Gifted at walking through melapo
In the classroom, I dropped into my usual seat in the back of the room, strategically placed along the windows so I could watch the squirrels in the trees and in the back row so no one could see the dragons I doodled all over my notebook. Some things were best kept private.
“Keena!” Meghan said, settling into the desk next to me in a cloud of Bath & Body Works. “Did you get your application in? Aren’t you glad it’s over?” I looked at her blankly, unsure of how to respond. Was this the girl I’d known since first grade, the desk friend who gave me Calvin and Hobbes books for my birthday and knew I liked owls? Or was Jessica right that this was the queen of the school and senior class president, who didn’t want me to get into Harvard because she thought I didn’t deserve to be there? I turned away and pretended to be writing in my planner. It was too risky to trust her. Meghan frowned and gave me an odd look, but the bell rang and saved me from having to respond. All I have to do is avoid her for the rest of my life, I thought. Or at least until early-decision results come out in December.
As it turned out, Meghan and I were the only two students who applied to Harvard from our senior class. Once the rest of our classmates figured out it was just us and no one else, the conversation shifted from being about whether I even deserved to apply to how unfair it would be if I actually got in. Nat had chosen to apply early decision to Yale, which people seemed to think was fair but unfortunate, since he really should have been the other Harvard applicant along with Meghan. All attention was on the two of us, and it felt like the whole class was waiting to see what happened. What Meghan herself thought, I didn’t know, as I was doing my best to avoid her.
Inevitably, and perhaps not surprisingly, I had another doctor’s appointment scheduled for the week before the early-decision results were supposed to be e-mailed to us. I’d been finding my mouth guard very painful to wear during field hockey season that fall, and we finally figured out that my wisdom teeth were coming in and squeezing my jaw in a way that made the mouth guard cut into my gums. When I spat out a wad of blood after our final game of the season, Mom said it was time we finally dealt with the problem.
I spent the weekend after my operation lying on the couch watching nature documentaries and trying to eat soup through a straw. It turned out that all four of my wisdom teeth had been coming in sideways and the operation had taken much longer than it usually did. I woke up twice, and both times had to be put back under with laughing gas. My jaw throbbed and I could barely open my mouth wide enough to poke the straw through.
When I finally made it back to school on the day early-decision notifications were coming out, my face was still swollen to an unrecognizable degree and my jaw ached horribly. I found myself welcoming the pain since it distracted me from the roiling anxiety in my stomach. Now that my classmates had raised the stakes, I wanted to get into Harvard. I really did. I was proud of how hard I’d worked, and thought I had as much a right to go to Harvard as anyone else. As much as I tried to pretend it didn’t bother me, the stares and whispers were really getting to me. I just wanted it to be over.
I was dozing in my usual corner of the library near the oak trees when I heard cheers coming from the row of computers by the librarian’s desk.
“You did it!” Jessica’s voice squealed. I sighed. Meghan must have gotten her acceptance e-mail. “You must be so thrilled,” Jessica went on, all syrupy sweet in a way that even I—with my stilted social skills—could tell was insincere. “You really deserve it.” Such a suck-up, I thought. But Meghan did deserve it. She had earned her place. She was smart and hardworking and had been since first grade with her perfect handwriting and perfect hair ribbons. I sighed again. If dragons really do exist, now would be a great time for one to show up and eat me, I thought.
I rose stiffly to my feet and tried cracking my jaw, which was a mistake and sent me staggering against the bookshelf in a wave of pain.
“Are you okay?” Meghan asked. She knew where my library corner was, even though she never bothered me there.
“Yeah,” I said, as I brushed a tear from the side of my puffy and misshapen face. “You got in, huh?”
“Yes.”
“That’s really awesome. I’m so happy for you.” I gave her an awkward hug, breathing in the Bath & Body Works. She even smells perfect.
“Your turn,” she said.
“Do I have to?”
“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” she said. “What if it’s good news?”
“Mmph.”
I followed Meghan to the row of computers, where Jessica stood with her arms crossed, already glaring at me. I sat down on a blue plastic chair and opened my e-mail inbox. There it sat, one new e-mail, black and unopened, from the Harvard University Admissions Office. Blood pounded in my ears and I tried to think about grass, sand, and monkeys, swords and princesses and pirate queens, boats and crocodiles and cold beers. Quiet trees, soft wind, and birds flying home at sunset. Don’t be scared, I said to myself. You are not in danger and nothing is attacking you. There is nothing scary here. I clicked the e-mail.
“Dear Applicant,” it read. “We are delighted to inform you…” I coughed out a laugh. Was this a joke? Meghan squealed and hugged me around my shoulders.
“You did it!” she said. My hands shook and my face pounded. I squinted at the screen. I didn’t even remember what the rest of the e-mail said. Carefully, I wiped more tears off my swollen cheeks and laughed again.
“I guess so,” I said.
“I should say congratulations,” Jessica said. “But you don’t deserve it.”
“Honestly, what is your problem?” I said, Meghan’s hand still on my shoulder. “Why do you care where I go to school? It’s not like you even wanted to go to Harvard; you applied early to Georgetown. And you got in! This has literally nothing to do with you.” Jessica shrugged.
“No, it doesn’t,” she said. “I just think it’s bullshit that Harvard let you in because of how you grew up. Your parents took you somewhere weird and you lived there, but it’s not like you actually DID anything yourself.” Never did anything? I should have spent more time at school talking about what I did in Baboon Camp. Maybe then at least if she still didn’t like me, she might have the decency to be scared of me. Did she even know how fast I could gut a fish?
“Our grades are exactly the same,” Meghan said quietly. “Also, shut up.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Thanks, but I don’t need your help. I can take care of myself.”
“I know you can; it’s just so rare I feel like being a bitch to someone.” Meghan had never said anything like that in her entire life.
I laughed aloud. “Anyway, congratulations,” Jessica said, picking up her backpack to go. “Enjoy a whole new school where everyone thinks you’re a freak and you have no friends.”
“Well, at least in a few months we’ll never have to see her again,” Meghan said as Jessica walked away, already texting on her cell phone. “And where no one knows you used to be known as Abu the monkey.” I jerked my head up, causing another spasm of pain to reverberate through my jaw.
“You knew about that?” I asked.
“Everyone knows about that,” Meghan said. I groaned, and only partly because of my jaw.
“Hey,” she said. “At least with your face like this you look more like the genie than Abu.”
I shoved her away gently while she laughed, remembering that this was still the girl I’d known since we were six years old.
“Shut up, Harvard,” I said.
CHAPTER 22
A Bear Just Doing His Bear Thing
Six weeks after I graduated from high school, I found myself sitting cross-legged on the floor of a freshman dormitory at Harvard, being asked a series of questions about how comfortable I was in the wilderness. We hadn’t gone back to Baboon Camp that summer since my parents had work to do at the university, and they claimed that I had to spend all my free time getting ready for col
lege, which just meant putting all my clothes in a box, then pacing my room and worrying about how much everyone at college would dislike me. My entire senior year had been hijacked by the drama around my admission to Harvard and it felt like that had destroyed any progress that I had made trying to fit in. Even though Meghan promised we’d still be friends when we got to school, I wasn’t sure I entirely believed her.
I’d spent all of high school trying to mold myself into this image of what I thought an American girl should be, only to end up more alone and confused than before about who I actually was and what was important to me. Botswana Keena wasn’t safe in America, and American Keena was disliked and lonely, so what was I supposed to do now? Go to college and remake myself again? Run away to a mountain to live on acorns and talk to the squirrels? That summer, I lost my appetite completely, drank gallons of Diet Coke (it was so easy to get in America!), and paced and paced and paced.
Among the tsunami of orientation materials I received before college was a pamphlet for something called the First-Year Outdoor Program, or FOP. FOP was a weeklong hiking and canoeing trip in Maine that was designed to bring groups of incoming freshmen together, to get to know each other before school started by bonding in the wilderness. I’d never been to Maine before but liked the idea of being outside for school. I immediately signed up for the program and chose the most difficult trip they offered: ten miles a day of rigorous hiking and canoeing. Just the thought of all that physical activity quieted my mind, though I tried not to think about the fact that there would be other students on the trip too. If we were hiking all day, how much talking could we really do? Maybe I’d be safe if they were all too exhausted to ask me questions about who I was and where I came from, since I had no idea how I would even begin to answer them.
Two minutes into my orientation day conversation with a Harvard upperclassman, however, I knew I was in trouble. This guy was way too cheery for 8 a.m. on a hot August morning and wanted to know every last little thing about me—and not just my medical history and whether I was okay with eating peanut butter. He wanted to know what I thought and felt and hoped to get out of this outdoor experience and whether I expected to be a changed person on the other side of it.
“Not really,” I said. My throat was dry and my head swirled with the realities of actually being on a college campus and talking to an upperclassman. The buildings were unnaturally huge and it was very loud. I hunched my shoulders and crossed my arms, trying to hide my sweaty palms against my T-shirt. Why was it so sticky in Boston in the summer? It was hot in Botswana but never a wet heat like this. I couldn’t breathe. The upperclassman, who was to be one of the leaders on my hiking trip, flipped to a new page on his clipboard and looked at me eagerly.
“So no dietary restrictions and no expectations. Okay! Let’s talk about the trip itself. We’ll be gone for a full week, and hiking or canoeing all day every day. Do you have any concerns about the level of physical activity?”
“You mean walking all day with a backpack? No, not at all,” I said. My backpack usually held a radio and test tubes for collecting baboon fur and blood, but at least this was still familiar territory. The boy made a note on his clipboard.
“Great! What about sleeping in a tent? Does that concern you at all?”
“I’ve been sleeping in a tent for ten years,” I said.
“Great! Wait—what?” he said. “Hang on, did you say ten years? In a tent?”
“Yeah. I live in a camp, and we use tents for our rooms.”
“And you’ve been living there for ten years?”
I frowned. Was he not listening to me? “Yeah.”
“Where? I don’t think there’s anywhere in America you can do that.”
“I wasn’t in America; I was in Africa. A place called the Okavango Delta in Botswana.”
He blinked. “What were you doing in Botswana?”
“My parents are primatologists. They study the evolution of social communication in nonhuman primates. I grew up in their research camp in a game reserve in Botswana.”
“Like…among the animals? Were there lions and tigers and monkeys there?”
“Well, yeah, of course there were, but no tigers. Tigers don’t live anywhere in Africa; they live in Asia,” I said. This conversation was getting weird. “It was a game reserve so there were lions and elephants, and hippos and giraffes, and zebras too. And yes, a lot of monkeys—baboons specifically.”
“And you were just there. With the animals. Just wandering around.”
“Yes.” For a long minute he did nothing but stare at me, and I fidgeted. Why did people always react so strongly to this stuff? At least people in high school already knew my story. Now that I was in a new place I’d have to tell my story over and over again until it was just something people knew about me. I wasn’t really looking forward to it either, especially when it was inevitably followed by questions like whether I rode elephants or kept monkeys as pets. Why did people always ask me that? It was insane to keep a monkey as a pet; everyone knew that. The boy glanced down at his clipboard.
“So if I asked you if you were scared about running into any animals the answer would be a ‘no,’ right?”
“Right,” I said. “Are there animals in Maine I’m supposed to be scared of?”
“Well, there’s…bears, I guess,” he said. “People are usually pretty scared of bears.”
“How come?”
He shook his head and smiled, still staring at me. I wished he would stop. “Because they’re bears? And people are usually pretty scared of bears? I thought that was kind of obvious.”
“Oh,” I said and shrugged, trying to act nonchalant and regain control of this conversation that had rapidly moved into uncomfortable territory. “Well, no, I’m not scared of bears. Or any other animal in Maine. So I think I’ll be fine.”
“And you picked a Level C trip, the hardest one.”
“I had to,” I said. “You didn’t have a Jurassic Park level.”
He laughed again and shook his head. “I have six other campers I need to talk to but I want to come back to this Botswana thing,” he said. “I need to know everything about you now.” Damn it. That’s exactly what I was hoping to avoid. I laughed nervously.
“Okay,” I said. “But you’ve already kind of heard it all.”
“No way. This is too cool. But you can tell me more about it on the trip.”
I retreated into the common room my group was using to store our gear and took a seat in the corner, my back pressed against the wall. We were going to “camp out” in the common room in our sleeping bags before taking a bus to the trail the next morning. The other campers swirled around the room making small talk before going to sleep, and as I watched them my heart started to race. They were all so tall and looked so mature and confident. Weren’t they as scared as I was? Would they like me when they knew who I was, or would they think I was weird and uncivilized like everyone in high school did? I curled into a tighter ball and rubbed the scar on my elbow. I can’t hide forever, I thought. And they’ll all find out about me soon enough. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and blocked out the conversations around me. Quiet is a good place to start, I thought.
My usual hiking buddies
I let my mind wander and found myself high above the clouds, walking into the castle in my head. I hadn’t been there in years, not since I was the girl sitting in the windowsill at school reading my book about dragons. Surprised it was still there, I pushed open the door and found the inside of the castle just as warm and inviting as it always had been. And full of some familiar faces. Laurana Kanan the elf princess was there, as was Lessa the dragonrider of Pern. Captain Nancy Blackett was there too, of course, and had a new friend by her side: my buddy Domino the baboon, the feistiest little monkey in the whole Okavango Delta.
“Hello, Keena,” Captain Nancy Blackett said. “Where have you been? We’ve been waiting for you.”
I laughed a little and a couple of the other campers
in the common room looked at me questioningly.
“Sorry,” I said and closed my eyes again. I was dizzy with relief and thought I might really be going out of my mind. They were still there! All of them! Even after I put my books away and told myself I couldn’t be or want or have those things! The castle was still there, and so were my heroines, princesses and warriors and baboons, all together. I wiped my hand across my eyes and sniffed, still giggling to myself. If they were still there, then that meant that Botswana Keena was still there too. All I needed to do to find her again was close my eyes and go to the castle in my head. Suddenly, this trip seemed like a piece of cake as long as I had Botswana Keena with me again, Pirate Queen of the Okavango Delta. She wasn’t scared of anything—not even Harvard freshmen.
We spent a hot, stuffy night in the dorm room, which reeked like teenage boys by the time we woke up in the morning. We gathered up our packs, and our trip leader, the boy whose name I learned was Andy, divvied up the group camping supplies among us. When he suggested it might be a good idea for the boys to carry more because they were bigger, I made sure that he saw me packing my backpack with just as much gear as the boys were carrying. No one was going to treat me any differently just because I was a girl. I could do so much more than these boys could anyway. They looked so nervous!
We piled onto a school bus to head to Maine and I slid into a seat by the window. A girl with curly dark hair paused next to my seat and then asked if she could sit with me.
“Sure,” I said, making room. She looked pale and I patted the seat to seem more welcoming. She sat down and gestured with a brown paper bag clutched tightly in her hand.
“In case I throw up,” she said.
“That’s…one way to introduce yourself,” I said. “Are you worrying about getting carsick or about the trip?”
Wild Life Page 26