From Kay

In the Tuba City Boarding School, there is a sign near the middle grade bathroom that has a picture of the Vulcan Salute, and the caption ‘Wash your hands, it’s only logical’. A girl in my class came in one day with a glittering necklace that spelled ‘I ♥ Justin Bieber’.

With the familiar pop culture around me it was easy to beat off feelings of homesickness, until I stepped outside. For miles, not a single tree. Not even a tall scrub. As a New Englander, that’s what shocked me the most. I expressed this shock to one of my peers, who patiently suggested that was maybe because we were nearly on the other side of the country.

If you drove you would see a scrub or two, a couple of tumble weed, a lot of mountains, and an occasional cactus that looked straight out of some ‘South of the Border’ T-shirt. We spent a lot of time driving to many a far away state park, and even to places only a few steps away. That was another thing-- we rarely walked, and nobody else seemed to either. I was used to being stopped by a J walker every couple feet, but not in Tuba City.

Instead, at a certain time of the school day, my whole class went outside and ran around the schoolyard. The ‘sick’ kids got to walk. Once we came back to our starting point, the whole class was heaving, including me. Their teacher, Mrs. Henderson, had made me their leader after seriously misjudging me as ‘the running type’. But she did make a few good calls, such as making me tutor her students in some of their fifth grade vocabulary words. Given some study prompters, I actually managed to coax some discussion out of them, although only a few really got into it. The same thing happened with Georgia O’Keeffe. Their answers to the questions I peppered throughout the story were usually short and filled with awkward silences, but they always reached a good point.

Once and a while, I’d get a few seconds to look around the room. There were a few posters telling them to ‘THINK!!’. A long number chart hung above the whiteboard, stamped at the end with the classic worm in the apple that has unnerved many a generation of students.

Even with no J walking, even with no trees, even with the far reaching effects of Justin Bieber, I felt comfortable here...almost at home