Wild Life

by Keena Roberts

  Going to high school was both familiar and completely foreign. I knew the drive to Shipley by heart, since I’d been going there since first grade, but I had never set foot in the high school before my first day of freshman year, even though it was right next to the middle school and shared the same open-air quad space between the two buildings.

  I’d seen the Upper School students eating on the quad during their lunch period, but had never given them much thought since I had so many other things to worry about. They were older, taller, and cooler, but didn’t really stand out to me as individuals in any way. I didn’t know any of them personally. But they all knew who I was.

  A few days before the school year started, the Philadelphia Inquirer published an article about my parents’ work titled “Eavesdropping on the Apes” (even the headline was factually inaccurate because baboons aren’t apes). In it, the reporter described my parents as “radiating a brisk cordiality” and said that they could just as easily be “planning a run up to a friend’s house for dinner and drinks rather than another trip down a flooded delta to a tented encampment on the Okavango.” The reporter went on in dramatic fashion to exclaim how brave my parents must be to do this unusual and dangerous work while “homeschooling their two daughters until the girls got old enough to require the socializing experience of the Main Line’s Shipley School.”

  Mom said the article was poorly written and the reporter was an idiot, and Dad promised he’d never said anything like that about me and Lucy, but the damage was done. “Require the socializing experience.” We all agreed it was ridiculous and untrue and I laughed at the article along with my parents. Lucy and I were fine; we didn’t need to be socialized! Family friends called to congratulate my parents on the article and share how wonderful it was that they were being recognized for their work. But wasn’t it awful, they’d say, what that woman wrote about Keena and Lucy? How unkind and untrue it was. By the way, they’d add casually, is Keena free this weekend? So-and-so would just love to have her over; maybe they could go bowling or out for ice cream or do something else generic and American. I scowled, imagining the conversations between the kids I knew and their parents: Wouldn’t Keena like that? A big ice cream sundae and a trip to the movies? Wouldn’t that be an extra special treat for her, the untamed, feral child of the jungle? I bet she’s never been to the movies before. Does she comb her hair? Can she speak in complete sentences? Does she even know what a Fruit Roll-Up is?

  The imaginary conversations echoed through my head, and I declined every playdate that was suggested. Were they even called playdates now that we were fourteen years old? I knew the parents meant well and that I would have a fine time if I did go spend time with their kids, but it felt forced. They weren’t inviting me over because they wanted my company; they were doing it because they felt an obligation to civilize me.

  Even after school began, I kept fixating on that article and wondering what the other kids would think of me. I let the imaginary conversations continue, thinking about them in my classrooms, the cafeteria, and on the quad. See her, that girl sitting with Meghan at the cool girls’ table? She’s made such progress since she came back from Africa—did you know she can tie her shoes all by herself now?

  Every day, Mom and Dad drove us to school on their way into the city. Every day, I sat in the back, always on the left-hand side, and drifted, mentally preparing myself for the day. With every turn, my shoulders and neck tightened like they were being wound by a screw, and I knew they wouldn’t unlock again until I got home in the evening. It didn’t matter how familiar Shipley itself was, everything about high school made me tense and jittery.

  “Am I weird?” I asked Nat at lunch one day. We were sitting by ourselves in the corner of the cafeteria. Nat was reading a gigantic book and, in classic Nat fashion, was completely oblivious to the comings and goings around him. He looked up.

  “You seem all right to me,” he said and went back to reading. I scowled.

  “No, seriously,” I said. “Look at me; am I weird? Do you think that article was right that I need to be socialized?” He looked up again.

  “The article was stupid. You’re fine. Now be quiet so I can read.”

  Nat made me feel better, but I didn’t think he was being completely honest with me. My friends’ parents clearly thought something was missing in my socialization experience given all the invitations I was getting, so I had to consider the possibility that they were right. I certainly didn’t feel integrated—after all, here I was sitting in a corner of the cafeteria hiding from the rest of the world behind a book about dragons. I had no idea what to wear, how to act, or what being in high school was all about, except for getting good grades. Every time I came back to school, it felt like everyone had moved light-years ahead of me in maturity, as Meghan seemed to. The minute I’d get comfortable with what we were supposed to be wearing and who was dating whom, I’d go back to Botswana and the world would shift into a new social dimension with new styles, new crushes, and new rules. Every year I was completely left behind and had to relearn how to live on whatever new planet we’d landed on in my absence.

  I looked across the cafeteria to where a group of junior girls were eating lunch by the bright windows in the “cool” part of the cafeteria. I recognized most of the girls from the field hockey team I’d joined as my mandatory fall sport, and a few of the girls were also in my advanced European history class. What would happen, I asked myself, if I got up and went over to where they’re sitting and said hi? I knew they were all nice people and would probably say hello back to me, but still, the idea of even attempting such a social feat made my neck sweat. What if they laughed at me? What if talking to cool older girls wasn’t allowed on this new planet and would just prove to everyone how little I knew about other people? Lost in my own imaginary humiliation, I was distracted by something bright pink moving across my field of vision and looked up to find Brooke standing over my table with two of her friends. It seemed like Brooke had become even taller and blonder in Shipley’s latest dimensional shift. She looked down on me with that pair of sparkling blue eyes that reminded me of a snake about to strike.

  “I guess you’re back,” she said. “And here I was hoping you’d stay in Africa and leave us all alone. But I guess you missed your boyfriend here.”

  I stared back at her. “You knew I was back,” I said. “We’ve been playing on the same field hockey team for a week.”

  She rolled her eyes. “No, I play field hockey with a weird, hairy little monkey, not a girl. We should just call you Abu.” She laughed and her friends whooped. “Abu the monkey! Abu the monkey!” they chanted as they walked away. I glared after them.

  Brooke passed through the cool part of the cafeteria and out onto the lawn, where the rest of her friends had reserved a picnic table. Though Brooke nodded to the junior girls from my history class as she walked past them, I noticed that none of them nodded back. Maybe they didn’t like her either. They’d been nice to me so far, and they were all beautiful and popular and cool. I didn’t care what Brooke thought about me, since it was pretty clear she’d made up her mind that I was Abu the monkey, but I realized that I did care a great deal about what these other girls thought. I wanted them to like me, and I wanted to be like them: successful and cool without being mean. Their approval mattered. They, I decided, were what it meant to be socialized.

  “Nat.” He looked up again. I pointed to one of the girls, the quietest of the popular group who sat to my right in my European history class. Her hair was light brown and straight, and she walked in a delicate way that made me think about impala in the forest. “Christine lives near you, doesn’t she?”

  He squinted across the room. “Yeah. She used to come trick-or-treating at my house. Our moms are friends.”

  “She’s nice, right?”

  “Super nice. Doesn’t really talk to me though.” He paused and put his book down. “You don’t, you know,” he said.

  “Don’t what?”


  “Look like Abu the monkey. After all, he wears a hat.” I grinned but looked down at my hands, clasped on the table next to my lunch bag and book—tanned, scarred, and without a hint of nail polish on them. Not monkey hands, maybe, but definitely not the hands of a cool high school girl. I didn’t know what I was, but at least now I had an idea of what I wanted to be.

  Mom used to tell me to lead through strength up to weakness. She meant it in the context of playing a hand of bridge, but I always thought it was a lesson that could be more widely applied. If you want to win, she used to say, you should always start with the things you know you’re good at, and end with the things you aren’t so good at. So what was I good at? I could drive boats and cars, run from animals, and was handy with a pocketknife, but Mom used to tell me that my greatest talent was observation. In Baboon Camp, I was always the first person to see animals, the first to spot the snakes in the trees, and the only one who could read the way the wind blew across the water and know whether there was a sandbank underneath. I could spot lions from miles away and blended in to the forest as seamlessly as any of the baboons.

  I rested my chin on my hands and stared across the cafeteria. Pretend it’s a water hole in Botswana, I told myself. Those kids over there are the giraffes: tall and quiet and not really doing anything. Those other kids are the baboons: loud and messy, and probably a lot of fun. And those kids—I looked out the window to where Brooke and her friends sat—are the buffalo: unpredictable, grouchy, and really very stupid. I smiled. All you have to do is learn how to blend in here, I thought. Just the way you would in Botswana. My eyes settled back on the cool girls and zeroed in on Christine. I had a plan now. I just had to set it in motion.

  I decided that if I was going to fit in at high school, I first had to put the Botswana pieces of me away. People rarely asked me about Botswana anyway, and if I never spoke about it, there would be fewer chances for me to stick out. A new year meant a chance to reinvent myself, in a way. The newspaper article had been a blow, but as it turned out, fewer high school students read the newspaper than I’d feared, and aside from Brooke’s posse, no one really thought of me as having anything to do with monkeys or Africa. They didn’t seem to think much of me at all. If I was going to fit in, I had to keep it that way, as much as I might hate being invisible.

  I started with my bedroom. We had recently moved to a new house a few miles away from our first house with the growling radiator and the pirate bannister. Mom and Dad wanted a bigger lawn and said we didn’t need the playroom anymore since Lucy and I weren’t as obsessed with Legos as we used to be. Our new house was a renovated farmhouse that stood at the end of a long driveway among tall pine trees devoid of monkeys. I liked the house well enough but didn’t love it. It had doors and walls just like the old house and didn’t really seem that different, if I was honest. The new house just flooded a lot more and I often spent my evenings mopping the basement as water seeped up through the cracks in the concrete.

  I had a small room at the top of the stairs and across the hall from Lucy’s. It had a creaky wooden floor, two big bookcases, a desk, and my bed, which I’d positioned under a window that looked out onto our front lawn and across the street to a beautiful field—my favorite feature of the new house. I kept this window open always, even when it was freezing outside. I was used to sleeping outdoors even on the coldest nights, and I liked the way the wind smelled when there was frost in the air. Sometimes I could even hear owls.

  The rest of my room was pretty tidy. I’d had enough dust in Baboon Camp, so naturally I kept things orderly to avoid having to clean them. Yet despite the cleanliness, items that reminded me of Baboon Camp were everywhere: a San hunting knife hung off my bedpost, a spear was propped in the corner next to a bow and arrow I made from porcupine quills, the walking stick I’d carved from the buffalo thorn acacia lay next to my bed, and hundreds of souvenirs from the gift shop in the Maun airport lined the shelves of my bookcases. There were dolls from Swaziland, owl feathers, ostrich shell bracelets, whistles I’d carved from palm nuts, and jars full of dried beans and berries that I probably shouldn’t have brought into the US in the first place. All of this, I decided, had to go.

  I brought up empty boxes from the basement and packed up all the stuff that reminded me of Baboon Camp and Botswana. I handled everything carefully and wrapped each item in newspaper like the precious possession it was. It made my heart hurt to put my things away, but this was what I had to do. No one will see your room, part of me screamed in my head. They won’t know it’s full of spears and lucky beans! But no, I told myself. American Keena doesn’t have those things in her room. No more spears and lucky beans. I packed away my tapes of South African pop music, including “Gorilla Man.” You have to listen to new things now, I told myself: Third Eye Blind, Usher, and what’s that other guy called? Puff Daddy. That’s what Americans listen to. That’s what those cool girls from your history class listen to. And you want to be like them, don’t you? I did. Finally, I had only one box left. This one I’d reserved for my books. My eyes burned and I bit down hard on my lip.

  “I’m not throwing you away,” I whispered to my bookshelf. “Just…putting you away for a while. I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” I felt insane, talking to my books, but it felt like I was betraying them. The characters in these books taught me to be strong and brave and now I had the audacity to put them away? How dare I?

  Into the box went Captain Nancy Blackett from Swallows and Amazons. Into the box went Lessa the dragonrider of Pern, and the elf princess Laurana Kanan. I didn’t have time for dragons and swords and beastmen. Now it was time for things like Friends and Frasier and ER. I didn’t much like TV, but I could maybe learn to like it if I tried. I had to do this right or not at all, I thought. I knew very well how long I would pay for even the smallest social slipup, and I didn’t want to give Brooke or her friends any more ammunition.

  Once the boxes had been carefully stacked in the back of my closet, I looked around. My room felt empty. Normal, but uncluttered and sterile. There was nothing bright or interesting, no weapons, and nothing that would be out of place in any other fourteen-year-old’s room in any home in America. It felt dead. Part of me felt dead too. What living part of me there was left lived only in Baboon Camp, where she was safe. American Keena was just a shell of her.

  Next, I needed to work on my appearance. I asked Mom to take me to the mall. I had to have new clothes if I was going to dress like the history class girls. After a week, I had studied them long enough that I thought I could duplicate their style.

  “You shouldn’t feel like you need to be like everyone else,” she said as we drove. “What you wear has nothing to do with the person you are on the inside.” Did she think I was stupid?

  “I know,” I said.

  “I’m not saying you can’t get some new clothes, but please don’t think you need to change.”

  “I know,” I said. She obviously didn’t understand what I was trying to do.

  “I love you just the way you are,” she went on, “my brave little bush kid who likes trees and birds and books.”

  “Stop it, Mom,” I snapped. “I know that already. I just want to get some new clothes.” And I stared stonily out the window as we drove the rest of the way in silence. Why didn’t she understand that everything I was doing was about protecting Botswana Keena, not getting rid of her? This is just what I had to do to survive.

  At the mall, we had a predictably unpleasant time. The stores were bright and loud and smelled like cheap cologne. Squealing teenage girls crowded around stacks of distressed hoodies, and shirtless male models pressured shoppers to buy tiny tank tops and jeans with holes in them. Mom found the models to be “a bit over the top” and told me she’d wait in the car. I tried to move quickly, since the music was hurting my ears, and managed to make it out of the store in one piece, my purchases clutched tightly in a big bag that smelled like the same cheap cologne.

  I tried out my new look at school t
he next day: a distressed, fitted plaid button-down shirt with three-quarter-length sleeves, and flared khaki cargo pants. Shoes I hadn’t figured out yet, but I needed my sneakers for field hockey practice anyway, so I just wore those to save time. The pants felt too tight in the thighs and too loose everywhere else, though the shirt was soft. It’s so flimsy! I thought while adjusting the buttons. This wouldn’t last a second out with the baboons. I supposed it worked though. I looked just like everyone else. The same shirt, same pants, same cookie-cutter teenage person, if a little shorter than the other girls and with a big scar on my arm. World, meet American Keena.

  “You look cute,” Christine said as I settled into my seat in history class that afternoon.

  “Oh…thank you,” I said, blushing a little. Really, thank you, I thought. You wore this exact same thing last week and I copied it. She smiled.

  “You ready for the timed run in field hockey practice today?”

  “No,” I said, still not quite sure I was having an actual, real-life conversation with one of the cool girls. My head felt fuzzy. “I really hate anything that’s timed. I can’t seem to relax.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “I have to do math problems in my head to distract myself.” I laughed.

  “You do? I should try that,” I said. I would do literally anything the same as you, I thought. American Keena needs all the help she can get.

  That afternoon after school, the whole field hockey team lined up on the edge of the field, nervously pacing in the dry, crunchy grass. Compared to the flooding in the Okavango, it felt like the US was in a constant state of drought. The grass was always dry in the summer, never green and lush the way it was in Botswana. I reminded myself it was still alive, underneath. I took a deep breath and looked up to the sky. I didn’t want to be timed, but I wasn’t afraid of the run, despite what I’d said to Christine earlier. I was just happy to be outside, free from my fancy new clothes and back in a T-shirt and shorts. I’d been sitting still all day and it was time to move.