“I said, you have to let me know if you’re coming by Friday. My mom needs a final count for the caterers.” I opened the envelope and pulled out a heavy piece of card stock with more gold designs on it as well as his name, Zach, and the words “Bar Mitzvah.” I didn’t know what those words meant but assumed it was a party of some kind.
“Thanks for inviting me,” I said. “That’s nice of you.”
Zach shifted the pile of envelopes from one arm to the other and looked around the quad, presumably for the next person to deliver an invitation to.
“My mom said I had to invite everyone in the class,” he said. He paused in his search and looked back at me, as if seeing me for the first time. He cleared his throat. “Ah…have you ever been to a bar mitzvah party before?” I shook my head. “It’s…pretty fancy. You’ll have to wear a dress.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Have you…ever worn a dress before?” he asked.
I curled my legs tighter against my body.
“Yes, I’ve worn a dress before,” I retorted.
Zach seemed uncomfortable and cleared his throat again. “Okay. I’m sorry, I…had to ask. You never wear a skirt to school so I wasn’t sure. Just please wear a dress this time.”
“I’ll wear a dress,” I said, recovering my cool enough to remember my manners. “And thank you for the invitation.” Zach turned away and started across the quad, to where Meghan and her friends sat in their pool of bright sunshine, all, I now noticed, wearing skirts.
I glared at Zach’s retreating back and pressed my palms against the cold metal of the windowsill. Of course I’ve worn a dress, I said to myself. I’ve worn a dress tons of times! In fact, if I thought about it, I’d worn a dress as many as ten times before, and had only complained about it a little bit. I just didn’t like to wear dresses; they slowed me down and made it harder to move. Dresses were what girls wore when they had to, like when it was their birthday or when their moms paid them to when their grandmothers visited.
“If you’re nervous about the party, why don’t you talk to your friends about it?” Mom said that evening after I showed her the invitation.
“I’m not nervous,” I snapped. Mom looked at me over the top of her reading glasses, the invitation still in her hands. She’d been analyzing baboon grunts on the computer and had to turn the speakers down in order to hear me.
“You’ve never been to a party like this before,” she said. “They’ve rented out a party boat that’s going to take you all around the Philadelphia harbor. There’s going to be a DJ, a live band, and the whole thing is going to be catered. Hell, I’ve never been to a party like this before. Do you know what you’re going to wear?”
“I’m going to wear a dress,” I said.
“Well, yes, of course you’ll wear a dress. But which dress? And do you have shoes? And something to wear over the dress if it gets cold out there?”
“I…don’t know,” I said. There was more to wearing a dress than I thought. This was getting worse by the minute.
“Let’s go take a look in your closet,” Mom said. I followed her up the carpeted stairs to my bedroom, where the radiator clanged and hissed. Mom opened my closet and moved aside a Makishi ceremonial mask from Zambia and a San hunting kit from the Kalahari Desert in Botswana that I’d gotten for my tenth birthday. A stream of porcupine quill arrows spilled out of the hunting kit and I scrambled to pick them up off the floor while Mom pulled out the two dresses hanging in the back of the closet. One was from my uncle’s wedding four years earlier, and the other was a floral monstrosity. Mom held the dresses up to the light and smoothed down the creases in the skirts. I obviously hadn’t been very careful putting them away.
“Neither of these is going to work for an evening party on a boat,” she said finally, laying the two dresses down on my bed. “You need something black. You should go shopping this weekend and find something that will work. Do you want to invite Meghan?”
My eyes went wide. Going shopping for dresses was already my idea of hell on earth, and inviting Meghan was terrifying. She would immediately see how little I knew about dresses, and what if she told everyone at school? After what Zach said I assumed they all thought I didn’t know how to wear a dress, and what if I proved them right? I swallowed hard. It’s just a dress, I told myself. There is nothing scary here. Pull yourself together.
“Sure,” I said. “That’s a great idea. But she’s so busy with her other friends I don’t know if she’ll have time.” At least, I hoped she didn’t.
But as it turned out, Meghan did have time, and I was more than a little shocked to hear that she was looking forward to meeting me at the mall on Saturday to go shopping.
“Have fun!” Mom said as she pulled up to the curb in front of Lord & Taylor on Saturday morning.
“You’re not coming with me?” I asked, surprised. I had assumed Mom would want to come shopping with me, since this was my first real party dress. And didn’t she know I needed extra protection in the mall? I hated it there, with all those fluorescent lights and fake fountains that smelled like chlorine.
“No, I hate the mall,” Mom said. “I’ll just wait for you to call me to pick you up. At least there are no elephants in there!”
“I wish there were,” I said, still feeling a little adrift as Mom drove away, leaving me standing stupidly on the sidewalk holding her credit card. Okay, well, here we go, I said to myself. Nothing scary here. Just another adventure.
To my utter astonishment, Meghan greeted me with a big hug in the entrance of Lord & Taylor and hurried me off to The Limited, a store I’d never heard of but that was full of black dresses like the kind Mom said I should get for the party. With Meghan’s help, it didn’t take us long to find a simple-looking black dress that fit me and that Meghan deemed appropriate for the party.
“Are you sure you don’t want something fancier?” she asked, running her hand along a rack of dresses dusted with rhinestones and accented with silver chains linked together that looked to me like pieces of a horse bridle. I grimaced.
“I’m sure. That’s…not really my style,” I said, deciding then and there that “a style” was probably something a thirteen-year-old girl ought to have. The store’s pulsing music thundered in my ears and the smell from the perfume samples was giving me a headache.
“Do you need anything else?” I asked, hoping fervently that she didn’t. We’d been in the mall for almost half an hour and that was already twenty minutes too long for me. I missed the fresh air and being able to think clearly without the sounds of Real McCoy screeching in my ears. Meghan shrugged.
“Not really,” she said. “But we can leave now if you want to. I’m going shopping with Sarah and Emily tomorrow anyway so I can always get something then if I need to.”
I drew up short next to an artificial plant by the exit of The Limited. I’d been enjoying my time with Meghan and in my rush to get the dress and get out of the mall I’d forgotten about her other friends. Of course she was going shopping with them. She probably wished she was shopping with them now. Suddenly anxious, I shifted the shopping bag from one hand to the other and stared past Meghan to the window of a Williams Sonoma on the other side of the hallway.
“So, um,” I said, still looking at the cookware in the window and not at Meghan. As uncomfortable as I was at the mall, I didn’t want to lose this chance to spend time with one of my friends without the rest of her entourage. It happened so rarely. I decided to be brave. “Uh…do you need to go home, or do you want to come to my house for a while?”
“That would be fun!” she said, smiling again. “What do you want to do?”
I hadn’t thought she would say yes and shifted from one foot to the other while I thought of what to say. I didn’t have a Nintendo console and Dad had taken our computer to work to be fixed, so we couldn’t play computer games. I didn’t want to watch TV and it was too cold to take a walk, even if Meghan didn’t mind the mud.
Realizing she was waitin
g for me to respond, I blurted out, “Do you want to make cookies?” It was something Meghan and I used to do when we were much younger and had playdates at her house, but something we hadn’t done in years. Meghan laughed and punched me lightly on the shoulder.
“Yes, let’s go make cookies,” she said, starting in the direction of the parking lot. “That’s a great idea; I never make cookies anymore.” She laughed again. “That’s the thing about you, Keena. You never grow up.”
A few days later, I stood in my parents’ bathroom while Mom ran mousse through my hair with her hands. I’d blown my hair dry but was having difficulty keeping it from sticking out behind my ears where it was still growing out from my last haircut by the firepit in Baboon Camp. Mom said no one would notice but I didn’t believe her; my hair puffed out in some places and lay flat in others, an uneven patchwork of cowlicks and layers that even the fancy hairstylist Mom had taken me to hadn’t been able to clean up. I stared at my reflection in the mirror. Hair disaster aside, I didn’t think I looked too bad; my face was clean, and I’d outlined my cat eyes with a thin line of mascara that made my long eyelashes look even darker against my skin. The dress was just as uncomfortable as any dress I’d ever worn but looked all right, I thought, all things considered. It was just another part of the costumes I had to wear here in America. Once she decided I looked acceptable, Mom and I got into our old Volvo and she drove me downtown to the Philadelphia harbor.
I stepped onto the boat for the bar mitzvah party with my spirits cautiously high. Most of the other girls were wearing black dresses that looked like mine, and I blended into the crowd seamlessly, wiggling my way through the sea of guests and waiters until I reached the bow of the boat, safely in front of the captain’s cabin and set slightly away from the crush of people in the middle. Nat and I had agreed to meet there to make sure we both had someone to talk to at the party, since he had never been to a bar mitzvah party either.
“Hey, you can wear a dress!” a voice behind me said. I turned around slowly so as not to stumble in the low heels I was wearing and came face-to-face with a girl named Jessica. Jessica and Zach were friends from the same elementary school in the city. She’d always seemed nice enough, and I smiled gratefully. She had the curliest hair I’d ever seen and it shimmered around her head like a cloud.
“Yeah,” I said. Jessica reached over and ran her hand down the side of my head.
“Did you do your hair yourself?” she said, and I smiled widely. Had I done something right? It had taken me hours to get my hair under control.
“Yeah!” I said again. “It wasn’t so bad once I—”
Jessica tugged on a curl behind my ear and I felt it unravel and fall against my neck.
“This is such a mess,” Jessica said, laughing as she yanked here and there on my hair and watching the arrangement fall apart at her touch. “It looks like you stuck your hair together with glue or something,” she said. “It’s all sticky and crunchy.” I pulled back and gently pushed her hand away.
“Stop it,” I said. “You’re just making it worse.”
She laughed again. “I don’t think anything can make it look worse than it does already,” she said. Taking a step back, she looked me up and down, from the heels I was cautiously balancing on to the mop of unruly hair on top of my head. “You really don’t know how to dress, do you?” she said. “Just the same old jungle freak.”
“Go away, Jessica,” I said. She shrugged and turned away, walking casually in her heels much higher than mine. I watched her stalk down the aisle to the middle of the boat, where the DJ was beginning to whip up the crowd with some music that sounded like what they’d been playing in The Limited.
I flipped my hair over my head and ran my hands through it, breaking up the remaining pieces of mousse and pulling out the bobby pins. It was ruined anyway, so I might as well be comfortable. I straightened up and shook my head from side to side, feeling the wind rush against my scalp and burn my eyes. At least there’s a bit of nature out here on this boat, I thought. Though I’m sure I look like a dog shaking off after a rainstorm.
“That looks much better,” another voice said. Nat leaned against the side of the boat, wearing a dark blazer and a green tie with yellow spots on it. Most people assumed these were polka dots, but I knew they were actually tightly coiled Chinese dragons. Nat was holding two plastic cups of Sprite. He held one out to me. “I brought you some bubbles,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Sorry about your hair.”
“That’s okay. It probably wouldn’t have held anyway.”
“You look better now though,” he said. “More like Keena.”
I smiled wryly. “I think you might be the only person who thinks so,” I said. Moving slowly on those damn heels, I crept away from the side of the boat and into the shade of the cabin to lean next to Nat. He sipped his Sprite slowly and looked across the harbor back to the shore.
“I don’t think I like these kinds of parties,” he said.
“Do you think we could swim to shore?” I asked. “You’ll have to ditch your jacket but I bet we could make it.”
“Mom’s picking us up at ten,” Nat said. “And I can’t swim that far. You could, but you can’t leave me here. I’d have no one to talk to for another four hours.”
“Fine,” I said. “We’ll just be stuck here together.” I turned my head to the side and watched my classmates dance, waving their arms and moving their hips in time with the music and circling around a small cluster of girls in the middle of the floor. I didn’t need to look closer to know it was Meghan and her friends. I’d seen them arrive earlier and they looked impossibly gorgeous in their pastel-colored dresses and tall high heels. Why was Meghan wearing colors now when she told me black would be fine for me? I slid my feet out of my heels and rocked back and forth against the metal grid of the deck. None of this made any sense. How was it possible that I could act like an adult and be treated like one in Botswana but here in America I was stuck in some kind of frozen childhood where I couldn’t grow up and spent my weekends making cookies while my friends wore pink and turned into women? I sighed. Maybe Meghan was right. Maybe in America I would never grow up.
CHAPTER 10
Baboon Identification and Other
Hidden Talents
Mercifully, the bar mitzvah party was my last commitment for the school year. Before I knew it, the time had finally come for my family to pack our dusty duffel bags and go back to Botswana. My parents had renewed their grant yet again, and now that the school year was over, their teaching commitments were done for another six months, which meant another six months of collecting data and conducting experiments with the baboons.
Most of my Baboon Camp gear was already safely under the cot in my tent awaiting our return, but Mom and I still made a trip to REI to pick up a few last-minute items we needed, an errand I always looked forward to. Shopping for camping gear was completely different and infinitely better than shopping for clothes.
Mom needed a new headlamp, since a baboon had grabbed hers from the hook by her tent and smashed it against a tree, and I needed to restock my emergency medical kit since I was out of sterile gauze dressings and oral rehydration solution. We had a book in camp called Where There Is No Doctor that had a recipe for homemade oral rehydration solution for cases of extreme dehydration, but the concoction tasted terrible and I always had a hard time choking it down since it was basically just water with sugar and salt in it. We all much preferred the flavored, powdered kind we could get in the US.
Mom also bought a stun gun, which surprised me almost as much as it surprised the clerk at REI.
“That’s no good for bears, ma’am,” he said, which I knew would piss her off. Mom hated being called “ma’am.” Mom slid the stun gun out of its case and tossed it lightly from one hand to another.
“I’m not going to use it on bears,” she said. “I’m going to use it on my kids.” The clerk stared at her in shock but she merely b
uttoned the stun gun back up in its case and added it to the pile of medical supplies in our cart. In the chaos of packing and closing up the house before heading to the airport, I completely forgot about the stun gun until a week later, when we were back in Baboon Camp and Mom brought it to the kitchen from her tent and asked Lucy and me to join her at the table.
I was wrapped tightly in my purple Patagonia jacket, now faded almost colorless, and had been sitting in cozy warmth in my chair at the table. Mpitsang had given us the idea to carry shovelfuls of coal from the firepit and dump them under our chairs to keep us warm, and it was working beautifully. I was barefoot, slowly sipping a cold beer that had been chilled in the water by the boat, and deliriously happy to be back in Botswana. The winter wind whistled through the rain trees and shook the branches of the fig tree, dropping leaves and bits of figs into the waters of the lagoon below. A lone buffalo had been spotted by the water pump and there were three elephants feeding on palm trees by the car park, shuffling their feet in the sand and rumbling quietly to each other as they ate. I could smell them. The graduate students who’d been watching the camp had already gone home and we were once again alone, surrounded by nothing but miles after miles of floodplains.
Mom flexed the stun gun in her hand.
“I can’t believe I bought this,” she said. “But I want you girls to know why I did. One of our colleagues at Penn told us that a friend of his who works in Ecuador believes that if you shock someone who is bitten by a snake, you can neutralize the venom. I very much doubt that this is true, but I figured, why not? It’s not like we have any other option if someone gets bitten by a mamba.”
“So if someone gets bitten by a mamba you want us to shock them?” I asked.
“It’s not supposed to be that painful, from what I hear,” Mom said. She looked at me and then her lips curved into a slightly evil smile. “Want to try it?”
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