Page 6 of To the Moon and Back

“You’re supposed to say ‘on belay,’?” snapped Brittany.

“On-freaking-belay.”

Brett was belaying my mother, but he was overinvested. He cheered nonstop for everyone. A very tall staff member, the scruffy blond man who’d done the safety talk when we first arrived, asked him to quiet down.

I climbed ahead of my mother, just a few feet from the ground.

Careful. I felt the grainy fake rock, coated in sweat and dirt and chalk.

I pressed my forehead to it and closed my eyes.

It occurred to me that I could unhook myself and fall, the way it sometimes occurred to me on bridges that I could jump off them.

I pushed the thought from my mind. I gripped the wall. My mother had, somehow, nearly caught up to me.

“ I know about Exeter ,” I said.

“Oh God. Honey,” she said, “I had to.” She reached up and touched my ankle.

I jerked away. “That’s bullshit!”

She opened her mouth to correct me, maybe to say something about cussing, but she didn’t. Maybe she knew how weak that sounded, that she’d had to .

I actually did have to be an astronaut. And to get there, I had to make it to places like Exeter and Harvard. I was going nowhere in Tahlequah. Where my mother had chosen to plop me down.

“It’s my life !” I said.

“Not really,” she said quietly. “Not yet.”

Around us came the bangs and shouts of campers. The slap of a hand on paper and John yelling. EARTH! Another slap. Meredith. ELOHI! Slap. MARS! Slap. MASI! They were loud and fast and laughing, and the laughing told me that they knew the game was weird, and they were not ashamed.

My mother was breathing hard, trying to pull herself up to face me. “I left where I was from,” she said. “My mother did, too. Even my grandmother. All you need to know is it nearly killed us. I have to watch out for you girls, even if you can’t understand why.”

This was old news to me. My mother had gotten pregnant with me as a high schooler, and her parents locked her out of the house.

She and my father left Little Rock for Dallas, where she had always wanted to be.

She’d been totally alone, cut off from her parents, her Applebee’s tips taken from her each day by my father.

It took six years for her to get us out of there.

The first time she told me about losing her parents—in her own terrifying version of the sex talk—I’d had nightmares of being pregnant, or lost, or locked out of the house.

Now I thought, her wildest dream was to live in Dallas.

“This is literally the opposite of that,” I said. “It’s the best school in America. It changes people’s lives, and they thought I was smart enough to go there!” I began to climb again, quickly, determined to leave her behind.

“GO team, GO!” shouted Brett from the ground.

I made it halfway up the wall, collecting index cards. Astronaut, gravity, oxygen, solar system. My mother fell even farther behind me, grunting with each pull of her arm.

“We’re not done here,” she said.

I pulled myself up higher, maybe forty feet from the ground. She huffed and puffed and pulled herself to the halfway point. I hadn’t expected her to make it this far. She was afraid of heights.

“I love that you’re ambitious!” she shouted behind me.

Her voice carried up and across the wall. What would Birthday Girl Heather think? She was standing under us with all her friends. They were eating pizza on bright paper plates, looking up.

“Kayla and I are ambitious, too,” my mother said. “You can do important things right here, where you’ll be celebrated and appreciated and safe. Where no one will make you feel less-than.”

“ Please ,” I said, catching my breath. “ Stop. Yelling. About our Private. Business. ”

To my left, Kayla made it up to my height. She shouted, “What are you two talking about?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“You got this, Steph!” Brett said cheerily from below.

“Kayla, talk to your sister,” our mother said. Her eyes were closed. She didn’t want to see how high up she was.

“I’m leaving anyway in four years,” I said. “At that point I’ll be in competition with people whose mothers sent them to Exeter and Choate and Taft. Whose mothers know how college works!”

“That’s enough .” She was sweaty and heavy and awkward, her arms shaking below me. Eyes still closed, she motioned with her head at the wall beside us, at the campers chasing one another to the top, screaming out Cherokee space words.

“I’m switching teams,” I said.

“But the cards won’t match up!” my mother gasped.

I raced up the wall.

“Steph! Wait!”

I made it nearly to the top, desperate to get away from her.

When I looked down, I saw there’d been no need.

She was curled into a ball, palms covering her face, all her weight released onto the rope.

She shook her head in refusal as the scruffy staffer yelled for her to rappel by pushing out with her legs.

Brett told the staffer to please lay off. He pulled my mother down by the rope, inches at a time. At the bottom, he caught her in his arms. He had no idea what she’d done to me.

I yelled for Kayla.

“ What do you want ,” she said.

“Forget the game. I need to tell you what Mom did.”

Kayla stared at the grips above her and pulled herself up to meet me. “After what-all you did to me?”

“Oh my God. I didn’t tell her about your little boyfriend!”

“Right.” Kayla swung her rope to the side and banged into me. “Whoops,” she said.

Brett yelled up at us. “Kayla Harper, that better be an accident!” He was unhooking himself from the ropes, stepping out of his harness now that our mother was safe beside him. She rushed past him to the restroom. Her head was down, her hands still covering her face.

Kayla tried to kick me. I pushed off the wall, making Brittany hold all of my weight (“ God how much do you weigh !”). My rope crossed over Kayla’s.

The staffer ran over, blowing his whistle. “DOWN! NOW! This is how folks get strangled!”

Brett hurried to him, talking fast and low. He put his hand on the staffer’s back, gentle, like settling a horse.

I landed mostly on the wall, kicking Meredith in the leg by mistake. It couldn’t have hurt much, but she was tired of me being so rude to her.

“I am tired of you being so rude to me!” She swung her body into mine, pushing me into Kayla. Kayla shrieked and pulled my braid.

The staffer whistled again and again, summoning his boss to whistle alongside him. The birthday party was enthralled. One of the boys waved his pizza triangle sideways over his head like a pennant flag and said, “Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!”

Daniel swung over to me. “You shouldn’t have told on Kayla,” he said. “What are you, jealous?”

“I didn’t tell on her!” I said.

Meredith reached out to slap me, and I took both her wrists in my hands. I held her against the wall. She stopped struggling. She looked at me strangely, her eyes spooky-beautiful. Her lips parted in surprise. I thought, stupidly—what if we kissed?

Kayla tore me away by my hair. Without me to hold her body up with mine, Meredith fell a couple of feet. Her rope caught her. She dangled in the air, dazed. The birthday party cheered.

“This isn’t fair, Steph,” called Brittany from below. “You’re so, soo heavy.”

A third staff member had joined the first two, and he flashed the lights on and off while he blew his whistle. “GET DOWN,” he said, shouting into a megaphone. “GET DOWN IMMEDIATELY.”

Someone turned off the music. The room was quiet, and everyone stared at us. In their hands were sad slices of pizza, cut too thin. Was this, I thought, what it was like for astronauts? To look down in disappointment at the people of the Earth?

Brett switched to Cherokee, speaking slow so we’d understand. “My girls,” he said. “They know you’re Cherokee. I’m embarrassed.”

Kayla watched me, breathing hard. Meredith and Daniel swung in slow circles, untangling themselves from each other before the slow drop down.

Someone at Heather’s party turned the music back on, louder than before. They talked and laughed and somebody called out, “Guess they’re on the warpath.” Somebody’s palm skipped fast against their lips. Howowowowowowowow .

Daniel froze, one arm outstretched, forehead down.

Meredith swung around to face the party below. “ FUCK off,” she said. Loud and then quiet.

I saw my mother holding me back, so afraid of her own past that she’d force on me a small life.

I saw my sister growing up faster than me, leaving me alone in the world.

I saw the laughter in Heather’s eyes, the confirmation that we were small-town and silly, that nothing I could do in Tahlequah would be enough to make me matter.

I felt surer than ever that I would one day leave—that I wanted too much, too hard.

Our mother returned from the bathroom. Her face washed, her eyes red, her voice high and bright and weak. She said it was time to go home. The second group, which was supposed to get to climb after belaying the first group, didn’t complain. We all wanted to leave and never come back.

Brittany yanked on my rope, signaling that I should move. I looked at Kayla. We were the last two left to rappel down.

“I got into Exeter,” I whispered. “Months ago. Mom didn’t tell me, and now it’s too late.”

Kayla nodded. She cupped her hand over my hand, over the faded plastic grip that held me to the wall. She said, “Let’s go.”

She swung past me, brushing her lips against my calf as she passed. She didn’t want anyone to see.

People talk about wanting to be anywhere but here, but that wasn’t it for me, not ever, not at all. It was wanting, needing, to be somewhere specific. Like I was all my life at a bus stop, reading the schedule again and again, checking my watch. I knew where I was supposed to be.

I closed my eyes and stretched my legs out high in the air behind me.

I felt myself wrapped in thick, insulated material, given air to breathe, heated and cooled and protected.

I felt my fingers tracing along the rock wall, and it wasn’t a rock wall but an ammonia tank, a leaking ammonia tank.

I was unscrewing the hatch, gripping sparkling silver tools in my space suit gloves, and I was a professional, my hands were still and expert and I had been born for this.

My crew was inside the shuttle and I was outside. On my own up here as I had been on Earth, but tethered tight with a short umbilical cable. I looked away from the crew, and down, in absolute wonder at the Earth below.