Tulsa, Brett and the gym staff set up our activity. Our mother explained the rules. “It’s like an extravehicular activity simulation,” she said. “Astronauts call it an EVA.”

I already knew what that was, from all but memorizing the brochures for real Space Camp. You hang from a rope outside a pretend-leaking ammonia tank outside a pretend space station and repair the tank. Your legs stretch out behind you as you work, like you’re flying.

“We’re going to do something like it,” my mother said, because the whole point of camp seemed to be to do our own, lesser version of everything.

I leaned back in my chair and looked up at the ceiling.

It was popcorned and yellow. I’d always pictured the training facility in Houston to be made mostly of glass.

My mother said we were going to be working in partners, and all up and down the rock-climbing wall we’d find index cards taped there by the staff.

“One of you collects the English cards and one of you collects the Cherokee cards, and you match each Cherokee card with its translation. When you get to the top, let go of the wall and stick your legs out behind you a few seconds. So you can feel exactly what it’s like to be in an EVA. ”

Exactly? Really?

Daniel said, “This sounds overly complicated?”

My mother shrugged. “Figure it out or lose.”

I asked her if now was a good time to talk, and Kayla grabbed my arm. She looked at me hard, pleading.

Kayla knew I planned to tattle. The day before, when the mailman again delivered nothing but bills, I’d told Kayla that there were good reasons we weren’t allowed to date at our age.

“You know boys only want one thing,” I said.

(I’d heard that on television, though I suspected I, too, might want what boys want.) Kayla had told me to stop waiting for the mailman because my Exeter letter was never going to come.

“You’re, like, obsessed,” she said, “and when you get like that, you get mean.”

My mother said now was fine. “Just get me a Coke first, okay?” She handed me two quarters and dropped her purse on a bench.

The vending machine was different from the ones I was used to. Newer, with light-up square buttons and higher prices. I needed another ten cents.

I ran back to the bench and tore through my mother’s bag. We were running out of time to talk.

Her purse was heavy, motherish. An empty box of Band-Aids, Neosporin, crushed pretzel sticks, an apple, and a little tube of ChapStick melted into the lining.

There were four bottles of children’s over-the-counter medicine, surely expired by now.

There was a stack of unpaid bills she carried everywhere, as if waiting for inspiration.

To better rummage for change on the bottom, I pulled out the bills and placed them on the bench. Water, electric, credit.

Phillips Exeter Academy.

I opened my fist. A few coins rolled across the floor.

Hands shaking, I unfolded the letter.

At the top was a golden embossed seal. Finis origine pendet. The end depends on the beginning .

Dear Miss Stephanie Harper,

It is with great pleasure that I write to offer you admission to Phillips Exeter Academy, with a full annual scholarship award of $22,590.

Congratulations! Your thoughtful application convinced us that you would thrive at our academy.

We sincerely hope that you will accept our invitation and inform us of your decision to accept your place no later than April 12.

The letter went on for a page, detailing the few expenses my family would be responsible for and how to browse the course catalog and when to speak on the phone with my adviser to plan my courses. My own adviser. My own courses.

April 12. It was June.

I burst into tears.

They had wanted me. And she had stolen that. She couldn’t have hurt me better.

I stood in a corner and sobbed against a wall. A teenage receptionist asked if I was okay, and I stopped mid-cry to say no, and she said, “Do you need me to go get your mom or something,” and I said, “ Hell no!!!” and then I ran, wailing, into the women’s restroom.

I only took a minute there, catching my breath behind a closed stall door. Then I stopped. I held my palm against the wall and focused.

I needed to be taken seriously. I needed to stick up for myself. I washed my face with cold water and patted it dry with a brown paper towel. Finally, shoulders back and jaw set, I returned.

“Where’s the Coke?” my mother said.

“I forgot it.”

She looked puzzled, then waved it away. “What did you wanna talk to me about?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay,” she said, which was infuriating. “Everyone paired up already, so you and me are a team.”

“Ha,” I said.

She gave me a confused look, but didn’t push it. I knew she thought I was just being weird, like kids can be, and I hated her for it.

There were four slabs of rock-climbing wall lined up together, and we had reserved three of them.

My mother and I were stationed at the end, strapping into our stupid harnesses that made a V-shape at the crotch.

The fourth section was for the birthday party of a girl in a necklace that said HEATHER.

She wore a glow-stick crown on her twisted-back, butterfly-clipped hair.

It was a boy-girl party with a CD player and pizza and many family-size bags of chips.

I had lost my spot at Exeter. I felt like I was melting inside my body.

I pulled up beside Kayla. “We need to talk about Mom,” I said.

We leaned against the base of the wall, in our matching orange Space-Culture Camp T-shirts, our harnesses bunching our shorts. My head hurt.

“I know,” Kayla said. “Please, please don’t tell her about me and Daniel. If I have an official boyfriend, you know she’ll make us break up.”

“No—” I started.

“Hey,” said Birthday Girl Heather, swaying over to us with one hand on a flat hip. Brittany, Kayla’s most annoying friend, followed. She was hooked to the other end of my rope, ready to belay.

“What’s your shirts say?” said Heather. She pointed at the Cherokee words printed across our backs, the same as were on my baseball hat.

The characters looked close to English but not quite.

A poster of a painting of Sequoyah, the man who’d invented the Cherokee syllabary despite his wife at one point setting fire to his life’s work, lived in a large wooden frame in our living room.

I looked at Kayla and Kayla looked at Brittany.

I tried to remember what I had been doing on April 12, the decision deadline.

Had the admissions people even once tried calling the house?

Had they called during work hours? Back in December, when I was applying to Exeter, I should have asked for an answering machine for Christmas.

I should have brought the mailman hot chocolate and told him what kind of letter I was waiting for.

“Really,” Heather said, when no one had answered her, “what do they say?”

“They say ‘camp,’?” said Kayla. Brittany laughed. We were all bad, slow readers in the syllabary. Cherokee was hard.

Heather smiled tightly. “So y’all are here with the Indian group?” She reached for an open bag of Cheetos Puffs, bigger than a toddler, and held it out to us.

Kayla rolled her eyes, which was rude and embarrassing. She was sensitive about Cherokee stuff with non-Cherokees, like she was scared they’d make fun of something precious to her. It was weird to witness. An hour from here, at home, she didn’t care what people thought.

Kayla turned her back on Heather and started her climb.

“Oh my God,” Heather said, “I was just being friendly.”

“Yeah, that’s the group we’re with,” I said. I sighed apologetically, like being affiliated with Cherokee mean girls was my cross to bear. Heather gave me a small smile and a wave and a single Cheeto Puff. I pulled myself up the wall after Kayla.