Wild Life

by Keena Roberts

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just trying to be helpful.”

  “Well, don’t,” she said. “Anyway, we’re having a private conversation.”

  “Okay. Sorry.” I shuffled my sneakers on the carpet and felt the heat rising behind my ears. What had I done wrong? I thought you were supposed to talk to people if you wanted to make friends, but that hadn’t gone very well. And why was I reacting so strongly to these girls I didn’t even know? I picked at a mosquito-bite scab on the back of my hand and sniffed. Why did I feel that scared feeling in my stomach when nothing scary was happening? I could always trust myself to know what to do if something scary happened in Botswana, but the sudden doubt that settled in the back of my mind like a headache made me feel even worse than what the girl had actually said. What if I couldn’t trust myself here?

  I started getting prank calls almost every night. One night in particular, I was doing homework in the dining room when the phone rang from the kitchen and Dad tentatively said, “Keena? I believe you have a phone call…”

  “Hello?” I said.

  Four or five giggly boy voices shushed each other on the other end and someone said, “So, like, do you wear a loincloth under your pants? Do you speak African and eat bugs? Do you have a monkey baby?”

  And as I did every night, I squeezed the phone receiver and struggled to keep my voice measured and calm.

  “Of course not,” I would say. “That’s ridiculous.” The laughter continued on the other end of the phone and I flexed my free hand open and closed.

  “You’re so weird,” the caller continued. “Will you be my girlfriend?” At this point the voices were howling in the background, and I’d moved on from being hurt to just plain angry.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want a boyfriend. Now go away and leave me alone.” I slammed the receiver back in its cradle and stomped up the stairs to my room, my homework completely forgotten, like every other time this happened.

  Every night, Dad would walk to the foot of the stairs from the kitchen and say quietly, “Keena? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I’d answer. “I just…nothing, yes, I’m fine.”

  “Okay,” he’d say. “Dinner is in half an hour.”

  I would pace back and forth in my room, letting the anger burn through me until it faded away and I could think clearly. I wasn’t hurt in any serious way by these calls. They were annoying and made me feel sad in the moment, but it wasn’t what the boys said that irritated me, it was the fact that they took time out of their day to do something designed to cause me pain.

  “Why do they do that?” I asked Mom one night. She and I had started a new tradition since we’d come back to America. Even though I was twelve and too old to be kissed good night, every night Mom brought me a glass of ice water at bedtime. I had made some remark about how novel it was to have a refrigerator that made its own ice and how much I liked the sound of ice cubes tinkling against a glass—a sound I’d heard only in restaurants and therefore equated with something luxurious and fancy. When Mom heard this, she started bringing one up to keep by my bed every night. On the way up the stairs, she shook the glass so the ice cubes tinkled extra loudly.

  “I wish I could tell you,” she said. “But there’s no reason for it. Sometimes people are just mean to each other.”

  “Animals aren’t mean to each other for no reason,” I muttered from underneath my blanket.

  “Sure they are,” she said. “Or it could be something else. Remember that time you came out to the baboons with me and we saw Sylvia bite Balo for no reason?” I nodded. “Well, just before that happened, Selo jumped on Sylvia and bit her tail really hard. Sylvia attacked Balo because she was angry about being bitten, and Balo is lower ranking than she is so Sylvia can attack Balo. She couldn’t do anything about Selo attacking her because Selo is the alpha and can do whatever she wants to anyone. Remember what we call that type of aggression?”

  “Redirecting aggression,” I mumbled.

  “Exactly. So maybe these boys are being mean to you because someone else was mean to them.” I rolled over in my bed and looked up at her.

  “Well, it sucks,” I said.

  “I know. And I’m really sorry they keep doing it, but maybe if you just ignore them they’ll stop. Now go to sleep; you have a big day ahead of you tomorrow.”

  I pulled the blanket up under my chin and stared at the wall. I didn’t have a big day tomorrow. I knew exactly what kind of day I had tomorrow: wake up at 6:00 a.m., out the door by 7:30 a.m., at school by 8:30 a.m. in time for homeroom, and then class after class after class, all announced with bells that meant you had to get up and get moving if you didn’t want to be late. Then home, homework, and bed, and getting ready to do it all over again the next day. No animals, no game drives, and no time for daydreaming, unless I wanted to do it between 11:43 a.m. and 12:17 p.m. when I was supposed to be eating lunch. I barely saw my parents anymore and never saw Lucy; the elementary school was nowhere near the middle school, and in the evenings, she had just as much homework as I did. As close as we were, my family wasn’t the kind to talk about how they were feeling. For the first time in my life, I began to realize that I was surrounded by other people and yet completely alone in the world, just going through the motions of existing. Captain Keena of the Okavango, the reckless risk-taker who climbed trees and shot snakes, was my only companion—and she was pacing restlessly back and forth in my brain, begging to be let out but knowing that even if she could, there was nowhere in America she would have wanted to go.

  Me and Nat geeking out on a field trip

  It was a warm day in spring when I climbed the three floors to the sixth-grade locker room and headed for my locker, thinking half about the day ahead of me and half about Dune, which I’d just started and which was waiting for me on my bed at home. I often let my mind wander while I went about my daily routine—I called it “the castle in my head,” the place where I could think about anything and everything without anyone being able to judge me for it. I placed my brown-bag lunch on the top shelf in my locker and grabbed my copy of The Giver, the book we were still reading in English class, an unbelievable three and a half months later. I couldn’t believe it had taken this long to read 208 pages. I read that much in a weekend.

  I slipped to the back of the classroom to the same desk I’d been assigned on my first day, next to a boy named Jamie who I knew from elementary school and who used to invite me over to his house to play Star Wars computer games. He’d stopped talking to me years ago after I’d beaten him in Star Wars: Rebel Assault.

  “So, class,” Mrs. Richards said, “one of the most interesting themes of The Giver is that the author takes some concepts that are very familiar to us and presents them as if they are completely new and impossible to describe—like a sled or a sunburn. For our final assignment on The Giver I want you to take something that you think is ordinary and try to describe it as if it were extraordinary and you were seeing it or feeling it for the first time, just the way the author did in this book. What do you think you would choose? How about you, Keena?”

  “Excuse me?” I said. As usual, I had only paid partial attention to what she’d been saying.

  “What ordinary thing would you choose to describe?”

  I thought for a minute.

  “I’ll probably write about the way the birds sing in the morning when the sun comes up,” I said. Next to me, Jamie scoffed.

  “That’s what you’d pick?” he said. “Seriously? When you can write about anything else, like fire or hurricanes or airplanes?”

  “Sure,” I said. “The assignment is to pick something ordinary and describe it as something wonderful, right? Birds singing is something ordinary to me but something I also think is extraordinary.”

  “That’s just stupid,” Jamie said, shrugging.

  “Why?” Captain Keena of the Okavango stopped pacing in the castle in my head and Jamie now had her full attention. “It’s my essay. If you want to
write about bombs or whatever, then go ahead.”

  “I guess I don’t believe you,” he went on.

  “Jamie, focus, please,” Mrs. Richards said from the front of the classroom. What was wrong with him? This didn’t sound at all like the boy who cried when his mother accidentally vacuumed up his Boba Fett action figure.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Richards,” he said. “It just doesn’t make sense that someone would find birds singing to be that great. It’s just a random thing in nature.”

  “I really like it when birds are singing,” I said. “It makes me happy.”

  “Well, whatever,” Jamie said, shrugging again. “If that’s true it just means you’re an incredibly shallow person.”

  The bell rang to end the class period and students surged toward the door. I slid The Giver into my backpack and headed into the hallway, tension radiating through my shoulders. Who was Jamie to tell me something I liked was stupid? Wasn’t it okay for people to just like what they like and have that be the end of it? I would never do that to him. I sighed. I realized that if I wanted to protect my birds, and everything else I loved, I needed to keep them safe in the castle in my head.

  The fluorescent lights beat down like an alien sun as I shouldered my way between my classmates and their ever-present cloud of Cucumber Melon body wash from Bath & Body Works. Deep in the castle in my head, the elf princess Laurana Kanan touched me on the shoulder and said, “Be thankful you can feel pity for your enemy. The day we cease to care even for our enemies is the day we have lost this battle.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Can We Swim Away from This Party?

  Lucy arrived home from school one day angrier than I’d ever seen her. She dropped her backpack in the front hall next to a statue of a baboon carved out of the trunk of a palm tree and kicked off her sneakers, which thudded against the wall next to the baboon and left smudges on the wallpaper.

  “Lucy, please,” Mom said wearily, following her in from the car. Whatever was making Lucy upset had clearly been bothering her the whole way home from school. Dad and I paused fixing dinner as Lucy stormed into the kitchen and dropped into a chair, her hands in fists. Lucy had a temper, but I couldn’t remember ever seeing her quite this upset.

  “What happened?” I asked. I never saw Lucy in school anymore since the elementary school was several blocks from the middle school, but I still felt an obligation as the big sister to defend her against anything bad.

  Lucy glared at me. “We had a substitute teacher today for social studies. He lied about Africa and sent me to the principal’s office when I told him he was wrong.”

  Dad put down his knife and took off his glasses, something he only did when he was upset.

  “He lied? What do you mean? What did he say?”

  “He said that Africa is like America because it is one country made up of many different states.”

  “Bullshit,” said Dad.

  “I know,” said Lucy. “I told him he was wrong, and that Africa was a continent made up of many different countries. Then he said that if that was really true, then why did everyone in Africa speak Swahili?”

  I laughed. “What did you say to that?” I asked.

  “I told him that they only speak Swahili in East Africa, and anyway it’s called Kiswahili, not Swahili, and that there are thousands of different languages on the continent of Africa.”

  “Well, that’s ridiculous,” Dad said.

  “But then,” Lucy said, her blue eyes glittering with anger, “he said that people in Botswana are stupid because they build their huts out of mud and have to rebuild them every time it rains and the water washes them away.”

  My mouth dropped open, and Dad shot Mom a look with his eyebrows raised.

  “I know,” Mom said. “I already spoke to the principal. She said she would do something about it but that Lucy had already done her part to put the teacher in his place.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  Lucy raised her chin and looked me in the eye. “I threw an eraser at him,” she said.

  Mom and Dad burst out laughing and hugged Lucy tightly. She immediately began to relax now that it was clear she wasn’t in trouble.

  “It’s actually kind of funny,” Lucy said. “Imagine people in Botswana not liking when it rains. That guy really didn’t know anything.”

  Dad chuckled and went back to chopping beans with a smile on his face. Lucy kicked her bare feet against the legs of the chair and sipped the juice box Mom handed her from the fridge.

  I knew Lucy would forget the incident completely now that it was resolved. Lucy never obsessed over her problems; she attacked them with the ferocity of a mongoose battling a snake and then immediately moved on. She was the best person I knew at putting the past solidly in the past and trotting off to do something more productive with her time than worrying about what others thought. I had always respected Lucy’s self-confidence but found myself admiring it more every day as she smoothly transitioned to life as an average American elementary school kid. Meanwhile I found myself still struggling with my own adjustment.

  Though the prank calls had lasted several months and into the start of my seventh grade year, they had mercifully died down. Mom said it was because the boys got bored with bothering me when I wasn’t responding, but I thought it was because their attention was occupied elsewhere. Over the summer, Meghan and her boyfriend quietly broke up and suddenly the most popular girl in seventh grade was back on the market. If Meghan noticed the sudden increase in male attention, she didn’t show it. She calmly went to her classes, did her homework in study hall, and ate her lunch, either unaware of being the center of attention or choosing to ignore it.

  Meghan’s magnetism was felt by all members of the middle school, even those who weren’t in our grade. A week after we learned about her breakup, the lunchroom watched in shock as one of the eighth-grade boys walked over to Meghan’s table and asked her to go to the spring dance with him. To be asked out by an eighth grader was absolutely unheard of, and even the teachers paused their conversation to see what Meghan would do.

  Smiling sweetly, Meghan politely declined the invitation and told the boy she already had plans to go to the dance with her friends, though she appreciated the thought. The boy slunk back to his friends, tail between his legs, while the rest of the room stared at Meghan, who was obliviously eating her turkey and cheese sandwich on a Kaiser roll. If she had been cool before, she was now untouchable.

  I was mystified by Meghan’s ascension to the status of middle-school goddess. Objectively, I couldn’t see anything different about her that might explain the vast chasm in social status between her and the other girls, though it was clear there was one. She dressed like all the other girls, so it couldn’t be how she looked—though I had to admit she was very pretty in a delicate sort of way. She was smart too, but that couldn’t be it either. There were lots of smart kids at school, and they certainly weren’t conferred godlike status by the rest of the class. This I knew for sure, since I spent most of my spare time reading with Nat, who was the smartest of all the smart kids but was often laughed at for cutting the crusts off his peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and not eating the fruit his mom packed for his lunch (he gave it to me instead).

  No, it had to be something else that made Meghan so popular—something that was very important and that everyone else but me seemed to be able to see. Worse, it was something that I clearly didn’t have and had no idea how I would get. In Botswana, it had been so easy to be the person I wanted to be: drive the boat to Delta Camp, do all the things adults did, and be treated like an adult. But I didn’t know how I wanted to be treated in America, only that being myself got me laughed out of the room, as it did with my “Gorilla Man” dance, or prank called every night for months. One spring day near the end of a fairly quiet school year, as I watched Meghan and her friends eat lunch on the quad, the sun shining on their casually messy ponytails, I realized I knew one thing for sure: America was not a safe place f
or me to be me, and until I figured out what kind of person was safe here, I would just have to stay very quiet—just as I did when an elephant was nearby. I had to lie low and let the danger pass.

  I shivered. It was cold where I sat, perched on the sill of one of the large windows on the bottom floor of the middle school. The windowsill wasn’t as comfortable as the trees I liked to read in back in camp, but it was the closest I could find, so I had to make do. An early spring wind blew across the quad, made stronger by being forced to blow between two buildings rather than drift through the trees as it was supposed to. I knew it was probably too early in the year to wear shorts, but I’d been wearing them for more than a week already, assuming that the day would warm up the same way it did in Botswana and that by noon I’d be too hot in pants. I’d been wrong.

  I repositioned myself in the windowsill to avoid the breeze and pulled my book out from my backpack. I was reading The Golden Compass, which Nat’s father, Jonathan, had given me for my birthday. Jonathan told me that the main character, Lyra, reminded him of me because she was always climbing on roofs.

  Suddenly a shadow fell across my book. I looked up and saw a tall boy standing in front of me with an armload of envelopes. He was one of the new kids, but I knew he hadn’t been one of the ones who prank called me, since I would have recognized his lisp over the phone. He looked uncomfortable so I smiled and closed my book to show him I was paying attention.

  “Here,” he said, thrusting an envelope into my hands from the pile in his arms.

  “What’s this?” I said. The envelope was heavy and black and had my name written on it in loopy gold lettering. The only thing I could imagine arriving so mysteriously was a scroll written in runes that would unlock the door to a parallel universe where animals talked and people rode on broomsticks. As I contemplated this, I noticed he was staring at me, as if waiting for me to say something.

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?” I asked. He shuffled his feet and cleared his throat.