Read Online Stop That Girl by Elizabeth Mckenzie - Free Book Online

night,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I make myself be happy?”
    In the fall she enrolled in some extension classes at UCLA, which loosened her up about driving to a destination, getting out, and interacting with people. But her breakthrough came when she found a part-time job at a special backpacking store in Glendale, not just a shop but a
hub,
a center for wilderness types, a place where activists posted flyers and meetings were held and talks were given and she was there in the thick of it, selling boots and mole-skin and providing tips on which dehydrated foods tasted best and pouring over USGS maps with hikers and dispensing her knowledge of river trips and trails. She was a hit there, and she liked it. I was happy for her. But somehow this led her to apply for a summer job as a ranger at a certain national park, and—calling upon some contacts from the old days, including some higher-ups in the Park Service and the Sierra Club—she got the job.
An actual
ranger.
She’d have a ranger car, wear a ranger outfit, give nature talks, lead nature walks. Truly grotesque.
    “We get our own cabin in the compound,” Mom was saying. She was losing weight to fit into the uniform, giddy over her accomplishment. “No way on earth are you staying home. You and Kathy can roam and play.”
    “But I was planning to hang around with my friends and maybe go to Tahoe with Susie’s family,” I said.
    “Don’t be so shortsighted,” she said. “You can do that any summer.”
    “No, I can’t,” I said. “It’s probably the only summer I’ll
ever
be able to do that.”
    “You depend too much on your friends,” she said.
    “What about you?”
    Mom said, “It’s time I met some people of substance.”
    My mother had an assortment of new friends from the backpacking store. River rafters and oarsmen, with names like Connie Bohn and Spencer Chang and Ned Martinez. Hikers like Lewis Blaustein and Dena Fladeboe. Independently wealthy adventurers like Angus Frey. They were coming by our house all of a sudden, and Mom and Roy were having raucous dinner parties, and Kathy and I would clean up in the kitchen while they hooted out in the living room, pretending we were hunchbacked scullery maids in a manor house, scraping the plates and hand-washing the good silver, then stabbing it away in its felty sleeves.
    Angus Frey was an Australian, a man with a head the size of a bull’s, a rumpled, bulbous face, thick dark hair like a pelt, and a voice used to speaking to crowds, a man who tossed laughs from his chest like bricks and spent his time traveling and doing good deeds, such as protesting new dams in the Sudan or spreading the word about endangered species in the Amazon, or about timbering, or littering, or oil drilling: you name it. He’d written books on his exploits. He talked up a storm, words hammering on everything within his range. Spokesman for a group founded in Sydney, he roamed the world, but somehow, lately, here he was in our living room.
    “Listen here, girls, do you know the story of Truganini?”
    “No,” we said. We crowded at his enormous feet.
    “Before the settlers came to Tasmania, it was peopled by a race which had lived there for thousands of years. And of course when the British arrived in 1803 they had to clear the slate, and they killed these people off by the thousands. Truganini was the last woman of her kind. She lived a government-subsidized life and was subject to all manner of unwanted exposure, and one of her greatest fears was what would become of her remains after she died. Promises, promises. Sure enough, they strung up the woman’s bones in a museum in Hobart.”
    “Is that good or bad?” said Kathy.
    “Bad,” said Angus Frey.
    “Aren’t you slanting it, by using the words
strung up
?” I said. “If you’d said
commemorated
or
protected
the story’d have a whole different twist.”
    “My word, yes, you’ve got me, I’m a propagandist at heart,” he said. “But you see, no