Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture by Chelsea Cain Read Free Book Online Page A

the hall through a beaded rainbow-colored curtain and into her room. I sat down in a beanbag beside the unmade twin bed with its rumpled sheets and strong odor of dogs and urine and something else, something I did not recognize. Summer opened her closet door and withdrew albums I had never heard of. She gathered the ones she liked best and we stepped into the family room where a teenage boy lounged on a sofa with his arms around two teenage girls. ‘That’s my brother, Sky,’ she said. ‘And his girls, Tina and Lori.’ Another young man with long hair and a beard sat cross-legged on the shag carpet strumming a guitar. ‘That’s Hunter,’ she said. ‘My mother’s brother.’ An older woman with a long braid down her back rocked in a hammock. ‘That’s Nina, my father’s mother.’
    Without asking permission. Summer proceeded to play Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Manic Depression,’, ‘Break on Through to the Other Side,’ by the Doors, and Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb.’ Hunter stood up and retreated to the kitchen and returned with a bowl of steamed vegetables and a glass of water, which he passed around the room. Tina stood up and adjusted her bikini top and said she was going to make an alfalfa sandwich and pour herself a glass of goat’s milk. Sky paused from kissing Lori and patted Tina’s bottom and said, ‘Go get us something, too.’
    Tina glanced down at me. ‘Would you like something to eat?’ I remembered my father telling me never to eat or drink anything at anyone’s home: The food could be poisoned; the drinks could contain alcohol; I could get sick, maybe die. ‘No, thank you,’ I said.
    From across the room, Nina beckoned me. I expected to be reprimanded. But she gathered me into the hammock and wrapped her arms around my chest and said, ‘I want to tell you a story. About how we came here.’ Her deeply bronzed skin creased when she smiled. ‘We started in New York—Brooklyn, to be exact. Nothing to talk about there. Just smutty skies and mean-spirited people. Summer’s father met Yellow Bird at a concert in Central Park, and they decided to run away together. That was the year Summer was born. I went with them. There was nothing in New York for me. Nothing worth mentioning, that is. We packed our belongings into two duffel bags. We had a roll of quarters and hearts full of love and hope. After spending the night on a park bench, we found a trucker going west. Said he’d drop us off in Chicago. We didn’t like it there, too much like New York, and we wanted to see the Grand Canyon, so we found another trucker going west and headed out again. Never did make it to the canyon. Got stuck somewhere in Idaho. Walked twenty miles in the snow. Don’t ask me how. We were young and invincible.’ Nina hugged me tight against her chest. ‘Tell me, child, do you believe in magic?’
    I thought of the life-size statue of Jesus nailed to the cross, and the promise of eternal life. I guessed it must be magic. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘When we die, we live forever.’
    Nina nodded and looked entranced by the thought of eternity. ‘We come back sometimes, you know. Depending on how good we are and what we’ve done. I was an eagle once. I flew so high I could kiss the clouds. I bet you were a coyote or a wolf. You have the hunter in you, child. A brave soul. Of fire and water. A daughter of the moon.’ She touched my eyelids with her fingertips. ‘Even your eyes are like crescent moons.’
    I thought of my father saying I was nothing because I was a girl. In China, girls are bad luck. A curse on the family. I knew I was lucky. I had been born in America to an American woman and allowed to live, not forgotten and drowned in a well.
    But I liked Nina’s story better, of how I was the daughter of the moon, a brave soul, a hunter.
    Nina twirled a brown beaded necklace around her neck. The beads clacked in time with the rhythm of the music. Nina’s skin creased into folds above her eyebrows and