What I Carry: Chapters 5–9

He packed his bread and compass and books and walked a thousand miles, to the solace and beauty of the natural world, and lived to save Yosemite Valley from destruction; he saved the redwoods and sequoias of California and the alpine wilderness of Washington’s Mount Rainier.

"Natan," he said, in a way that he probably intended to show great patience and restraint over my admittedly failed pronunciation of his name but was instead super condescending, delivered through his overwrought beard and complicated waxed mustache.

Another wry, mustached smile.

Muir hated the implied rush of the word hiking. He preferred to saunter through the forest, stroll into the woods.

Same size as the cats, it was brown and black and kind of mangy.

Half lie—I had gone for a walk; there was just also the first day of an internship in the middle of it I hadn’t mentioned, so more of an omission than a lie—but close enough.

It was a perfect day—I looked at the table laden with food, at this nice lady who made it all for me and who let me walk wherever and whenever.

"School is your job; it is your only job.”
“I’ve always worked, you have my report cards—I can do both, I swear.”
We sipped our Red Rose tea. An impasse this early—she was probably working out how to call Joellen to pick me up.

No more doing ambiguously not cool things and then apologizing after.

The bright warmth swelled tentatively in my chest again.

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.

I tried to keep my burgeoning hatred at bay.

I was worn out trying to look...pretty...around Sean, and simultaneously berating myself for caring to do it.

There is a pervasive lie born of the corporatization of adoption that insists birth parents are bad, adoptive parents are good, kids get “bad” traits genetically and learn “good” behaviors from adoptive parents.

Natan shook his head and smiled, forever oily and patronizing, at Sean. “So young,” he said. “So hotheaded.”

Sean’s face was somehow both blank and incredulous.

Sean placed his hand lightly on my elbow and steered me toward a water spigot near the lodge and away from Natan’s noxious cloud of patchouli and tentative G chord strumming.

“And what would that entail?”

“Also, I have an innate sense of direction.”

“You’ve been asking about me?”
“Kira told me,” I said. “Unsolicited.”

I’m not ‘debating’ the inherently superior merits of preservation.

“Do not reduce my namesake’s words to hipster T-shirt, bumper sticker quotes you can’t finish. Pinchot lackey.”

Lying was brand-new to me, the best way to kill a friendship before it began, and Kira wasn’t stupid. Did I think I could keep this ruse up for an entire school year?

For all its good intentions, Seattle is not immune to what Joellen described as “a stupid bunch of racist gentrification and discriminatory housing practices.”

“You’re so lucky you brought lunch,” Kira said, dropping beside me in a chair at a table near a window, harried, hair damp, catching her breath.

I took in her small, wiry stature. “But why the fat route? That doesn’t even make sense.”

Being the new kid twice a year, every year, has gotten me ignored at best, shoved into lockers, my backpack tossed into dumpsters, descriptions of my supposed sexual prowess Sharpied on bathroom stalls at worst.

“Black leggings. White sneakers. T-shirt, tank top. Lunch in a red-and-white Lululemon shopping bag with black handles. Tasteless signifiers of mediocrity.”

“Oh, good!” she trilled, blatantly delighted.

The mountains are calling and I must go, and I will work while I can, studying incessantly.

For someone not well versed in witty flirting banter, it sure was rolling off my self-deprecating tongue.

For someone not well versed in witty flirting banter, it sure was rolling off my self- deprecating tongue.

I’ll be out in ten months and on my own; I’m not trying to get knocked up so I have to buy a windowless van to run away in and travel the county busking for change because I’m just so in love with some guy who only wants me to help him cook meth and then I'm part of it and I end up in jail with him.

I had trouble back home. Los Angeles home. Trouble finding decent friends; like, discerning who was a friend and who was miserable and just wanted someone to be miserable with them.

I could not fathom the scenario she was painting: parents who loved their kid so much they let her ink her body to try to keep her from something more self-destructive?

“You really made all those paintings in the living room?”
“Yeah. Not the birds—those are my great-grandmother’s.”
“Artistic lineage.”

“She made them in prison, at Manzanar. They found a set of Audubon bird identification cards in an old National Geographic and carved them from scrap wood. She made paint from plants and berries; the legs are wire from screens over bars on the windows. They’re brooches. Something pretty to wear around the detention camp.’’

“I’m sick of avoiding things I want to do because of them. They can have art class, fine, but this is a coveted bonfire invitation, and we are going.”

Her candor was so refreshing.

Like Kira’s kindness, his attention was also unprecedented.