Wild Life

by Keena Roberts

  “Hey,” said Lucy.

  “Hey,” said Brooke.

  Brooke slid into the passenger seat next to me and Lucy settled into the back. I switched the radio to AM to try to find the news, and Brooke hunched over her phone, dialing and redialing the same number over and over again with no success.

  The tree-lined suburban streets were deserted as we wound our way through town. The crackle and buzz of the AM radio station felt like a broadcast reaching us from a World War II bunker. Normally crowded intersections were devoid of traffic and no children were playing outside. We were listening as the first tower collapsed. The commentators mentioned a similar attack in Washington, DC, and I thought how strange it was that Brooke and I would be sitting side by side in a Volvo when the world ended. Who would have guessed?

  Brooke’s phone buzzed and she yanked it open.

  “Dad?” she yelled. I wanted to look at her to see if the news was good but forced myself to keep my eyes on the road. You have to get everyone home, I said to myself. One thing at a time, one thing at a time.

  “Is he safe?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Yeah, he’s fine,” Brooke said breathlessly. “You were right; he hadn’t even left for New York yet.” She laughed. “He’s at home. He’s at home and he’ll meet me there.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “That’s really good.” Lucy reached over the seat and squeezed Brooke’s shoulder.

  “I’m really glad your dad is okay,” she said.

  Brooke sighed deeply and let her head fall back against the headrest. Outside, the sun shone brightly and birds sang the way they do on beautiful days in the summertime.

  “Hang on,” Brooke said, her eyes snapping open. “What about your parents? Where are they?”

  “They work downtown in Philly,” I said. “I’ll try to call them as soon as we get home but I’m sure they’re fine. If they can’t get home on the train then they’ll probably go to a friend’s house until the trains start running again. Either way, they’ll let us know.”

  “You’re not worried about them?”

  I glanced at Lucy in the rearview mirror. She shrugged.

  “No, not at all,” I said. “It doesn’t sound like they’re in any danger where they are and I know they’ll try to get home as soon as they can.”

  “I don’t understand how you can be so calm,” Brooke said. “This is all so scary.”

  “Yeah, it is really, really scary,” I said. “But everyone whose safety I can control is fine. I’m getting you home and then we’ll go home and I know that my parents are safe. That’s all I can control.”

  Brooke stared at me silently and for a minute I was back on the lacrosse field wondering if she was going to call me Abu the monkey again.

  “You really are as tough as you look,” she said finally.

  I smiled. “Thanks.”

  We slowed to a stop at the bottom of a delicately manicured driveway about a quarter mile and a million dollars away from my house. Brooke climbed out and grabbed her backpack. A screen door slammed open and a tall man with gray hair leaned out of the house and called her name.

  “Thanks for the ride,” Brooke said.

  “Anytime. I’m glad your dad is okay.” I watched while Brooke ran up the driveway.

  Lucy moved into the front seat and turned up the radio.

  “She seems nice,” Lucy said. “Are you friends?”

  Ten minutes later, Lucy and I were sitting on an old oriental carpet in my family’s living room, watching CNN. Mom and Dad had left a message on the answering machine saying they were fine and making their way home but didn’t know when they’d be back. Outside, the leaves rustled in the late summer breeze and a chipmunk scuttled across the porch. On TV, we watched in silence as the second tower collapsed in a cloud of white dust that looked like it would blanket the whole world. People in Washington, DC, and New York were evacuating and there was talk of the US going to war, though with whom no one was really sure yet. What the commentators did agree upon, though, was that America and Americans were under attack.

  I curled my legs under me and leaned back into the couch. America and Americans are under attack. My country was under attack. My family was under attack. I was under attack. This wasn’t the same thing as being out with the baboons and having a leopard come after one of us, though that was certainly an attack on my Baboon Camp family. And it wasn’t the same as being out with the baboons and having to run away from a lion when I was by myself with Balo the monkey, though that was certainly an attack (of a kind) on me. This was a cosmic reminder that I was part of something bigger than those things, something I had never really thought about before.

  I knew I was American. I’d known it ever since I was a little girl in Amboseli and Mom and Dad told me I had been born in California. I’d known it since Masaku told me I was different from Njaraini and Ma, and every day since then when I’d chatted with Mokupi or helped Mpitsang or Press with something around the camp. I was told over and over again that America was home, even though I was never there long enough for it to feel that way. I had all the trappings of being an American, from the clothes to the language and mannerisms, but actually spent all my time in a world where my identity was both the most and least important thing about me. I didn’t need to be born in Botswana to love the delta as much as Mokupi did, but I would never be Botswanan, and I could never be African. Even beyond tangible differences like the ease with which my parents talked about college or how simple it was to access quality medical care, the most fundamental part of who I was had nothing to do with the places and people I loved and admired. I was not African. I was part of a different team. And I could feel any which way I wanted to about it—whether it be guilty at the privileges that my race and nationality afforded me or embarrassed at how my home country was sometimes regarded in other places in the world—but the fundamental truth remained: I was American.

  My parents finally got home after dark, exhausted and drained. Lucy and I had pulled ourselves away from the TV and done the same things we always did in times of crisis: make a roast chicken for dinner and do our homework. I wanted to be useful, in whatever small way I knew how to be, and the first step in that process was making sure the people around me had enough to eat and drink. It wasn’t until I started putting drops of iodine in the water, though, that I remembered that I didn’t need to purify water in America, that this was a different kind of crisis from the ones I’d faced before. While the world was still coming to grips with what happened in New York, Washington, DC, and rural Pennsylvania, all I could do was keep myself and my family safe. Tomorrow would be another day, with new plans, new information, and new people to help, and I would be ready for it, along with every other American I knew.

  There was also a crisis going on at Baboon Camp that fall, albeit on a much smaller scale. When Dawn and Jim returned to give Thore and Jacinta a break so that they could go home and visit family, Dawn wrote to us that Mokupi had stopped coming to work. Though he often did this, he was only ever gone for a couple of days, and his recent disappearances were stretching into weeks. Dawn and Jim didn’t really need him in order to continue with Dawn’s research, but we were all concerned about Mokupi and wondered where he was.

  Mpitsang had moved back to the small staff village near Xaxaba, but no one from Baboon Camp had seen or talked to him since the fight with Mokupi about the hippo assassination attempt. Dawn went to see him one afternoon to ask where Mokupi was, but Mpitsang just shrugged. They hadn’t spoken in a long while. Though she asked other staff members at Xaxaba, no one seemed to know where Mokupi was. They assumed he had either gone to see his family in Etsha or was in Maun—where, no one could guess. As far as anyone in Xaxaba knew, Mokupi didn’t know anyone in Maun. He had just disappeared.

  From the US, Dad e-mailed our friends at Xaxaba and Delta and told them to keep an eye out for Mokupi. Mokupi’s health had been on a slow but steady decline in recent years and though we couldn’t be sure it was HIV or AIDS
, we were worried it might be. If he was missing, then it was also likely he wasn’t receiving any kind of medical treatment or eating well enough for any medication to be effective. Not that he took medication from doctors anyway. Even getting him to take an aspirin for a headache was a challenge. He distrusted everything about the medication we brought with us from the US and didn’t think anything from another country could address his health.

  As the Baboon Camp family searched for Mokupi, and America and the world searched for meaning after the 9/11 attacks, my educational career plodded along. I began applying to colleges and took a road trip with Dad up the East Coast over one unseasonably cold weekend in October, stopping at Princeton, Columbia, Yale, Brown, and Harvard. Dad was pushing hard for Harvard, his alma mater, and as we drove around New England, he discussed the pros and cons of various Ivy League institutions, mostly to himself, as I stared out the window and watched the snow collect on the lampposts.

  I didn’t really care where I went to college. I went through the motions of course, in the official way that one does with important life decisions, but it seemed so insignificant when there were much bigger things going on in the world, like leopard attacks, terrorist attacks, and Mokupi. Why should I worry about which university said it was better than the others? They all seemed basically the same to me, except for having different reasons why I didn’t want to go there: At Brown, I watched the field hockey team struggle to run up an incredibly steep hill and decided Brown was not the place for me. There weren’t enough trees at Yale, it was too loud at Harvard, and at Columbia our tour guide was shocked when he asked me if I wanted to be a Columbia University lion and I said, “No, I hate lions.” Everything was too big and too crowded and so very far away from the quiet trees and wind of the places I loved. How could I ever survive in any of these places for four years? And what was the point? More work and all for what? More school and more work forever and ever and always? None of it would get me back to where I wanted to be. The idea gave me a headache.

  I took the SATs. Then, because everyone at school was doing it and Mom thought she’d be a Bad Parent if she didn’t follow along, I got an SAT tutor and took them again. My scores stayed exactly the same, proving my point that the whole process was a waste of time. At school, people talked to me even less than usual. College was the only thing on anyone’s minds, and it seemed as though everyone I knew was either bragging about where they were applying or being so secretive about it that you’d think they were hiding nuclear codes in their lockers. At lunch and in study hall, my classmates clustered in small groups, clutching glossy college brochures in their hands and eyeing each other suspiciously. All I did was study. I knew I wasn’t as naturally smart as people like Meghan and Nat, but no one worked as hard as I did. Before school, during school, after school, I was either running, studying, or sleeping.

  I decided to apply early to Harvard. I didn’t expect to get in, but I thought I might as well aim for the top and then go from there. I wasn’t feeling very emotionally invested in the process, but it seemed to make my parents happy. I just wanted the application to be done and submitted so I could have some free time back; it had been weeks since I’d read a book, and not being able to run after field hockey practice made me jumpy and restless. My mind was wandering even more than usual and every pen in my backpack had been chewed to pieces.

  Worst of all, we still hadn’t found Mokupi.

  CHAPTER 21

  The Other Spot at Harvard

  Early-decision applications were due on a Thursday, and on Friday morning, I walked into school feeling lighter than I had in a long time. Thank goodness that mess was finished! Now I just had to wait a few weeks to see if I got in. I very much hoped that I did, if only because it meant I wouldn’t have to do all the work of applying anywhere else.

  Since I was a senior, I was allowed to leave campus during my free periods. I was late that Friday morning because I’d gone to 7-Eleven to get coffee with a girl in my English class named Natalie, whom I was only getting to know senior year. I liked that she dyed her hair and that she agreed with me that Heart of Darkness wasn’t necessarily a metaphor for human nature—it could also just be a story about a very stupid person who didn’t know how to travel in the Congo. Natalie wore heavy black motorcycle boots and didn’t laugh at me when I called it “a coffee” the way British people did. As the weeks passed, it became a tradition for us to go to 7-Eleven for a coffee on Fridays before English.

  I dropped into a plastic chair in the cafeteria and slung my backpack onto the table, where it landed in its usual cloud of dust. Natalie sat down next to me and propped her heavy boots up on a chair. Ever since we started hanging out I had been dying to know what it felt like to walk in them. I imagined it would be like wading through the thick sand on White Island, but Natalie didn’t seem to mind.

  “So did you get your applications in?” a voice said. I looked up from rummaging through my backpack to see a couple of girls from my grade settle into the seats across the table from us. Two of the girls I knew from my math class, and the third was Jessica, the girl who’d made fun of my hair at the bar mitzvah party a hundred years before. They were all friends with Natalie. Jessica was generally a pretty grouchy person, but this morning she seemed even more pissed off than usual.

  “I know you got your application done,” Jessica said, looking at me. “Where did you apply? Or is it a secret?”

  “It’s not a secret,” I said. “I applied to Harvard.” Jessica snorted.

  “I knew you would,” she said. “And you’ll probably get in too. It’s so unfair.”

  “How is that unfair?” I said. “You could have applied there too. Anyone can apply anywhere they want.”

  “You’re so fucking naive,” Jessica said. “You know colleges won’t take more than a couple of people from each school and it’s completely unfair that you’re taking one of the spots.”

  She didn’t mention the other spot, and neither did I. We all knew who the first spot at Harvard was going to, and that was Meghan. Meghan had been destined for perfection since the day I met her in first grade and she got to play April O’Neil in Ninja Turtles at recess, and it was only natural that she would graduate as senior class president and go on to Harvard. It was fate. It was destiny. No one questioned it. This idea of “the other spot at Harvard” was a new one though, that had just started swirling around the senior class after someone came up with the idea that the best universities only took two students from any school’s senior class. It was widely assumed that “the other spot at Harvard” would go to Nat or one of the other boys from the AP Physics class who was also a concert violinist or a Junior Olympic swimmer or something else impressive. The idea that someone else might have the audacity to even apply for one of these spots was somehow perceived as an insult to the most deserving among us. And it was an idea I thought was stupid.

  “How is that naive?” I said. “I work really hard for my grades. Why shouldn’t I get the same shot as anyone else?” Jessica rolled her eyes.

  “You don’t deserve to go to Harvard,” she said. “We all know it. You have an unfair hook that no one else has and you’re trying to use it to get something you haven’t earned.”

  “Excuse me?” I said, my voice raising. Natalie put her hand on my leg under the table, but instead of calming me down, it made me even angrier. I didn’t care that she was trying to be nice; I could defend myself just fine.

  “You heard me,” Jessica said. “You have this weird childhood that no one else had and you’re going to talk about it in your college application and try to seem all different and special and better than the rest of us. It’s like saying, ‘Hey, I’m a weirdo circus freak, let me in to Harvard and I’ll be your diversity.’ It’s bullshit.”

  “It’s not bullshit,” I said, making a conscious effort to steady my voice. “My childhood is not weird and I am not a circus freak. That’s just me. That’s just my life.”

  “Whatever,” Jessica s
aid. “You don’t deserve to go there. You don’t even deserve to apply there. We all think so. You’ll just follow Meghan around and bother her like you’ve been bothering her since first grade, since you can’t make friends on your own. I bet she hopes you don’t get in, just like the rest of us.”

  “Fuck off, Jessica,” Natalie said.

  My breath caught in the back of my throat and the world telescoped down into the single pinprick that was Jessica’s face, pale and pinched under her cascading chestnut hair that was always perfectly styled and never bleached by the sun. I blinked once, twice, and a third time, as Jessica turned away and carried on her conversation with her friends, completely ignoring me now that she’d said her piece about me and my future. Behind her, the windows looked out onto the quad between the Upper and Middle Schools, and across the lawn I saw the windowsill where I used to sit and read my dragon books. It was empty, but I knew that if I closed my eyes I could feel the cold aluminum under my legs and smell the swish of the pages. How was this conversation even happening? People like Jessica and the boys on the prank phone calls had spent years teasing me about my childhood and Baboon Camp and now here she was, in my face, resenting me for having it because she said it gave me an unfair advantage? What new nonsensical reality was this?

  The bell rang and I snapped out of my reverie. Natalie looked at me questioningly.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah, fine,” I said, feeling anything but fine. I cleared my throat and focused on picking up my coffee cup and walking out of the cafeteria, one foot in front of the other. Stonily, I blinked the tears out of the corners of my eyes and clenched my teeth. This was not the time—and definitely not the place—to fall apart. I followed Natalie down the hall to the English wing, absently sidestepping other students and keeping my eyes glued on the ground, the same way I did when I was doing a focal follow on one of the baboons. No one was better at writing and walking than I was, though the scars on my shins were evidence of the occasional tumble into warthog holes.