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 soft cones that squish down with your body weight, but hard plastic cones, prim and pointed as 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, Coco had heard, though she didn’t know exactly what.

When Ms. Harper had passed out the simulation’s rainbow-coded biography cards last week, Coco had not been assigned to the Culver family. Her lemon-yellow card listed her as the matriarch of the Bell family, who had lived right here in historic Lexington, Massachusetts. Coco couldn’t bear to be a matriarch. While the class wandered around collecting their families, Coco asked Devon, the Bell patriarch, if she could be a child in the Bell family 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’d make up some woman who’d long since perished. Recalling her benevolence could pass the time on the trail.

“You want to be dead?” asked Devon.

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

“Why?”

Coco wouldn’t say so to Devon, but she was uneasy in dresses and skirts. The wind could catch the fabric and expose the part of her she hated most, that felt so wrong and that she pretended had withered off her. In the role of a child, she’d be an eighteen hundreds tomboy. As matriarch there was no option. She’d have to look like a full woman. Ever since Coco’s body had started developing a few months ago, she focused hard on the mildew on the ceiling while she washed herself, in order to forget her body. Only when the water was dirtied and lathered with soap 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.”

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

Devon shrugged.

At first Coco considered not traveling the Oregon Trail at all. She’d never played sick before, and that seemed like the type of trick every kid should pull once. But missing the day would be a crazy move. Coco loved Ms. Harper and would never lie to her. But beyond that, the Oregon Trail was the culmination of the fifth graders’ hard work through Bridge Elementary, where you got to be a pioneer like those who’d traipsed around Plymouth Rock. Her classmates had chattered about the day since kindergarten, when they’d first glimpsed the wagons pulled through the field by what looked like small adults. All through middle and high school, the Oregon Trail would be reminisced about as the pinnacle of their education.