“Twelfth. She saw me?”
“Same. Tiana, too, so that should be fun.”
“Okay, but she saw me?”
Kira spit her gum out into a napkin, unwrapped another piece, and went to work on it. “I’d offer you some,” she said, “but it’s nicotine. Tastes disgusting. Don’t worry about Tiana. She’s all upspeak, no action.”
Now I smiled. Kira tried to blow an unsuccessful bubble, but Nicorette is not for playing around. So many kids I lived with used that gum. No smoking in the houses. I leaned against a tree beside hers. One of us looked pulled from central casting to star as Pissed-Off Foster Kid on an especially touching episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. As per usual, it was not me.
A group of younger boys ran past, screaming and using sticks like swords, and one of them waved at Kira as a man came running after them, yelling, “Boys! We’ve talked about this!” Kira rolled her eyes.
“My brother. Freshman and instantly popular. You have brothers? Sisters?”
I’ve answered this question hundreds of times, always without thinking, straight-up honest. Foster care. I never lie to new people. Lets people show me right away if they’re going to be dicks about it, or maybe they’ll be nice, though it doesn’t matter anyway when I leave halfway through the year. So I was shocked when I heard myself say instead, “Just me. I’m living with my aunt. She made me come to this.”
What am I doing?
“My mom and dad made me, too,” she said, looking past me to the bouncy houses and food trucks. “We moved here last year from Los Angeles, and they are still shocked—shocked, I tell you—that starting a brand-new high school as a junior hasn’t made me the most popular and well-loved student in a school full of people who’ve grown up together on a damn island and have known each other since kindergarten. They’re baffled.”
“Well,” I said, liking her more every minute, “you need to understand, this picnic is the answer.”
She chewed her gum, turned right to me, and smiled. “Nothing like carnival popcorn and egg-and-spoon races to create lifelong bonds of friendship with a bunch of idiots who would rather be hiding in the bathroom vaping and getting drunk at eleven a.m.”
One more year. Just nine more months of school. Two hundred ten days.
That’s a lot of days.
“Aren’t there any sober non-vapers?” I sighed.
“I mean, in the world at large? Or…” She unwrapped another piece of gum. “Speak of the devil,” she said. I followed her gaze.
Sean.
He came walking to us, across the field, in jeans and a faded Yosemite Valley T-shirt. Still those arms and eyes, dark and directed right at mine even while he hugged Kira hello. “Muiriel?”
“What the…,” Kira said. “You’ve lived here five minutes. How do you know Sean?”
“We work together,” Sean said. “Muiriel, I figured you ferried from the city—do you live here?”
“You what together?” Kira said. “Five minutes and you know Sean and you have a job?”
I could not look directly at him. “I’m highly motivated,” I said.
“And making some powerful-ass vision boards?” Kira shook her head. “Don’t ever let me introduce you to my parents.”
“Kira, how’s your summer?” Sean asked. God, this guy was so…sunny? Genuinely cheerful. Or maybe I’ve just been living with sad, scared kids for so long I’ve lost the metric of normal emotion, and now baseline happy looks like a person living in a perpetual surprise party. Ice cream! Sunshine! Hey, I know you!
“Living the dream, schlepping toast and coffee,” Kira chirped, and to me she said, “Explain the work situation.”
“Salishwood,” Sean and I said in unison.
“I saw the flyer at Blackbird,” I told Kira. “I’ve only worked one day.”
“Your first day was the best day I’ve had all summer,” Sean said. “Jason was the worst, and Natan is…”
“Worse?” I offered.
“Exactly. Thank God you’re there.” He smiled. “And here—when did you move? You’re going to school? Please tell me you’re a senior.”
Kira watched this exchange, nodding through her gum chewing. “She’s with us,” she said. “Class of Get the Hell off This Island.”
“I don’t want the hell off,” he said.
“You do,” Kira said. “You want to live on a mountain in a Bob Ross cabin and, like, write poems about the sunrise. Don’t lie to yourself.”
“I could build a cabin here, and I don’t write poems—they’re called sonnets,” he said. “Muiriel, do you like it so far? Want the hell off yet?”
“Not yet,” I said, in a voice thinner and three octaves higher than my own. Jesus.
“Good,” Sean said. “Please don’t ever leave. Being alone with Natan every day was a nightmare. And the kids loved you.”
“Sean-y!” A laughing voice pierced the crowd. “We need you!”
The three of us turned to see Tiana—of course, because that’s how school goes for me—surrounded by a group of kids our age, the girls’ long arms beckoning frantically for Sean to Come on! Come here! All of them admittedly beautiful, cute shorts and blouses, shining hair, perfect teeth. I ran my tongue over my own.
Not crooked, exactly, not like a jack-o’-lantern, and, yes, immaculately clean—but definitely not perfect. Braces, like phones and nonutilitarian clothing, are not necessities. They are luxuries I had no need for, no access to even if I did want them. It’s possible to remain alive without straight teeth and stylish outfits. Alive is all that matters.
Still.
I felt my clothes on me. I was dressed, as always, in the colors of a bruise: blue, black, gray. My wardrobe was made almost entirely of things found at Goodwill or hospice thrift shops, which I take a needle and thread to, Pretty in Pink–style, so everything more or less fits me. Fashionwise, everything I wear safely represents the last half of this decade, a few splurges from Target once in a while, just neutral enough to not draw attention from mean kids at school. My face, my body, my wardrobe all perfectly nondescript, and all I had.
But right then, for maybe the first time ever, I wished I had more. Or something different.
Sean kind of grimaced at the girls’ calls. He hugged Kira goodbye. “See you at Blackbird. And, Muiriel? I don’t really write sonnets. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Or poetry in general. See you Monday.”
Is he nervous?
“Sure thing, Seany,” Kira said, snapping her gum. He ducked his head a little, and we watched him walk back into the crowd. “Don’t hold it against him,” she said. “His mom is friends with Tiana’s mom. And mine. Small island. Also, he’s too nice for his own good. He’s the only guy in the world who’s super popular for not being a dick, and he’s completely oblivious—I mean, can’t he see those people are assholes to anyone who’s not in with them who’s not him? I think he thinks he can make them be nicer; he’s the resident life coach or some shit. But sincere—I mean, he means it, he just can’t see they’ll never change. Douchebags gonna douche. Sean is kind of the one thing everyone can agree on; he’s friends with everyone: the jocks, the stoners, even those basic bitches there, and he tutors the special ed kids….He’s Ferris Bueller without the narcissism.”
Not friends with Natan, I thought. Good to know he had some kind of line. I watched him laugh with the girls. In my experience, both extreme kindness and hyper assholery in people are almost always born of tragedy. Something happened to this kid.
Right on cue:
“His dad died when we were ten,” Kira said.
Knew it. God, how awful.
“He was a ranger, the dad. Like a…forest ranger? National park–type deal, wore the hat and everything.”
Well. That explained Sean’s love of the forest. Joellen would say, He comes r
ightly by it.
“Everybody loves him,” Kira said.
“Oh.” Including you?
“Except me. I mean, yes, I love him, but I’ve known him since I was little. He’s a less annoying second brother.”
Thank God. “Wait. Didn’t you just move here?”
She unwrapped more gum. “My mom’s family has lived on the island since my grandparents’ parents. Same house, the next generation moves in when the one before it dies. We’ve been in LA since I was born, but we’ve spent every summer of our lives here. Grandma died last year, so now here we are.”
Four generations. One island. One house. One family. Unimaginable.
“Why don’t you ask Sean to get Tiana off your back?”
“No,” she said, fast. “Not his problem.”
“Sorry—”
She shook her head. “It’s fine. Just don’t need him in it making it worse. It’s fine.”
“Got it.” Not my business. My own rule.
Someone in the crowd sent a beach ball flying. “This thing’s been happening since 1945,” Kira said.
“Yeah,” I said, looking at my watch.
“No,” she laughed, tipping her head at the mayhem of kids. “This. When the war ended and the internment camps closed, some of the families came back, their kids still school age, and the teachers thought the white students should get reacquainted with their Japanese pals who were back from prison before the school year started. Then they just kept doing it every year, so now it’s a tradition. I bet not a single one of these people knows how it started. Or would give a shit if they did.”
Nearly everyone on the field was white.
She was right. Why had Francine not told me? And why did every high school history class I took act like the internment never happened? Oh, Wikipedia—please don’t end up being the vital core of my education.
We stood for a while, watching the littlest kids try to fly a kite in no wind, me wishing I could think of something not stupid to say.
“I made that flyer,” Kira said. “The one for Salishwood.”
I looked at her. “You did not.” But there they were; the pine boughs from the paper, across her shoulders.
She drew the flyer. She drew the ink on her own body.
“Oh, Kira,” I said. “The ferry cookies.” No wonder they were so perfect.
She shrugged. “More where they came from.” Tiana’s laugh rang from the crowd. I tried to keep my burgeoning hatred at bay. A smaller girl, just as loud, also pretty, was buzzing near Tiana’s side, laughing at something Sean said, trying to wrestle him into a selfie.
“Tiana and Katrina,” Kira said. “Even their names suck. They share half a brain and a third of one personality, so I just Frankenstein them as one: Katiana.” She spit her gum once more into a wrapper.
“Okay,” I said, “so what happened to her?”
“Who?”
“Tiana. Someone die? Do her parents beat her up? Does she have a rare blood disease? Is she homeless?”
Kira’s eyes were wide. “Uh…not that I know of.”
“Because what’s making her be like that?”
The girls tossed some guy’s hat in the air and scrambled to take pictures of their own cleverness.
“Or,” Kira said, “maybe her parents are fine, her life is great, and she’s just awful because she can be.”
Joellen always reminds me that mean kids who seem to have perfect lives may very likely be enduring some unseen tragedy. Which is obviously true of anyone, everyone has sadness they don’t go around blabbing about. But my sympathy has worn thin, because the meanest kids I’ve encountered in the nearly twenty schools I’ve attended in my life were never us. Kids in foster care aren’t having the greatest time in life, but we are never afforded leeway to be assholes; we are expected to be perfect every goddamn day or we’re instantly and indelibly labeled out loud and in our files: Trouble. No longer people. We are problems. Kira wasn’t wrong. It seemed equally as likely to me that at least some kids like Tiana have known, instead of unseen tragedy, nothing but comfort and safety their whole lives, and they simply feel entitled to hold on to their flimsy self-esteem and high school social status by humiliating anyone they feel superior to. It’s not like they’ll get kicked out of their house for run-of-the-mill bullying. In fact, bullies’ parents typically roll up to the school to defend their unsavory offspring, no matter what. Makes it pointless to ever ask for help from an adult.
“I don’t know,” Kira sighed. “I’m trying to do better with…people.”
I watched Sean make his way among the crowd. “What’d they do?” I asked. “Katiana?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. Nothing I haven’t done to myself.”
Interesting.
She pulled her phone from a black backpack at her feet. “Well. Back down in the mines. That toast isn’t going to butter itself.” She held up her hand in a sort of wave and walked through the trees to the road, where she stopped and turned.
“Muiriel?”
“Yeah?”
“Boys your thing?” she asked, matter-of-fact.
“Yeah.”
“Because he likes you. Sean.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
I tried not to smile. “Okay.”
She turned and kept walking.
“Hey,” I called. “Do you take the bus to school?”
“I walk.”
All the best people do.
“Do you want— Could I walk with you? On the first day?”
She faced me and walked backward. “What’s your number? I’ll text you.”
“Don’t have one.”
She stopped. “Don’t have what?”
“A number. No phone.”
A car passed.
“Okay, just come to Blackbird later, we’ll figure it out.”
“All right.”
“Muiriel?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I call you Muir?”
“Sure. Yes.”
She walked away, down the street and to the water, back to Blackbird, and yelled to me, without turning around, “Not having a phone is fucking weird.”
It was that, more than anything, that made me want to be her friend.
THE NEXT THREE WEEKS became a routine of sitting and reading at Blackbird before my shifts at Salishwood. Kira brought secret free toast with jam to my window seat. “Until they raise the minimum wage, I’ll take it in toast,” she said, and pretended to wipe the table while we talked.
“How’s the woods?” she asked every time.
“Woody. How’s the math?”
“Mathy.”
She was spending her summer afternoons with a math tutor, trying to get through algebra, let alone geometry or precalculus, before graduation. “My parents are horrified by the fact I may not get into college because of it, and I keep telling them to calm down, because I’m majoring in art, so I’ll be fine.”
I noticed a big square bandage on her shoulder.
“Nicotine patch,” she moaned. “Gum’s giving me TMJ.”
“Maybe because you chew fifteen pieces at once?”
She sighed. “Maybe.”
“How long did you smoke?”
“Year? Fifteen months? Don’t ever do it. I’ll be nicotine’s bitch the rest of my life.” She rubbed the patch.
“Well. Is it helping?”
She shrugged. “Not as much as horking gum. I need to find a better spot; it’s covering my waves.” The swirling inked ocean spilled from beneath the patch.
Each of her tattoos, as I suspected, was her own design: the waves, birds, whales, the pine branches across her shoulders. I could not imagine anything in the world worth putting on my skin, part of me forever.
“Do your parents have tattoos?” I asked, nosy but not rude enough to ask what I really meant: What kind of parents let a fourteen-, fifteen-year-old kid start collecting so much ink that they’re practically sleeves?
“God, no,” she said. “They’d rather die.” She stood up and wiped the table for real. “Want tea to go? On the house,” she whispered. Like Francine. Said what she needed and nothing more. I walked, full of toast and jam and tea and intrigue, to Salishwood.
* * *
—
Salishwood, Jane had told me in the lodge when I arrived, slows down considerably during the school year. She and Man-Bun Natan and the other grad students would work with the school-day visits, but she asked me to come on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school and Saturdays. “You and Sean,” she said. “Okay?”
Twist my arm.
She gave me my official name tag and smiled longingly as I pinned it to my shirt. “Still jealous,” she said.
This sunny Monday I wore new-to-me hiking pants I’d found at the Humane Society thrift shop—they fit pretty well, gray and lots of pockets—with my best T-shirt, blue and the newest I had. I was worn out trying to look…pretty…around Sean, and simultaneously berating myself for caring to do it. I walked outside and leaned against the edge of our unofficial “counselor picnic table” to tie my shoes. Two busloads of summer school fourth graders arrived from a district I once was in, a school I attended. I recognized one of the teachers, but she either didn’t know me or was too busy trying to herd the insane ten-year-olds whacking each other with their backpacks and water bottles to notice me.
“Hey,” I called to two boys climbing a tree beside a really big wooden sign clearly painted with twelve-inch letters: Do Not Climb. “Your reading skills suck! There are trees to climb on the trail we’re taking. Cool it for ten minutes.”
The boys dropped to the ground, panting and red-faced, eight in the morning and full of bottled energy from the ferry and bus ride to get here, tearing around full-throttle.
“Are we going with you?” one of them asked.
What I Carry Page 6