Katiana clutched their Lululemon bags and glared hard at me via perfect cat-eye liquid liner. Sean got busy scrolling through his photos to show us the best shots of the bears.

“Muiriel,” Kira sighed. “Please tell me you did not just invite that chaos to come sniffing around the tent flap of your life.”

She was right. I was breaking self-imposed rules left and right taunting those girls on Kira’s behalf; I was off the rails, but I couldn’t seem to stop doing it. I tossed my granola bar to Kira. “They were already in the tent,” I said. “They’re all talk. They’re nothing. Screw them.”

“Screw who?” Sean asked. “Oh, wait, look, here’s one of her eating blueberries! Can you believe how close we got?”

We?

I leaned near him to see the image on his phone: a beautiful, fat black bear nosing her way into a berry bush. “Who do you—did you hike with?” I asked as casually as I could.

“Myself. But halfway I met my mom.”

“His mom,” Kira said, eyeballing me.

“She’s a park ranger in the Cascades; she’s stationed on Rainier till winter.”

I nearly choked. “Your mother is a park ranger?”

“She is.”

“On Rainier?”

“Yes.”

“But wasn’t your dad also…”

“Yes, he was.”

Kira nodded. “Royal family. That’ll do.”

Yes, it would.

“What the…?” Kira suddenly stood and waved. “My aunt is here. Hey, Francine!”

I followed Kira’s eyes, and of course there was only one Francine on the island; there she stood, chatting it up with the principal.

My foster parent. Talking to my school principal.

My heart seized.

The nearly adult, rational part of me understands that not every school administration official is out to get me.

However.

The neural pathways in my brain were carved by a lifelong master class of observing how adults interacted with the kids I lived with, and I learned as a very small child that principals, like police officers, are terrifying. Not as people, necessarily, but more who they are. What they do.

Suspicious of children in foster care, ready with blame and itching to “teach us a lesson,” they are uniform and business-casual, sport-coat-wearing embodiments of capital A authority, hell-bent on muddying the waters of a kid’s clean record because they can, and I have avoided interacting with them at all costs.

This is not logical, and obviously not fair. But the lizard brain does not want open and honest dialogue with those we are conditioned to mistrust—it demands only survival.