Or, on second thought, it’s still a hell of a time to be Native.
That night, Mama and Daddy had gone to Pennington’s Steakhouse to celebrate their twenty-third wedding anniversary, which had been earlier that week.
Last August, Mama had stored her beading supplies — untouched since she’d started school — on the overhead shelf with the detergent and the fabric-softener sheets.
Then she’d brought home the plastic clothes-folding board from Walmart, and Hughie had declared the two of us Team Laundry.
While I shook out and awkwardly folded warm fitted sheets, he click-click-clicked one T-shirt after another into a perfect square and ruminated on the musical.
Ticket sales were still slow.
Hughie said, “We’re under a ton of pressure.” Click, click, click.
I gave up trying to fold and started rolling the sheets instead.
He added, “It’s like, with every cast that came before us, the audience would assume the roles went to the best performers.” Click, click, click.
“We feel like we have to prove ourselves.” Click.
“We have to give it 101 percent.” Click.
“Like Chelsea says, ‘We can’t let the haters win.’ ” Click.
“Everybody’s counting on me,” he said. “Everybody’s —”
Suddenly my brother heaved the folding board into the wall above the washer and dryer. It ricocheted up, smacking the bottom of the shelf, launching the beading supplies.
The impact popped open the top of the plastic box, and colorful beads burst into the air.
They rained down on us, bounced, rolled on the laminate floor, slipped into the folded laundry, between and beneath the bulky machines.
Hundreds? Thousands? Kajillions?
Beads everywhere!
The folding board landed — whack! — on the tile floor.
Then — whack — the box crashed beside it.
Picking a shiny green bead out of my hair, I was shocked.
Hughie had never acted out like that before.
Last time I’d seen him lose his temper, he was a toddler.
“Mama knew,” Hughie added. “She knew about Baum and Wounded Knee. All her books. Her Indigenous Studies. Mama knew before I auditioned. She should’ve told me.”
“She was probably trying to protect you,” I said. “You were so jazzed about landing the role. You’d made new friends. You —”
“Now what am I supposed to do?” he exclaimed.
I hugged Hughie tight, wishing I had the right words to explain that Mama wasn’t the one he was really mad at.
Friday the thirteenth. Game day. Before school, I stopped short on the bridge, flanked by hand-painted spirit signs on butcher paper.
The East Hannesburg Honeybees would face off against Joey’s old school, West Overland High. The usual cheers read like CliffsNotes on Manifest Destiny: Beat the Braves! Defeat the Braves! Sting the Braves!
They’d been up all week.
But since yesterday, something new had been added.
The last poster now featured a caricature, drawn in thick black marker. It depicted a Hollywood Indian in a feathered headdress, his heart impaled by the stinger of the Honeybee mascot. His eyes were Xs. His back was arched, and his arms dangled to either side.
It took me a minute to figure out that the thing at his feet was supposed to be a tomahawk.
Nick. I recognized his artistic style from his editorial cartoons for the Hive.
And there he was, in the bridge’s glass DJ booth, jamming to hip-hop.
I marched over and knocked on the door. No answer.
I pounded on the see-through wall.
Nick grabbed a marker and a piece of paper. Scrawled on it and held it up: NOT NOW.
The bridge was the main artery of the school. Students were hurrying by the spirit signs without a second glance. I could’ve ripped down the butcher paper. That was my first impulse, but Pep or Cheer or whoever would just make new posters.
I needed a bigger, more influential power on my side.
As usual, the popular people had claimed the long wooden benches centered between the floor-to-ceiling windows. I stormed up and pointed. “Did you see that?”
“Hello to you, too,” my ex-boyfriend, Cam, replied. “What’s your drama today, Lou?”
I shifted my weight. “What are you going to do about those signs?”
“Nothing.” He rocked back on his heels. “Last week it was Beat the Lions! Defeat the Lions! Sting the Lions! Remember? The week before that —”
“There was no cartoon of a honeybee skewering a lion,” I replied. “And, more to the point, there are no lions currently enrolled at this school!”
Cam was gaping at me.
I struggled for calm. “Half of those posters have your team number on them. You’re the freaking king around here. They’ll listen to you. Say something. Do something. Make it stop.”
Hannah O’Sullivan, a petite, popular JV cheerleader, walked up. Placing a steadying hand on Cam’s forearm, she said, “West Overland’s mascot is the Braves. What’s the big deal?”
Hannah seemed honestly confused. Less than thrilled that Cam was talking to his ex, but there was more to it than that. I might’ve been able to reach her. I began, “It’s —”
“Hold up.” Cam raised his voice. “Hold the fuck up, Lou. Now you want to talk? Fine. Let’s talk about something that matters. You broke up with me by e-mail. Do you have any idea how cold that is? How bitchy and chickenshit? Besides, nobody fucking uses e-mail!”
Had the great Cam Ryan just publicly admitted that I’d been the one to break things off?
“You were nobody when we met,” he added. “Nobody. Now you’re nobody again.”
I knew Cam. He had zero coping mechanisms in response to having been dumped by a girl he genuinely cared about. So he’d spewed a lot of petty, crude, sexist crap. Created his own reality to explain us away. To avoid dealing with his feelings and to protect his rep.
And it had failed. He still hurt. So he’d repositioned himself from victor to victim.
“You pull shit like that, Lou, and you still think of yourself as a good person. Saint Louise. But I say any damn random little thing that pisses you off — me, your boyfriend.”
“Ex-boyfriend,” Hannah put in.
“The person you’re supposed to love,” Cam raged on, shrugging off her touch. “All of a sudden, that’s it? You decide I’m an asshole and we’re over?”
By that point, everyone on the bridge could hear him over the music.
He shouted, “Fuck off, Lou! Fuck you! You’re all sanctimonious when you’re making everything about yourself, but when it comes to other people’s feelings, you suck.”
Yes, Cam had mouthed off about me. Said terrible things. He was an insensitive, self-absorbed asshole. But he wasn’t wrong about everything. My e-mail had been chickenshit.
I should’ve broken up with him face-to-face.
By the final bell, somebody had ripped down the spirit signs.
I had no idea who.
Joey’s mom didn’t come home from work until after 5:30 p.m. On days that we didn’t have a reporting assignment, his bedroom had become our sanctuary. Never mind his clothes strewn about or that it smelled vaguely like sweaty socks.
I made up for the lost homework time in the newsroom during lunch. I missed eating with Shelby in the cafeteria, but she still had Emily and Rebecca.
I missed Shelby — period.
But she always had to work, and now I had Joey to think about, too.
Besides, I wanted him. It was as much the talking as the touching.
Oh, how I appreciated that Joey talked about more than food, football, and how hot he was. But again, he had his own history with the sport.
There were a series of posed team photos above his desk, going all the way back to fourth grade. He’d no doubt played a game or two against East Hannesburg.
Yes, Joey had played ball at West
Overland High School. Worn a maroon jersey that read Braves. Took it off and picked up a camera instead, though football still meant enough to him to display the pics.
I could’ve segued a conversation from his former high-school mascot to my Native identity. I didn’t. Twice I opened my mouth with every intention of saying something — and closed it again.
“What I don’t get,” Joey began, drawing figure eights on my upper arm with his fingertip, “is why did they stick it out for so long?”
We lay together, our legs tangled. He was talking about his parents again.
I’d come to realize that part of the reason Joey had decided not to go out for Football this year was to spite his dad. Either because Joey blamed him for the divorce or because he wasn’t around much and never really had been.
I felt bad for Joey. For all of them. But he tended to swing between brooding about his parents’ divorce and about his cheating ex-girlfriend and ex-bestie.
I was tired of doing so much of the emotional heavy lifting.
“I heard my mom tell my uncle on the phone that she and Dad had been over for ages,” he added. “Mom said she’d first realized it on this vacation we took to the Grand Canyon. That was the summer between seventh and eighth grade. All those years, our whole life was a lie.”
“All those years, you got to live with both of your parents,” I said.
I slid my hand down to rest on his hip. “You and your sister, until she left for K-State. Y’all got to see your dad every day. And he got to see the two of you every day, too.”
“Every day he wasn’t flying,” Joey said. He withdrew, folded into himself.
He wasn’t touching me anymore.
The night before, the West Overland High Braves had defeated the East Hannesburg High Honeybees, and — huzzah — comforting Cam Ryan was not my responsibility.
At the top of the outdoor staircase, my cousin Fynn had just finished painting the front door to his newly constructed apartment over the freestanding garage.
“Hey, kiddo!” An old Meat Loaf song —“Home By Now No Matter What” — blasted from his phone. Fynn’s sleek, dark hair had been tied back, and he wore a red tank that showed off the Jayhawk tattoo on his shoulder. “If you’re looking for Rain —”
“I’m looking for you.” From what I’d heard, Fynn was the home town heartthrob before he got married, and I’d seen for myself that he treated his wife, Natalie, like she was heaven-sent.
“Well, then, by all means.” My cousin gestured for me to come inside. “Welcome back to my Domain. Be it ever so humble . . .”
Fynn and Joey reminded me of each other — both independent, enterprising. They even both drove Jeeps, though Fynn’s was in much better condition than Joey’s.
The above-garage apartment serves as an office for Fynn’s web-design and social-media business. I passed through the cozy kitchenette to his studio. An enormous computer monitor dominated the glass-topped, metal-frame desk. A client website was pulled up, the one for the breakout Kickapoo blues band Not Your Wild West Show.
“This way.” Fynn led me out the arched window to the roof patio. He offered me a paint roller. “Do you mind? I’m hoping to knock out the last of the trim before the weather gets much colder.” As I loaded the sponge with Parsley Green, he asked, “What’s on your mind, cuz?”
While we worked, I told him about my breakup with Cam. How Mrs. Ryan had objected to Andrew’s engagement and Cam hadn’t understood why that offended me. I mentioned that Peter from Immanuel Baptist had implied that all Indians were alcoholics and, as if that wasn’t enough, there were Native boys like Tommy Dale, who’d only date white girls.
“I keep not talking to Joey about my being Native, which is . . . Why? We’re getting serious. Potentially capital L serious.”
I’d decided to leave my potentially fast-fading virginity out of it.
“What’s wrong with me?” I asked.
If I’d had it to do it over again, I would’ve shoved my tribal affiliation into the conversation on day one in the newsroom. “It’s not like I’m ashamed of who I am. I’m proud to be Native. Muscogee. I’m proud of my family and my Nation and —”
“Understood.” Fynn set down his paintbrush. “You don’t have to defend yourself to me.”
From the roof deck, I couldn’t help comparing the historic, small-town neighborhood to my own subdivision. In old town, some of the landscaping is overgrown and the pools are above ground. I could see the occasional tricycle left out on a front porch and the occasional wheelbarrow alongside a vegetable garden. Laundry fluttered from clotheslines.
There was no homeowners’ association here.
“When I was your age, it was harder,” Fynn said, moving to stand at my side. “It’s like I was Indian in Indian Country and white in white America. Not anymore.
“Being quiet can send just as big of a message as speaking your mind.”
I wondered if Fynn might elaborate, but instead, he added, “These days, I’ve got clients to promote, a daughter to raise. All the negativity in the world, I try not to feed it more energy.”
I turned to focus on applying an even coat of paint. “I’m chicken.”
Or chickenshit, as Cam would say. Not to mention sanctimonious.
“No, you’re smart.” Fynn had resumed painting, too. “Sensitive. There’s no shame in that. They’re good qualities. You’re used to knowing the right answer, and you do. But this is personal, ‘capital L’ personal, and the more you care, the more vulnerable you are.”
He dipped his brush in the paint can. “You’re not being paranoid. A lot of people draw the line at romance. At first Natalie’s parents weren’t thrilled with me.”
Interesting. They were white moneyed Johnson Countians.
They’d doted on him (and the baby) at the wedding.
Once we finished, I helped Fynn wash the brushes and rollers and pack up the supplies. He led me to the freshly painted front door and gave me a reassuring good-bye hug.
“Eventually, Joey will have something to say about the fact that you’re Creek,” my cousin said. “It’s going to happen. You’re going to have the conversation. You’re not just somebody walking around with a tribal citizenship card in your wallet and that’s as far as it goes. You’re too close to your family and your community to avoid the topic much longer.”
“No comment,” stage manager Sydney Wood said in the hall outside A.P. Government class. “Not on camera, not off camera. Not ever.”
“You don’t have any thoughts on the casting controversy?” Joey asked less than a minute before the bell. Nobody else was paying attention to our conversation.
A Nerf ball sailed overhead. A majorette caught it, one-handed.
“Did you have to interview Garrett, of all people?” Sydney replied as our fellow overachieving classmates poured through Mr. McCloud’s doorway.
Joey’s video with Garrett, the actor playing the Wizard, had gone live the previous Friday. Today’s rehearsal would be the first since.
Sydney added, “Who knows how that’ll screw up my life. Actors are temperamental enough. I wish you would stop stirring up trouble. You’re a lousy school newspaper, for God’s sake. Stop taking yourselves so seriously.”
She was one to talk. “We’re not stirring up anything,” I countered. “We’re reporting it.”
“How nice for you.” Sydney plucked a large gold barrette from her purse. “You can list the Hive on your college applications. This is my third year on crew, my first as stage manager. It’s not fair that suddenly I’m expected to take a political stance and explain it.”
She smoothed her hair back. “The last thing I need is some college admissions director blowing me off because they’ve pulled up an online misquote of something I supposedly said to the Hive that doesn’t jibe with their vibe.”
Clack. Sydney fastened the barrette at the base of her neck. “I’m bored. Good-bye.”
Pivoting on one heel, she left us standing there.
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“Did she just say ‘jibe with their vibe’?” I echoed. “Was that off the record, too?”
“It was off, all right,” Joey replied.
As I shifted the car into Park in front of the high school, Hughie strolled out with A.J., trailed by Chelsea and her best friend, Taylor, who was playing the Wicked Witch.
According to Hughie, it had long been the girls’ dream to share a stage, and their synergy was electric. Most of the thespians were 100 percent behind the diverse cast.
When Hughie plopped into the front passenger seat, I said, “We have to stop by the drugstore — Daddy’s coming down with a cold. How was rehearsal?”
“Draining.” My brother didn’t say much more on the way or at the pharmacy as I picked up cough drops, tissues, and congestion meds for Daddy, sports tampons and acne cream for myself.
But Hughie didn’t elect to wait in the car, either.
I caught him staring at a rotating display of Oz-themed greeting cards. He extracted one with a photo of the Tin Man from the 1939 movie on the front.
“Want that?” I asked.
“I thought I did.” Hughie slipped the card back into the rack.
Heading home, I cranked the volume on a country radio station. We listened to a song about patriotism, a song about longing for home, a song about good love gone bad, and a song about a broken heart. The musical was scheduled for that weekend.
“It’s all tangled up in my head,” Hughie said. “The show is going to be amazing, but, bottom line, there would be no Tin Man if it weren’t for Baum.”
He pulled the Kleenex out of the bag and used a tissue to wipe his nose. “I hate playing a character that he created.”
Hate isn’t a word we use in our house, not often at least.
“I’m worried that my friends will hate me,” Hughie added. “Or think I’m a coward.”
My brother was trying to tell me something. With four days until the first performance, he had finally decided to quit the musical. I was the first to know.
Hearts Unbroken Page 13
