I remember how the sweat on my back made my clothes stick to my skin under my winter jacket, and the way it felt while my socks slowly slipped off my heels inside my boots. Didn’t matter. We grabbed another piece of wood off the mile-high pile and walked across the yard to stack them next to the wood stove. Dad would plow the backyard with his four-wheeler so at least we didn’t have to fight through the snow. After every piece I clomped down into its new seat, I would wipe the wood shavings and dirt off my jacket, even though I knew it would return as soon as I made the distance back to the first wood pile to grab another. Sometimes my two sisters and I would make an assembly line to haul the wood by passing the chunk to the next person. I remember whoever got to be in the middle was the luckiest because they neither had to pick up nor set down the wood, just grab it from one person and pass it off to the next.

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          It would be hours of hauling from one stack to another, and it was so boring and exhausting. To test my strength I would pick up moderately large chunks of wood, just to see if I could, and after I got tired out (pretty quickly) I would scan the stack to see if I could find a little one. I already knew I had to hurry before my dad noticed that I was being picky and would scold me that I just needed to grab a piece and get moving.

 

          When I’d take a bathroom break, I hated peeling off my outside clothes knowing that I’d have to put them all right back on in a minute, and then my body would recognize its discomfort from being damp and sweaty, and then I would be too hot because I’m in the house with my wet boots making puddles on the floor and my snow pants are dripping off of their bottoms. I would sit and count the tiles on the bathroom floor and try to find shapes in the marbled design. I had to test out the air freshener in the window sill to check on its scent and how much of it was left.

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          Red berry. Half evaporated. Don’t like it. Smells like a porta-potty. Was there anything else in the window sill that required my attention? A can of Febreze. I must read the ingredients and warnings on the label. A bottle of mom’s shampoo. Pantene. (I heard that brand is bad for your hair). What else is there… SNAP! 

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          “SHIT!”

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          I pulled my finger down to investigate the mouse trap clamped tightly onto my middle and pointer. YOWW! It was one of those plastic ones with the teeth, black and green as I recall. Yep, it works. Inspection complete. I replaced my damp clothes trying to avoid my throbbing fingers and journeyed back outside. My older sister Leslie went back into the heated garage to warm up again. 

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          “That laziness,” Dad said with disgust as he shook his head and grabbed another piece of wood off the pile. 

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          Winter melted and spring was revived with cold, hard dirt and dead grass that had been blanketed in the snow. I caught in my peripheral vision a figure moving down the road. I looked and saw that it was actually three figures: my friends that lived in the neighborhood. They pedaled their bikes down the second gravel driveway of our house and dug their heels into the dirt to come to a stop. The brakes on their bikes never worked, a strange trend I eventually discovered among all of my friends’ bikes. I hesitantly finished stacking my piece of wood onto the pile and approached the trio, who looked over expectantly but not impatiently. 

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          “Park?” was the only word that left Adam’s lips while he tossed a worn basketball back and forth in his hands. I felt the pit in my stomach as excitement battled my anxiety within me at the first invitation of the year since the weather had just begun to warm up. My sisters and I pled our case valiantly with our parents, explaining to them that we hadn’t gotten to go play for a while now and we’d been stacking for a long time already. To no avail. My parents did not budge from our argument as we continued to move wood through the entirety of the conversation and our friends stood straddling their bikes from a safe distance, awaiting the verdict. I looked to them, and without any words, I frowned and shook my head. They got the message, and nodded to us before grabbing ahold of their handlebars and pedaling away. 

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          There were many times through my childhood and teenhood that my neighborhood friends would waltz into our yard asking my sisters and me to come down to the park and play "fish out of water" or whatever other game we came up with. Adam, Bryson, and Jarrett whom all lived within a mile of our house would come cutting through the grass -or snow- sometimes wielding a sun-faded basketball with a slow air leak that we couldn’t locate. There were a lot of times we did get to go with them, but there were also a lot of times we’d be hauling wood, or organizing the shed, or raking the backyard. We weren’t allowed to go until we finished all our chores, if we were allowed to go at all. 

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          “Why do you have to do chores?” I remember any one of them would ask us periodically, seemingly having forgotten the answer from the previous time they asked. I felt frustration heat my ears every time I was cleaning up dog shit in the backyard and my friends would stand watching and ask this question. “We don’t have any chores. We just do what we want.” I felt baffled every time I heard this come from any of their mouths. I imagined the freedom that they must have, the carefree giddiness that must take over their bodies and minds at the knowledge that they can do whatever they want and they don’t have to do any work, or ever get grounded if they slack off or fight with their parents. 

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          “Your parents are so strict.”

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          “Yeah, I know.”

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          In sixth grade, my twin sister and I befriended the other set of twin sisters in our class, Haley and Hannah. It was great because they lived about a mile away from us, across the railroad tracks past the only blinking light in Bark River. We met up after school nearly every day, rushing to get our chores and homework done as fast as possible. Usually one of us would call the other’s house phone -we didn’t have cellphones back then- and agree to meet up with each other, either on our bikes or by foot. I’d grab handfuls of quarters and dollar bills any time I’d managed to acquire them, which was really pretty rare, and start my journey towards Haley and Hannah’s house, hurrying as I could to meet them as fast as possible. I never got tired of seeing them. Even years into our friendship, as soon as the other came into sight walking down the road we would run to meet each other to salvage as much time together as possible. 

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          Once I turned about fifteen years old, I still had to complete all my chores before I could do anything, but after I finished them, my parents didn’t seem to care too much about what I did. Still no cell phone, they just asked that I call them from the house phone to check in occasionally when I was at Haley and Hannah’s house. I spent a lot of time there, and the freedom we had was exhilarating. Anything we could think to do if we desired, we would just go do it. We would meet up with all our other neighborhood friends and play hide and seek tag at night time, out in a field or someone’s backyard. We’d put out a spotlight and shoot basketball the entire night at Bryson’s house. The church parking lot down the road became one of our play areas since it was open and deserted most of the time, and it had a nice front lawn to play on. The grass was always green there too, at least in the summertime. 

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          We got into the habit of sneaking out at nighttime to go on walks around the neighborhood or play hide and seek. Haley and Hannah’s windows were huge, and not a single one in the house ever had a screen in them, so they were convenient for jumping out of or climbing back in as we pleased. Haley had the idea one night that we would sneak out to go lay on the church lawn and watch the stars in the clear night sky. We gathered blankets and pillows and hoisted up the window. Haley got halfway out when the front door flew open and her dad emerged, looking right into our souls.

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          “What the hell are you doing!” he yelled to us, a cigarette hanging from his lips and anger filling the cold night air. 

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          “Stargazing?” Haley announced timidly and I stifled my laugh.

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          “Get back in the fuckin’ house and quit climbing out the goddamn window!”

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          You bet your ass we sucked ourselves back inside her bedroom at the speed of light and smashed the window shut. Immediately we broke out into quiet, uncontrolled laughter at our getting caught, and Haley’s hilarious response of “stargazing.” It sounded so elementary for her to say it out loud under the condition of being angrily scolded by her scary dad. It was only a minor setback. We waited until we heard snoring emulating from the living room and made our move back out the window anyway, blankets in hand. We ran barefoot to the green grass that was now wet with dew and set up camp, fighting off shivers from the cold darkness and taking comfort in the street lamps of the parking lot behind us. The view of the sky that night was… well. I wish I could say it had indescribable beauty, but honestly, some clouds had moved in and our view was spotty as they slowly drifted by. When we could see the stars, we identified the only constellations we knew: the big and little dippers, and pointed out the milky way that made its appearance as the clouds moved away. 

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          We laid on the blankets on the church lawn for hours. An older man appeared whom we’d never met before. I don’t remember his name, but he wore a flat cap and was smoking a cigarette. He came and sat on the concrete wall that separated the parking lot from the grass, and being the nosy and rambunctious kids we were, we had no choice but to approach and talk with him. Looking back now, this is only one of the potentially terrifying things we’d recklessly adventured into when we were younger, but we were less suspicious at the time. We knew that the man was obviously drunk, even though the closest bars around were in Escanaba. He showed us a magic trick, in which he sucked his burning cigarette entirely into his mouth and made it disappear before reemerging it between his lips, a bright cherry still lit up at the end. We laughed our lungs to failure when he leaned over and ripped a big fart like it was no big deal, disbelief filling our faces and noses. Eventually, he left and stumbled back to wherever he came from, and not long after we gathered our damp blankets and ran back to the house, and climbed back into the bedroom through the window. 

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          I remember when Dad shut off the hot water at the house. Leslie would always take half-hour-long showers, until the hot water ran out, and Dad got sick of it. From that day on the water got lukewarm at best, and I’d shut off the tap between washing so I wouldn’t have to endure the cold discomfort on my skin longer than I had to.

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          Haley and Hannah’s shower wasn’t that much better, but we would heat up pots of water on the stove until boiling and dump them in the tub for a hot bath. 

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Their house felt wild all the time. Disorganized, and messy, and I usually remained hungry after dinner because they had five kids to feed plus me and whatever other strays might be visiting. Despite the disarray of the busy house, I loved it there. I loved our freedom.

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          But there was a cost to the fun, free life. Haley and Hannah’s dad was scary. I remember when he came home screaming in anger, belligerent from his addiction. Haley and I ran to the closet and hid in a pile of clothes for over an hour while we listened to smashing and yelling from the bull in the china shop. The sound of our breathing felt loud, and our whispering conversation made the limited air supply hot. It made me feel guilty that I complained that my dad never came to any of my softball games. I was too busy thinking about the other dads who came to all of their daughters’ basketball games and took them on vacations. The front door finally slammed and the house quieted before we crawled out and took a deep breath.

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          I searched the ground through the red pine needles and overgrown grass for a mushroom. Dad was much better at identifying them than I was, so any time I found one I’d call him over in excitement and wait for him to tell me if it was a keeper. Most of the time they weren’t, but when they were, he would cut the stem with a knife and collect it into our basket. By cutting the stem, you would leave the roots and a new mushroom would grow in the same place. 

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          Mushroom hunting was usually a family event, as was berry picking or any other kind of foraging my dad liked to do, but today I was the only one who came along for the ride. The sun shone through the trees of the woods on Limbert Road a few miles from our house, and it was the type of quiet out there that is hard to describe. It’s like the moss on the ground and the trees absorb the sounds before they can get to your ears, and all you're left with is the bugs, birds, and breeze if there is any. You realize how loud you are in a place that has no one else there to disturb the silence.

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          It’s hard to remember the details of that day other than how long we walked on a dirt trail through the woods, my dad teaching me the different kinds of trees and what you can use them for, along with gathering any chanterelles, puffballs, oysters, and boletes we came across that hadn’t been attacked by critters of the forest. I liked the boletes because the spongey underside turned from yellow to blue when you touched it, and I found great joy in stepping on old, dead puffballs that expelled a cloud of green dust carrying spores which would make more of them grow if they successfully survived. The thing I remember best about this day was actually when we finally got back to Dad’s truck after hours of exploring. The sun was just starting to go down, and we were parked at the top of a hill on the dirt road. Dad put the tailgate down and we sat looking out into the trees.

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          “Just be quiet for a minute and take it all in. Commit this to your memory.” My dad’s advice seemed odd to me at the time. We were in that woods all the time doing things- backpacking, camping, foraging, hunting, hiking, cutting wood- and it was just part of life. I looked around me. Dad always commented on how beautiful the woods were, and I would thoughtlessly agree with him, not really appreciating what he was seeing. It was just a bunch of trees. But this time, I sat down. For the first time, our objective in the woods was to do nothing for a minute. The breeze was almost non-existent. The sun was orange peeking past the trunks of beech and hemlocks, shining onto the reindeer moss of the dried marsh where deer would lay in the night. A red squirrel knocked twigs and beech nuts to the ground not far off, which was the only sound other than the singing bugs that broke the engulfing silence around us. It really was quite beautiful. 

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          We sat there for what felt like forever until the sun hit the horizon and its light dulled in the woods. I noticed how the air had cooled off and the chirping and buzzing of insects had grown into a loud, edible hum. I waited for Dad to signal that he was ready to go because I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t enjoying our time out there together like I was itching to leave. When he finally sighed and voiced a “Ya ready kiddo?” I nodded and slid down from the tailgate. I thought Dad’s old Chevy was a grumbly piece of shit because of how it chugged and the sweet smell of leaking antifreeze filled the cab. I think I was wrong now, though. 

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          “What? You've never had a pasty! How have you not!” 

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          Until high school, I didn’t even know what a pasty was. My family didn’t go out to eat, except for our annual trip to the Hong Kong Buffet in Escanaba, which had always felt like the treat of a lifetime. And we didn’t make pasties, so naturally, I had never had one. My classmates in their shock informed me that pasties were a trademark of our culture as U.P. dwellers and that I was really missing out. It didn’t matter to me. I knew I wouldn’t have the opportunity to get one until I had a car and money to go get one for myself anyways. Though Bark River was such a small town and I’d gone to the same K-12 school with almost all the same classmates since we were four until we graduated together, there was a lot I didn’t connect with them on. Our lives felt like they were lightyears apart to me. I remember when Adam C (not to be confused with Adam K from earlier in the story) bragged at the back of the bus about how his mom bought him the brand new iPhone 5. Kids argued with him that he was lying, there was no way he’d gotten one already. I didn’t put my nose into it. I didn’t even know what an iPhone was, or the significance of it. I didn’t have a phone at all, aside from the Obama phone that my two sisters and I shared so that we could call Mom to check in, or she could call to tell us to get home, and that was really it. 

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          I remember losing my mind when Caitlin’s mom bought her a brand-new car for her 16th birthday. Oh, the envy that boiled in me! I wouldn’t get my first car until more than a year later when I’d buy my cousin’s 2003 Chevy Impala for $300 cash. The brake pedal bounced when you pushed it, and the catalytic converter took a big dump so it chugged so loudly you couldn’t hear the person talking next to you, let alone music on my CDs- yeah, that’s right! I listened to CDs! By the time I was about sixteen, I couldn’t stand the music they played on the radio anymore. 

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          I could never have the expensive, name-brand clothes that my classmates had. The Vanity jeans, the sequined Ugg boots, and the Pink sweaters. I coveted them deeply as I squeezed into my too-tight jeans that mom got me from Goodwill and the discounted Sketchers from JC Penny’s at the mall in Escanaba. I begged my mom to buy me a pair of the fancy Uggs that every girl was wearing, as if it was the key to connecting with my classmates and getting invited to birthday parties. Looking back now, I’m glad she didn’t, because one overpriced pair of boots wouldn’t have been enough to make any difference. My parents couldn’t pay for us to join traveling sports, or take me to a dermatologist to get rid of my terrifying acne (seriously, horror movie shit), or buy me expensive dresses for the school dances that no boy ever asked me to. I think I was trying so hard to be someone I wasn’t. I wanted to be like them. The cool girls who were good at basketball and whose parents rented party buses for their birthdays. But since I was little, it seemed like the kids in my class had a different kind of life than me. 

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          One thing rang true though. Everybody knew everybody around. If you had a reputation of some kind, it didn’t matter where you went in life from that moment. You would never be known any other way again. 

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          When Dad insisted we go spend our weekend at camp in Gladstone, my sisters and I would groan in disagreement. Camp was isolated, tucked way back in the woods down a long, twisty dirt road, and the only neighbors were a middle-aged lesbian couple with no kids for us to play with. After a half-hour drive, we arrived at the hidden driveway and bumped and turned down it for another five minutes before pulling up to the overgrown grass of the front yard. Rizz and her wife would come walking over from next door to make sure we weren’t some punk kids coming to smash in the windows and ransack the place or throw some wild party. She was a good neighbor, and I liked her spotted hound whose butt wiggled back and forth from excited tail wagging. 

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          Camp had an outhouse with two toilet seats next to each other so you could have a bathroom buddy like you were in Basic Training. The sauna was our shower because there was no shower.  It was a pretty rustic way of living that I wasn't the fondest of at the time. I didn't like that the river was filled with rocks at the bottom. You couldn't take a step into the always-frigid water without bracing yourself for stones of all different shapes smooshing into the bottom of your feet, gambling if it was going to be a piercer or a slipper covered in algae. If you did slip and fall into an area where the bottom wasn't only two feet below the water, you would find yourself floating away at an alarming pace due to the current of the river, and pushing your feet downward in a fight to smoosh your toes into the rocks and stop your journey to wherever the river decided to take you to. 

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          There were two paths to get down to the river. The first one was just on the back side of the cabin, where you would basically slide down the mountainous hill for about ten feet before stopping on a land shelf, and then using spindly trees to keep gravity from sucking you down into a tumble, awkward run-stepping down the rest of the way. The hillside was mostly overgrown weeds and there wasn't a lot to grab onto. My sister Julia found a liter-sized, glass Coca-Cola bottle pressed into the dirt and buried by yellowed weeds that had no doubt lived there since before we were born. It became a lovely end table decoration in our bedroom next to a bowl of sea shells, though there were a couple of dirt stains that couldn't be scrubbed off. 

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          The other path down to the river was "the long way around." You had to walk parallel to the river over to the edge of the property through the woodsy, dirt path for about ten minutes before you reached the trail down. This trail down the hill was long and angular, and had occasional boulders and stumps interrupting the walking area. Though it wasn't as steep as the first option of barreling down the hill and hoping for the best, which was the more common option among my impatient sisters and me, you would still find yourself reaching for the thin, bendy trees near enough to the path to squeeze onto and lower yourself at a more comfortable pace. 

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          There was an anomaly on the second route I've described to you. Just before the path took a turn to head down the steep hillside, there was a tree with a rope that had grown right through the middle of it and hung out the other side. The rope was thick and braided, and I could never bring myself to walk by it without stopping to admire with awe at the way it didn't belong there. How unnatural it seemed hanging through the inside of a tree's trunk like it was. I felt like I could just sit and look at it for a whole day and never be satisfied. I think I felt about this rope the same way I felt about abandoned buildings and old tree houses that were dissolving from rot back into nature. I'm not going to tell you more about it, because I don't think I can. You either get it or you don't, and for your sake of wonderment, I really hope that you do.

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          I remember how we always had to wake up early at camp. If the restlessness of everyone else being awake didn't do the trick, it would be the sun shining in through the large windows and heating my body under my scratchy, orange blanket. My bed was a three-cushioned couch that sat next to the raw hardwood front door that only Dad knew how to latch shut at night. Even at my particularly short stature, my feet hung off the edge of my "bed" and the cushions pushed apart to create frustrating gaps beneath me. The musty yet comfortable smell in conjunction with the crackling of the woodstove in the center of the room had a strange way of inviting me to sleep each night. The frustration would always return in the middle of the night when I'd wake and rip the blanket off from the overwhelming heat in the room, and I'd lay there perusing the grooves of the ceiling until the crickets chirping turned to birds and the sun crested the horizon. 

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          Croquet was the most common yard game of choice at camp. We had a badminton net and lawn darts (the foam tips, not the lethal weapon types), and a volleyball that we could really get going sometimes, but croquet was the game that the whole family would come together to play. Since the ground was so lumpy and uneven, it made for an interesting croquet arena. We would poke the pickets in ridiculous locations and angles to make the game last as long as possible. Whenever we played croquet, it seemed like the sun was shining and there were burgers on a grill somewhere. I felt like we belonged in a magazine advertising some family-time bullshit where their product, perhaps croquet, was the secret to solving your family's problems and it would say in cursive letters somewhere on the page "fun for the whole family!" It was nice to live in that page for a moment. 

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          After our game of croquet ended on a particular summer afternoon, I couldn't bring myself to go inside. My sisters raced down to the river with their water shoes from Goodwill, which I was not fortunate enough to get a pair of, and my parents went into the cabin to start dinner. I laid down in the yard among the white croquet pickets and laid my head on my arms to keep the dirt off my scalp. I watched the leaves on the trees shiver and occasionally fall off and dance in the wind to the ground. I closed my eyes and felt the world around me. I felt like a stump in the dirt, or a Coke bottle jammed into a hillside. I had almost dozed off when suddenly shadows darted over the warm orange of the sun through my closed eyelids and my eyes shot open. Cranes. They flew over my head high above the trees, one after another. I had never seen cranes fly before, and I still haven't since. They were like dinosaurs, their long necks stretched out ahead of their bodies, and their wings were ginormous. A strangeness that felt like it didn't belong in this real world. An anomaly, like a rope growing through the trunk of a tree. 

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          In the summer before I turned seventeen, I started partying up the road with Adam K and a few other mutual friends. My sisters and I would walk or bike up the gravel hill nearly every single day for a summer-long last hurrah before Adam left for military school. We'd play drinking games into the night and have bonfires in the backyard, hooting and hollering with music blaring over the speaker. A lot of the time we didn't even go home. I loved the freedom to do whatever I pleased here and the attention Haley and Hannah's older brother showed me. One late morning after a night filled with partying, Dad pulled into the driveway in his Chevy truck. My sisters and I silently gathered our things and scurried out the door before Dad had the chance to make it up the porch steps. 

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          "Get in the truck," was all he said. We squeezed in on the two open seats and Dad put it in reverse. I felt anxiety radiating off of me like the steam off a hot potato. But it didn't really matter. I can't even remember if we had any consequences from that day, and we were back at Adam's house within days after being picked up, for the continuation of drinking, bonfires, and loud music. That whole summer is a blur, with very few real moments of clear memories. I remember laying on the living room floor with Haley and Hannah's older brother while he asked if I wanted him to take my pants off, but I held onto my belt and ignored him because I didn't know how to politely tell him to fuck off. He stopped asking after a few minutes and we fell asleep on the carpet. 

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          Their older brother continued to flirt with me over the summer, and I was so taken by the fact that a human of the male species was showing me any kind of positive attention that I ate that shit up with a spoon. Their brother and I started dating, and it didn't take long before I was spending so much time at their house that I just moved in. I was essentially using my parents' house as a storage unit for my things that I didn't bring with me across the railroad tracks. It was easy. I was already taking care of myself at this point- working a job, paying my own bills, and buying my own food. I figured if I'm living like an adult, why follow petty rules like a child? 

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          It took about a year as I recall before my boyfriend admitted his drug addiction to me. Looking back now, it seems so obvious, but I guess I wasn't as wise as I decided I was back then. Over the course of that relationship, my money would disappear at a very rapid rate. I'd get paid $500 on Friday and it would all be gone again by Monday. I found a tiny purple pill in our bed one day, which my boyfriend gleefully identified as morphine. He crushed it up on the counter and snorted away. At least he was gentleman enough to offer me some first. I declined, as I did every time, though it was an incredibly strange normal to be living in. Ketamine had him rolling stupidly on the floor while we watched "Cops" on his aunt's TV. Percocet and Vicodin didn't do anything for him anymore; he'd built up too much of a tolerance to them. When he didn't have his weed and painkillers, he would throw an earth-rattling tantrum that sometimes ended with a new hole in the drywall or another "come on, we're leaving and never coming back" speech. It got harder to pay my bills every month, now including rent, and groceries that seemed to evaporate faster than a puddle on hot cement. 

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          This relationship was my life for a couple of years. Fighting, screaming, crying. He stole my money. He stole my car. He won't let me sleep. He needs more cigarettes. He lied again.

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          It was like an ugly poem that I wrote myself into because I wanted to be free from my parents' rules and hauling wood and scooping dog shit. And I wasn't mad at Mom and Dad. I just wanted someone else's life that I thought I'd find somewhere else. I thought my boyfriend would be nice, and I'd get to play hockey at the rink without having to be home by dark. And it was a little bit like that. But it was a fake freedom. I replaced my parents with a controlling, addicted boyfriend who was even worse because all he did was take from me and give nothing in return but misery and anxiety. 

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          Finally moving downstate for college was a difficult breath of fresh air. I broke up with my boyfriend within two weeks of my move. Finding out that he cheated on me was really the last straw. It was an ugly, drawn-out breakup, but I suppose the entire relationship was quite the same. You'll have to believe me, because I don't want to waste any more space on this stain of a topic. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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          Ann Arbor is not Bark River. 

   

          The start of my college journey might be classified as slightly atypical. I drove down to Fort Custer to meet with my home unit in the National Guard for the first time a few months after graduating from Basic and Advanced Individual Training for the Army. The downstate air was thicker and less comfortable in my lungs. My palms sweated as I pulled onto Post and flashed my military ID to the gate guards. I was quickly granted access. They had no idea I was a newbie here, sipping on their coffee at a disgustingly early hour of the morning and waving people through. The sun wasn't up yet, at least not beyond a peak over the treeline, but it promised to punish the day with heat that made sweat roll down your arms inside your long sleeves buttoned neatly around your wrists where the moisture would collect into a pool party. 

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          A lump formed in my throat and tears began to well in my eyes when I quickly realized I was lost, driving aimlessly down by the shooting ranges until the paved road turned to gravel and I knew I must have made a wrong turn. After a slightly embarrassing phone call to my squad leader, I managed to find my way to the armory. 

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          Annual Training that June would take place at Camp Grayling. Two weeks out in the field in full kit, sleeping on flatbed trailers or individual tents if you had one. Lucky bastards. The nights were the only relief I felt from the sweltering cloudless skies and ravenous mosquitos that infested the evergreens around us. 

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          I awoke one night at some point in our second camping location of the trip to the sound of commotion. Yelling around me, far from the South side, and traveling towards me, spreading like fire. Then I felt it on my face, and it felt like fire. And it smelled like gas. I quickly realized that command decided to gas us in the middle of the night and I struggled to rip my gas mask out of my hip pouch. I started coughing on the burning CS gas that scratched my throat like a demon clawing its way out of my body. I smashed my mask onto my face clearing it desperately and began to breathe clean air. I grabbed my M249 and ammo can and headed to the rally point with my truck partner. The sand was quite frustrating to hurry through, and my face started to get hot with desperation as I fought to move with a fucking sense of purpose. We set up patrol that night for our training scenario and watched in the prone position for pretend intruders to creep in and throw some more real tear gas and shoot us with blanks. It was one of many long nights that followed exasperating days. 

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          After a couple of weeks of field training, we traveled back down to Fort Custer and parted ways. I got into my 2000 Pontiac Bonneville and popped in an I Prevail CD and drove an hour and a half to Ann Arbor for the start of school the next day. Unfortunately, I missed orientation during playtime with the National Guard. I found my dorm hall, Alice Lloyd, after some anxious driving around town. Everyone was in such a hurry around here. The pressure to be in a hurry with them was real. Headlights shone into my rearview mirror like an annoyed person yelling at me to "hurry the fuck up and get out of the damn way!"

          

           I lost count of how many times I circled the building trying to find somewhere to park. Every lot was reserved for staff only or people with a parking permit, which I lacked. Around the fifth time I circled the roundabout from driving in huge circles around town, I started to cry. I was borderline panicking driving around like a fucking nut in a new city with no one to help me. I had no one to help me. No one I could call to ask for directions. This was not like Bark River. At home, I knew what to do, and I knew I could pick up the phone and call my friends or family if I had any silly little question in my one-loaf-of-bread town. This is different. This is scary.

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          I finally gave up and parked in the staff parking lot. I was still in my smelly uniform adorned with my dried sweat from days of not showering out in the field of Camp Grayling. I lugged my fat, green duffel bags, and backpack to the door around the corner and waited for someone to let me into the building that was locked to those who didn't have an M-card. The kind boy at the desk helped me with a room key and pointed me in the right direction. Other new college students lounged around in the common areas chatting away contentedly about their start at the University of Michigan and making plans with their new friends and roommates. I tried to look strong and not completely defeated in front of them. I was attracting some attention on account of my uniform and probably smell. I finally got to my room via the elevator and met my roommate. She got up from her bed and smiled to greet me. 

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          "Awe, cute!" she said gesturing to my disgusting uniform. I chuckled sheepishly and dropped my bags. After a very brief tour of our tiny room, I peeled off my clothes and stuffed them into a laundry bag at the end of my bed. I noticed the pain in my empty stomach, complaining to me that I hadn't fed it since our truckstop breakfast on the drive down from Grayling. I wanted to lay down and do nothing for the rest of the night, but my stomach screamed loudly at me in protest. I decided I needed to get food, and something familiar would be nice. 

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          I Googled the nearest Taco Bell, which although was only a few miles away would take about 15 minutes to drive to. I decided to go anyways and made the return to my car. It wasn't until my journey back from Taco Bell that I saw it. Fluttering in the night wind stuck under my windshield wipers, a slip of paper. I knew immediately it was a parking ticket even though I had never seen one before. Tears again as I choked up and let them fall from my eyes pathetically. I pulled back into the staff parking lot and plucked the ticket out from under my wiper. Twenty-five dollars. I felt even more miserable and stupid holding onto my paper bag of Taco Bell that I had quickly lost my appetite to eat, which made me feel even sadder and more pathetic. Since it was so late and I was so lost already, I decided I couldn't handle driving around looking for a parking lot I was actually allowed to use and then figuring out the bus system in order to get back to my dorm, and I went to my room feeling very defeated that night.

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          I was greeted the next morning with another parking ticket placed so elegantly under my wipers. I left it there hoping that the next meter maid would see that I already had a ticket and it would buy me a little time until after classes ended for me to find somewhere to dump this fucking car off at. To no avail. After classes ended that day I would find a partner for the already existing ticket added to my windshield. But we have to talk about my classes first.

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          I misread my class schedule and headed to my writing class at 10:00, and saw that I was the first one there. The relief of being on time disappeared after my professor introduced herself to the class and asked that everyone had just come from math. A chorus of "yes" rang out around me from every other student. Then I was struck with the realization that math was at 8:30 this morning. And I missed it. 

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          They're gonna kick me out. I've ruined my future already and the University is going to realize that I was a mistake and send me back to Bark River with only one blinking light and my ex-boyfriend who's been begging for another chance and the money to pay for his phone bill.  I'm going to be stuck in the same small town where danger didn't feel real, and everybody knew who I was, and I was a seventeen-year-old adult. 

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          After classes ended I collected the parking tickets I'd accumulated. Three now at this point. Time to find a place for this money pit of a car. I found a park-and-ride lot on Green Road, about a fifteen-minute drive (was everything in Ann Arbor a fifteen-minute drive?), and decided that was the first thing I had to take care of. I dropped my car off in an open parking space and downloaded the Uber app, which I had never used before because we don't have Uber where I'm from. It reminded me of when I took a taxi into Escanaba to visit a friend when I was fourteen. It smelled like weed inside and the taxi driver talked the whole way about a book he was writing about robots and aliens. I politely encouraged him so he wouldn't get mad and try to murder me.

   

          I finally got Uber set up and called one to come get me. It didn't feel much more comfortable than the taxi had, except it was cleaner and they played quiet Hindi music on the radio and didn't talk to me for the duration of the drive. It took me two years to realize that I could take any of the 'The Ride' buses for free with my student M-card, so I spent a lot of money on Ubers.

 

          The morning after next when we had classes again I was sure to be on time for math, but when the professor did roll call, he didn't call my name. We came to the conclusion that I was in the wrong classroom, but he told me to just stay for the day since the curriculum was the same anyways.

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           That evening I arrived back at my dorm with a little more peace of mind but still riddled with anxiety because I missed my first class and was not in the right room for the second. I walked the short distance to the dining hall to get some needed dinner. I was a little impressed with the options, even though I'd find later that it didn't even compare to South Quad's dining hall which was much bigger with a lot more to choose from. 

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          I sat by myself at a table by the window and watched other kids socializing and playing games on the field near the track. I wanted to cry into my sandwich, but I didn't need the extra sodium so I decided against it. 

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          It became the normal for my boyfriend of the time to stay with me for days at a time in my dorm, and to save money on food, I would eat at the dining hall and then gather various foods and put them into tupperware to bring back for him to eat. I did this at least twice a day, but if I had time for breakfast (rare), I would bring him three meals a day. I always felt so embarrassed taking food and putting it into my backpack while people pretended not to see, but none of the staff ever stopped me from doing it so I figured the shame was worth it for the money I was saving.  

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          I just want you to know that eventually, I made it to the right class on time, and the University didn't kick me out. They did however charge me about seven thousand dollars out of pocket to pay for my summer semester because the FAFSA I had applied for wasn't effective until the Fall semester. I spent my entire savings of about five thousand dollars on tuition, and then took out a loan for the rest of the cost. 

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          Over the duration of being in college, I found all the right buildings for my classes and learned how to read schedules, and after many, many more parking tickets (I think I'm up to ten or eleven at this point), I kind of figured things out. But let's not get too far ahead. Patience!

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          Since I lived the rest of my freshman year in a dorm room by myself, my first roommate experience beyond a couple of months in the summer came my sophomore year. One of the girls I met over the summer semester took the bus with me to the mall. The only thing I remember doing there was eating Panda Express and waiting at the bus stop outside for a very long time. Trash rolled in the ditch from the wind, and as the sun disappeared goosebumps raged on the backs of my arms. The only other time we ever met to hang out we got smoothies and walked around downtown. I'm pretty sure she heard my new boyfriend yelling at me through the phone when I approached her outside of the Union. He was pissed that I said hi to her without telling him that I was going to say hi, even though I told him I was there and that we'd be meeting up. After an embarrassing start, we got to walking and talked over smoothies that were way too big for anyone to ever finish. It started to seem like we didn't really have anything in common, but maybe it was just because we were new to hanging out and still getting to know each other. We decided we would sign up to room together in a dorm for the next school year. Why not? It's not like I even knew anyone else in this city, and she was the closest I'd had to a friend since moving here. 

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          Plans changed when she called me to ask if we wanted to join a three-bedroom apartment with a different friend of hers whom I had not met. Since it would be bigger and cheaper, I was quick to agree, but my heart dropped when she said: "he." Her friend was a "he." There was no way in Hell my boyfriend was going to let me have a "he" roommate. I was hardly allowed to talk to men in any context, let alone live in the same apartment with one. I told her it wasn't going to work, and she laughed and told me that her friend was gay. Oh. That could work? I convinced my boyfriend of the plan and met with my two future roommates at Buffalo Wild Wings to talk about things. Travis was a very large guy, like colossal in every sense of the word. 

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          I didn't sense any tension until the day I actually moved in. They were already settled in their rooms; Travis took the largest room and let me have the medium size room. My boyfriend complained the whole time while helping me unload my things, but that wasn't anything new. He complained a lot, and I was pretty used to dealing with it by now. After he left, Gina and Travis very kindly offered to help me get settled in, including putting together my bedframe and hanging lights around the ceiling. They started fighting low-key and it escalated to a real argument about politics and race. Travis was white, and felt that she was hating on white people. Gina was Latina and felt like white people were the cause for a lot of struggles for people of other races. They were honestly both right to some degree, but that doesn't matter. There was quickly a divide created in the house that I was put in the middle of by trying to play Switzerland. Each of them would rant to me about the other, and I would give as little feedback as possible. 

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          The first time I saw Gina cry was a couple of weeks into living together. I was painting my bookshelf in the basement and she came down to just be in the same room as someone she could talk to. The conversation was uninteresting at first, but the tides turned when she began to talk about her family. She spoke of their poverty and her younger sister's recklessness for deciding she didn't want to go to college after she would graduate high school. How was Gina, in partnership with her sister, meant to "pull her family from poverty"? The answer was a long, cement-floor therapy session from yours truly, which I set down my paintbrush for. I got the feeling based on how much she confessed that she didn't have anyone else to give these confessions to, and they'd been building for a while. I felt sad for her. 

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          After guiding Gina upstairs for a glass of water and a moment to unwind, I ventured back into the basement to continue my artistry. A box that's been sitting unopened on the floor finally piqued my curiosity enough to examine the writing on the side. It was an exercise bike, the plastic bands sealed tightly around its cardboard prison. I picked up my paintbrush and ran it over the drips on my wet bookshelf.

 

          Gina's mom liked to spend the night at our townhouse every weekend. Every time she pulled up in her shiny, orange SUV she came toting bags full of groceries for the house. It was probably a good thing she was helping buy us groceries, honestly. Travis ate a lot, and it didn't matter too much to him whose food he was digging into. If your name wasn't written on it, and sometimes even if it was, you'd find it magically disappeared the next time you went to get it. A couple of weeks after Gina's first cry session in the basement, her mom helped her carry up a new TV to her bedroom. After her mom left, Gina broke down in tears again. This was becoming a very regular occurrence. I tried to comfort her, though it was becoming exasperating trying to be her underpaid and underqualified therapist. Gina cried on her bed with her door open, and I felt like I couldn't walk by her door to get to my room without checking on her. 

 

          "Can you come in? I gotta tell you something," she choked out while stifling sobs. I sat on her bed next to her and gave her time to speak while she wiped her face with a tissue. I fought to not reveal how tired I was and swallowed my yawns that kept fighting their way up. Gina finally sniffled and looked at me. 

 

          "I'm transgender."

 

          Oh. 

 

          "Oh. That's okay! That's fine. Do you want me to call you he/him now? Or use a different name?" I asked her. 

 

          "No, I don't want to change anything yet. I'm not ready. Are you sure it's okay?" I could see she was fighting a major battle within herself. I patted her hand and pulled her into a hug. Transgender was not something I had ever encountered before Ann Arbor. I found myself conducting Google searches and looking at different news articles. One thing about me that has come naturally is not caring about what choices other people make for their own lives. I went to bed and slept as well as every other night. I think it's the sweet smell of my comforter from the laundry scent-boosting beads.

 

          Travis and Gina kept fighting. Sometimes they'd take passive-aggressive digs at me, too. Gina apologized for cussing in front of me because she knows I'm a "good, Christian girl." I didn't let things like that slide. Passive aggressiveness isn't in my nature, so they both learned rather quickly that I didn't play the same games that they did with each other. However, I tried to keep my nose clean within the house, not get into their disagreements. I kept finding gray smudges on the toilet seat which was cause for an awkward house meeting, during which Travis professed it must have been from Gina's "ashiness." Gina left during Thanksgiving break and never came back. After discovering that the smudges were still appearing after her absence, Travis nonchalantly admitted it was deodorant from his thighs.

 

          Before she left, Travis and I would take turns giving Gina rides to and from her job at a smoothie place a few miles away. I thought I could teach her how to drive in my minivan, but I decided we should take an indefinite break when she almost drove into the back of a parked car. 

 

          Gina was gone before I got back from break. I felt bad that she left the house to move back in with her mom, but when I reached out she didn't seem open to telling me much other than she was homesick, which I can verify was only partly true. Gina's crying was no longer heard throughout the house, but there was no more peace after she left. Travis liked to invite his witch friends over fairly often. They would do tarot card readings, brew potions in the kitchen, draw on the walls with wax. When I asked Travis if he was supposed to open the doors and windows while burning sage, he informed me that he was clearing out bad energy, and that you only open the windows for evil spirits. His altar of colorful candles and plastic skulls sat in the living room for weeks, but I don't think he ever used it. 

 

          I noticed that Travis wasn't a very good friend behind the backs of the people he hung out with. He and Gehenna would fight over the same middle-aged man who lived in New York, and he tried convincing another couple of friends to sleep with him over and over, guilting them after they gently declined his advances. Travis would ask me to hide in the basement or vacate the house for the night when he planned to bring boys over for dates, but most of the time he said he got stood up. I laid on the bed in the basement listening to the washing machine for over an hour before he called me up to let me know his date bailed. On my way to the stairs, I noticed for the first time that the exercise bike was gone.

 

          I was put on active duty orders for the first half the year of 2020, so while I was gone Travis sublet Gina's room behind her back, collecting rent and pocketing it for himself while Gina and I still paid for our rooms, but that wasn't what he told his friends he was stealing money from. It came to a head when I went to pick up my stuff and we got to talking. Apparently, they had already signed to take over the lease, so I wonder if they ended up living together for the next year. Awkward.

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          My first roommate experience beyond a couple of months in the summer was… complicated. And shitty. I was excited to get into my one-bedroom apartment. Was everyone in Ann Arbor like them? Were they all witches? And did they only listen to today's Pop hits? I didn't know, and it gave me heartburn. 

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          I got into the routine of stopping at the Walgreens for a Monster energy drink and crossing the street to Noodles and Company for some caulifloodles (You really can't tell the difference!). On my way into Walgreens one day, I saw a homeless woman sitting in a wheelchair outside holding a cardboard sign. 

 

          BROKE AND HUNGRY. ANYTHING HELPS. 

 

          I've given to homeless people a number of times since moving down here. They're always grateful every time I buy them food, blankets, clothes, and hygiene products. I secretly wonder if I'm ironically selfish for giving to them to feed my ego and sense of goodness. I smiled to myself as I picked all kinds of food and drinks off the shelves. I chose things you could eat as they were without having to heat them up in case she didn't have a microwave. Thirty dollars later I walked out of the store and approached her with a few bags of food. 

 

          "Hi! I got these for you," I smiled, handing her the bags. She looked up at me, cigarette burning in her hand. 

 

         "Ohh, I actually prefer cash only," she half held onto the bags that were getting ever heavy in my hand. My face fell and I felt my ears growing red hot.

 

          "So, you don't want them?" I was embarrassed that people walking by might have been paying attention to this hoedown. 

 

          "Well, do you have cash?" I was starting to get angry because of how foolish I felt.

 

          "No, I do not have cash. Do you want it or not." I was having a hard time hiding the irritation emanating from my soul. 

 

          "I'll keep it," she hesitantly took the bags from me and set them on the ground next to her. 

 

          "Okay," was all I could muster before walking away. I realized I had lost one of my earbuds somewhere, and walked in and out of the store, past the wheelchair lady over and over again looking for it. I finally found it on the sidewalk, smudged but luckily not stepped on. I brushed it off and put it back in my ear. I skipped Noodles and Company and went straight to the library that day. I'm such a jackass!

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           It's been a little hard to connect down here. People here are.. just different. But, it hasn't been all bad. I can wear my jean shorts and a crop top, and I don't feel like a slut. I feel empowered. I broke up with my shitty boyfriend and got a new one, Andrew. The old one sucked, and he wouldn't let me dress how I wanted in a city that told me I could wear whatever I felt pretty in. Andrew encourages me to wear whatever makes me feel happy, and he bought me a pair of boots.

 

          When I wear my Ariat boots, I undoubtedly stick out. But people don't make me feel like I stick out. They don't look at me differently. And they don't treat me differently. You can do what you want here, take risks, and people are okay with it as long as you aren't hating or hurting anyone else. I drive to class as the weather gets hotter, and in addition to the myriad of sneakers hanging in the electric lines, I look up and see people sunbathing on their rooftops. And on the sidewalks. And some people carry speakers so they can dance as they walk through campus, but most people just put their earbuds in and keep their heads down. 

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