Empress of the World

by Sara Ryan

  I say, “Hey Battle, my teacher said something in class today about discovering artifacts without digging them up out of the ground. Is she some kind of weird archaeological psychic?”

  “Oh, she is the same one! She used that line last year, too.” Battle looks pleased. She continues, “What she’s talking about is a kind of archaeology—I don’t remember the name—where you use metal detectors and other equipment to see what’s in the ground at a site, but you don’t disturb the artifacts.”

  “What’s the point of that?” I ask, disappointed that the explanation isn’t more exotic.

  “Well, if you dig everything up and take it away, it’s not a site any more. There’s no context,” Battle explains in her slow sweet voice.

  “Oh, like a crime scene. If you disturb the body, you won’t be able to solve the murder,” says Isaac, taking his glasses off and rubbing his nose.

  “Yeah, but that seems excessive. I mean, everything I know about archaeology is about people digging things up!” I say.

  “This must be the politically correct kind of archaeology. You don’t cut down the rain forest, so you don’t dig stuff up, either,” Katrina guesses.

  “Speaking of politically correct, my teacher is Mikhail Gorbachev,” says Isaac. “Just kidding. Actually it’s Ralph Nader. No, honestly this time—it’s Richard Nixon, raised from the dead and ready for action!”

  I laugh, but nobody else does. “Who is it really, Isaac?” I ask.

  “Oh, some guy. I forget his name.”

  “So, not that good, huh?” I ask.

  Katrina puts her hands over her mouth to make a megaphone. “Act now! Learn to make the computer obey your every command!”

  “You’re really into computers,” says Isaac, with a note of wonder in his voice.

  “You have a problem with girls being into computers?” Katrina demands.

  “Uh oh, watch it, she’s gonna take you out, man!” says Kevin in his deliberate way.

  Kevin has spent the entire meal up to this point composing. At least, that’s what I assume he’s been doing, although it looks more like he’s making a connect-the-dots version of a Jackson Pollock painting.

  “No, I don’t have a problem with it. I just think computers are boring. I don’t know why anybody’s into them.” Isaac pulls all the cheese off his pizza and stuffs it into his mouth. Yuck.

  “Well, you’re an infidel,” says Katrina, but she doesn’t sound angry any more. She starts explaining to him why he should care about computers, and I turn to Battle and ask, “So, what about your teacher?”

  Battle says, “She’s fine,” as though I’d asked whether or not she was sick.

  “Fine? Just fine? That doesn’t sound very exciting. Are you going to get to study cool stuff, at least?”

  “I like history,” she says. It’s not really an answer, but I don’t seem to know how to ask her the right questions.

  One of the Goth girls walks past our table. She’s wearing an amazing black satin dress with a dark red velvet vest and incredibly high-heeled black leather boots. I smile at her to show my appreciation for the outfit.

  “What the fuck’s so fucking funny, bitch?” she says, and stalks off without waiting for me to reply.

  Battle says, “Don’t let her get to you. The Angst Crows are like that.”

  “Angst Crows?”

  “That’s what I called them last year. They were in Archaeology. All they ever wanted to talk about was burial practices.”

  “Oh, I think we have one of them this year, too. Do they like anybody?”

  “Each other,” says Battle.

  “All I did was smile at her,” I say.

  Battle shrugs. “Some people think everyone wants to screw them over.”

  June 19, 8:30 a.m., Prucher Hall Lobby

  They’re taking us on a Hike today, I guess so that we don’t shrivel up and die from studying too much. I love hiking, but I hate Hikes.

  Katrina looks as though she’s on her way to the electric chair. She is wearing a T-shirt with a smiley face on it, except that the face is frowning, and black leggings with a small white repeating pattern which, up close, is revealed as the word “Fuck” in tiny type.

  “It’s not as bad as it could be, y’all,” says Battle. “They could be making us do one of those nasty trust things where we have to fall into each other’s arms.” She puts a hand to her forehead and pretends to swoon, catching herself right before she loses her balance.

  “But I do trust you guys! I could do that all day! That wouldn’t involve walking giant distances,” says Katrina.

  As soon as we get outside, we see Isaac and Kevin. Isaac has the exact same expression as Katrina. He’s rubbing the lenses of his glasses maniacally with the tail of his shirt. It’s as though he thinks that if he can just get them clean enough, when he puts them back on, he’ll be transported to a place where Hikes are not required. Kevin looks like a page from some hip outdoor gear catalog. He says slowly, “I can’t wait till we’re out in the woods! All these buildings, they drag me down.”

  I look questioningly at the friendly brick facade of Prucher Hall, the only building in evidence. The courtyard that we’re standing in is full of trees. Kevin and I are definitely not from the same planet. Meanwhile, Katrina is glaring and lighting a cigarette.

  “Only you can prevent forest fires,” says Isaac, waggling a finger at her.

  “Or cause them. . . . Hey, now there’s an idea! If the forest were on fire, we wouldn’t have to walk in it, right?” asks Katrina, a demonic gleam coming into her eyes.

  “That would be a Bad Idea,” Battle says. She’s holding her nose again. “You would damage the ecosystem. Plus they would figure out it was you, and then they’d expel you and you’d have to pay a truly enormous fine.”

  “Don’t talk to me about ecosystems. Native Americans burned parts of forests all the time, and it was good for them,” says Katrina.

  “The Native Americans or the forests?” I ask.

  “Both,” Katrina says decisively.

  It appears that Kevin has started to dance a peculiar form of jig. Then I realize that he’s only playing with his Hacky Sack.

  Isaac looks at his watch. “Zero hour,” he says.

  The forest is actually quite small as forests go. It covers one large hill, which we will walk up and back down again for purposes of the Hike. The hill is so thickly covered with pine trees that from a distance it looks downy, like moss. It seems strange to think that there’s enough space between the trees for us all to walk.

  Ms. Fraser has asked us to bring back any signs of human habitation that we find—a sneaky way of getting us to pick up garbage.

  “Carl says this is a waste of time and he doesn’t know why they make us do it. He says it makes sense for botanists and people like that, but not for computer scientists.” Katrina manages to make “botanist” sound like a swear word.

  “Everybody should get outside more. John Cage said that the natural world was more inspiring than any other composer,” says Kevin. Battle smiles at him.

  All I know about John Cage is that he wrote some piece called 4’ 33” , which is four minutes and thirty-three seconds’ worth of silence. We’re always trying to get our conductor to let us do it for one of our concerts.

  We’ve joined up with the rest of the group now, at the foot of the hill. The RA in charge is saying something about being careful because the trail isn’t always smooth, and how it should take a couple of hours each way.

  I’m standing between Isaac and Battle. I edge a little closer to Battle and ask, “So what do you think of hiking?”

  “I love it,” she says, “but not in a crowd like this.”

  “I wish we could just do our own little hike,” I say. I see the two of us walking quietly together in cool green shade, breathing in the scent of pine.

  “Do you want to?”

  “Now?”

  “No, silly, we can’t now. But some other time, do you want to?�
��

  “Yes,” I say. This is the first thing so far that Battle and I like and Katrina doesn’t.

  It’s steep. I can feel my calf muscles working with every step. Eventually, our group splits up in a predictable way: Kevin far ahead, Katrina far behind, Isaac slightly ahead of her, and Battle and I almost in step in the middle.

  I feel guilty about not being back with Katrina, but it’s nice to walk with Battle. There are a lot of other people around, too, of course—the wood-chip-covered trail is wide enough across for six or seven people at a time—but no one else near us that I know. There are several RAs interspersed at various points, but they have stopped pointing out interesting ecological details as the difficulty of the climb has increased.

  Battle doesn’t get flushed, I notice enviously. I see just a few beads of sweat near her temples, near where her hair has started escaping from its ponytail. My own face is, I am sure, the exact color of a beet.

  The trail dips down suddenly. I step too hard, my right foot slips, and the next thing I know, I am on the ground with pain shooting from my ankle.

  Battle is kneeling next to me in an instant. “Are you okay?” she asks.

  An RA appears, anxious and annoyed. “-Don’t try to walk!” he says angrily, as though I showed any signs of doing so. Meanwhile, Battle has started very carefully to unlace my shoe. My ankle is throbbing as though there’s a second heart beating in it.

  “Stop that,” says Isaac, who has also showed up to peer at me. Suddenly I feel like everybody’s science project. “If you take her shoe off, her foot will swell up too big to fit into it and she’ll have a harder time getting back. I’m Red Cross certified in First Aid.”

  “You are?” the RA asks, as though Isaac has just said that he is God. “Can you get her back to the nurse’s office? If I leave, we won’t have enough adults . . .oh, shit, and I have to file an incident log. . . .” His voice trails off.

  “Sure,” says Isaac. “No problem. Where’s your first aid kit?”

  The RA blinks.

  “Where there would be a splint—” Isaac is getting more insistent, “—to immobilize her ankle, so it won’t get worse?”

  As I look at the RA’s face right now, I fully understand the expression “deer in the headlights.” It would be hilarious if my ankle didn’t hurt so much.

  “You could use a couple of branches,” Battle says quietly. “Here.”

  “And attach them with . . .”

  “. . .my jacket?”

  Battle and Isaac start fussing with her jacket, the branches, and my ankle, trying to figure out the best place to secure the splint.

  “You guys, I really don’t think you need to do all this. I’m fine,” I lie.

  “Jesus Christ, what happened to you? I knew this whole hike idea was the spawn of Satan. Are you okay?” Katrina kneels next to me, getting her “Fuck” leggings dirty on the ground.

  “She’s not okay, she’s sprained her ankle. I’m going to get her back to see the nurse,” Isaac says.

  Oh, is that what’s happening?

  “I’m really okay. Just let me stand up,” I say. This is the kind of thing that happens to me all the time: some incredibly embarrassing, entirely stupid accident which reveals that the mere act of walking is apparently too difficult for me to grasp.

  They don’t let me stand up until they’ve finished the splint, and when I do, all the pain comes back, and I almost lose my balance. All three of them reach out for me at the same moment, but Isaac is the closest. He keeps me from falling by grabbing me around the waist and putting one of my arms over his shoulders. We are close enough to the same height that he only has to bend over a little to make a good crutch.

  “Do you want help getting back?” asks Battle.

  “Yeah, we could, like, take turns carrying you or something!” says Katrina.

  “You couldn’t lift me,” I mumble. At the same time, Isaac says, “No, you go on, I think we’ll be okay.”

  My ankle hurts. “Let’s just go,” I say.

  “Make them give you some great painkillers! Then we’ll have a party!” says Katrina.

  Battle is already continuing up the hill, I notice. She turned away from us right after I said that I wanted to go. It’s almost as though my saying that made her angry.

  “Does it feel like you broke any bones?” Isaac asks, as we start awkwardly back down the trail with everyone staring at us.

  I shake my head. “I don’t think so,” I say, “but I haven’t broken any before, so I wouldn’t know. Why are you Red Cross certified, Isaac?”

  Isaac tries to shrug and then remembers that he’s being a crutch. “It’s dumb,” he says. “My parents want me to be a doctor, right? Blah blah blah my son the doctor. And you can’t send your kid to med school when he’s fifteen, so what’s the next best thing?”

  “Oh, I get it. Did you hate it?”

  “No. I really liked it, but I wasn’t about to tell that to the parents. Parents,” he says, as though I should understand immediately what he means.

  After a moment or two, I have an honesty attack. “Actually, I like mine.”

  “You’re lucky,” says Isaac. He sounds almost sad.

  We walk—well, he walks, I limp—in silence for a while, and my mind drifts.

  Why didn’t Isaac want Battle and Katrina to help take me back? It’s obviously Katrina that he has the crush on, so it’s not like he wanted to, like, get me alone or something. Was it some macho boy kind of “I know First Aid and you guys don’t” thing?

  “Do you need to rest?” Isaac asks.

  “No.”

  The nurse failed to give me any painkillers suitable for recreation, but I did get a large number of cold packs, of which Katrina highly approves. “Functional, yet stylish, in a very ‘now’ shade of electric blue!” she says, putting one on her head.

  “Don’t ruin that, she’s going to need it,” warns Battle.

  Katrina brought me extra pillows and candy.

  Battle gave me a flower that she picked at the top of the hill. “Since you didn’t get to see the whole field of them, I thought you should at least have one.”

  “Thanks for coming to see me, you guys,” I say. “I felt like such a moron for falling like that.”

  Katrina says sarcastically, “Yeah, well, we were meaning to speak to you about that, you know, we just don’t want to be seen with someone who’s always getting injured, it’s just so uncool.” She rolls her eyes.

  “I fell off the stage once during a dress rehearsal,” says Battle. “I had all these complicated things to do with my arms, and I completely lost track of where my feet were. Everyone laughed.”

  “Really?” I ask. I can’t imagine Battle ever doing anything ungraceful.

  “Of course, I was five at the time,” she adds with a little smile.

  Before I can start to feel embarrassed again, Katrina starts talking. “You know . . . I bet, Nic, because of what happened to you, they won’t make next year’s group go on a Hike. What a noble sacrifice you made! You should be very proud.”

  After they leave, I write in my notebook.

  isaac = smart, sweet, funny, cute but not too cute, super nice to me. all logic demands that i should have a crush on him.??? . . . i wish i knew the name of that flower.

  June 22, 8:27 p.m., My Room

  It seems like the point of this article on typology is that when archaeologists find pottery shards or whatever, they organize them somehow into different categories.

  What I don’t get is how they know where each one belongs. I mean, say you find this shard that has a pattern of wavy red and white lines. Why would you necessarily say that it has anything to do with a shard that has wavy green and white lines? Maybe the green meant something totally different. Maybe the red ones were only used on special occasions. Or maybe women used the red ones and men used the green ones. I just don’t understand how you decide where something fits.

  I stare at the words on the page until they tu
rn into gibberish.

  Battle had Archaeology last year. She must have learned about typology. Or should I ask Anne? No, she probably won’t have understood it either. Besides, I don’t know where her room is, and if I tried to walk there my ankle would start hurting before I found it. And I bet she’s on the phone with her lifeguard boy anyway.

  Battle’s room is just down the hall. It has a sign on the door which says, “All hope abandon, ye who enter here,” with a picture of a three-headed dog. Battle made the three-headed dog picture on her computer, which of course Katrina was delighted to hear. Two of the heads are the actual heads of her dogs. The third head is the two of them morphed together in some complex electronic way.

  It’s kind of odd that I haven’t seen Battle’s room yet. But she’s only been to mine when she and Katrina came to see me after I hurt my ankle. Mostly the three of us gather in Katrina’s because she always wants to smoke, and Battle and I refuse to have her do it in our rooms.

  I knock on the door. After a moment, Battle opens it. She smiles, and her eyes look even greener than usual. She’s twisted her hair into a bun, which is secured with two pencils.

  “Hi, are you busy?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “Come on in,” she says. “Look at my shrine to Dante and Beatrice!”

  Almost the whole wall behind her desk is covered with pictures of her dogs. The dogs running around in a big manicured yard, the dogs asleep on what must be Battle’s bed back home, the dogs just standing around randomly looking adorable. “I miss my doggies,” she says.

  “I would never have guessed,” I say.

  She smiles. “Do you have a dog?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “I had a goldfish once, but it died. And I guess you could say I have partial custody of my friends’ cat, Frank.”

  Battle’s room is terrifyingly clean. There are no clothes on the floor, the bed is made, there are no empty pop cans or candy bar wrappers. Even her books are in a neat pile on her desk, not scattered throughout the room on every available surface in Katrina’s and my preferred method of organization. Her parents must love her.