Pioneer

The Oregon Trail ran from the back entrance of Bridge Elementary down through the school yard to the edge of the woods. Cones marked the journey. Not the satisfying rubber cones you could squish down with your body weight but hard plastic cones, prim and pointed like shark teeth. The cones looped around the tree line to the right, and that’s all Coco and the rest of the Culver family could see from the starting point. Who knew where the trail went after that? There were dangers, she’d heard, though she didn’t know exactly what.

Coco had not been assigned to the Culver family when Ms. Harper passed out the biography cards last week. Coco’s card listed her as the matriarch of the Bell family. But she didn’t want to be a matriarch. While the class wandered around collecting their families, Coco asked Devon, the Bell patriarch, if she could be a child instead.

“We already have two children,” Devon said. “And there can’t be children without a matriarch.”

“Sure there can,” said Coco. “The matriarch could have died.” They could make up some woman who had long since perished. Recalling her benevolence could pass the time on the trail.

“You want to be dead?” asked Devon.

“No,” Coco said. Not right now, anyway. “I just don’t want to be the Bell matriarch. I want to be a Bell child.”

“Why?”

Coco didn’t want to say so to Devon, but she was uneasy in dresses and skirts, knowing the wind could disrupt the fabric and expose the part of her that she hated to look at, that felt wrong attached to her, and that she sometimes pretended she didn’t know was there. In the role of a child she could fake it, pretend to be an eighteen hundreds tomboy. As a matriarch there was no option. She would have to look like a woman. Ever since Coco’s body had started to develop a few months ago, she couldn’t take a bath without laying washcloths over her torso and between her legs, so she could forget about the wrongness of her body. As the cloth chilled it suctioned to her, stiffened like plaster around her form. Only then could she bear to look down.

“I don’t have the right clothes,” she said.

“Ms. Harper said the girls could staple a sheet,” Devon said. “A long sheet. Like touching the ground.”

“Wouldn’t it get dirty?” Coco pictured herself as a bedraggled angel.

Devon shrugged.

At first Coco thought she wouldn’t travel the Oregon Trail at all. She’d never played sick before, and that seemed like the type of mischief every kid should try once. But missing the day would be a crazy move. First, because Coco loved Ms. Harper and would never lie to her. But besides that, the Oregon Trail was the culmination of the fifth graders’ hard work through Bridge Elementary. Her classmates had talked about the day since kindergarten, when they’d first glimpsed the wagons pulled through the field by what looked like small adults. The Oregon Trail would probably be reminisced about all through middle and high school as the pinnacle of their education.

The day before the Oregon Trail, Coco asked the other families in Ms. Harper’s class if she could join up with them.

“Do you need a baby?” she asked the Murdochs and the Hancocks, the Bakers and the Blackthorns. “Or an adolescent?”

“No,” they said, if they bothered with her at all. Even though it was still regular school for another day, the families were already insular and protective, clumping around desks between subjects.

“Aren’t you a matriarch yourself?” the Blackthorn matriarch asked.

“I don’t want to be,” said Coco. “I want to be a kid.”

“That’s nonsense. You should accept your station.”

“Yeah,” said the Blackthorn son, who blew his nose on his math work sheets. “Matriarchy is an incredible honor. Women rule.”

“Want to trade?” Coco asked.

“That’s gay,” he said cheerfully, as though that might be a good thing. “But thank you very...