Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida Page B

and hot. We spent the first two days chopping down and dragging away the bushes on the site. During the third day, our excavation group scouted out the grounds and superimposed a grid, which we constructed out of six-inch wooden posts and miles of white rope. The rope turned brown after a day.
    The seventy volunteers were divided into groups of ten. Matt was my group’s supervisor. He was in his late twenties, short but strong, with brown eyes that squinted so you couldn’t tell if he was laughing with you or at you. He took off his shirt after ten in the morning and didn’t put it back on until night. His spine curved like an S .
    I was assigned to a plot called G1, four feet by four feet.
    The real challenge was its depth—I was only allowed to plumb a centimeter at a time. I spent the entirety of one morning sweeping dirt until I found small seashells: Montana used to be underwater.
    Matt flirted with the women during lunch at the site, when we relaxed in the shade of a pitched yellow tent. No one bothered to talk to me, except to make sure I was having a good time. A librarian from Idaho checked the inside flap of a book I was reading, to see if I had borrowed it from a library. She had two long hairs hanging from her chin. After I’d finished eating, I would recline on my backpack and pretend to sleep so no one would have to feel bad for me.
    Matt would give massages to the women, and, once, to a man. His ex-girlfriend had been a masseuse, he bragged. A

    masseuse and an archaeologist. I pictured them sitting around giving massages and talking about bones.
    On the fourth day of the dig, Matt came by my plot. “How’s it going?” he said. I was squatting. He stood above me.
    “Okay,” I said. I showed him some tiny bones I had come across.
    “Fossilized turtle vertebrae,” Matt said. “Pretty common.” “Do you think I’ll find something big?”
    “Sure,” he said.
    “What’s the best thing you’ve ever found?”
    “I was on a dig in New Zealand where we found skeletons.” He looked down at his chest and picked something invisible off of it.
    “Really?”
    “Yeah, I even found the skeleton of a woman and a sheep side by side, like they died fucking.”
    “Wow,” I said and looked at his sandals. He wasn’t wearing the snake guards the rest of us wore. His toes were sunburned.
    During the second week, Matt told our group that a friend of his who lived in town was having a party. We were all invited. After dinner, our group piled into two cars.
    We walked into the kitchen of the house as though best friends, but within a minute, after we’d made ourselves gin and tonics, I found myself alone. The kitchen was crowded with locals, who looked showered. Those of us on the dig bathed in the lake, the dirt trickling down our legs and caking around our ankles.

    A hand took my red cup. How could I have already finished my drink? The hand vanished, and a moment later, it reap-peared.
    “The vodka’s almost out,” said a voice. Matt. “Getting you a refill while there’s still some left.”
    “It was gin,” I said, taking a sip of the new, stronger drink. He shrugged. He was wearing a sweatshirt that said COLLEGE . “So what’s your number?” he said.
    “My number?”
    “Yeah, how many countries have you been to?”
    I tried to suppress a laugh. “Counting America, one.”
    He had asked me the question so I would ask him. He was waiting. “And you?” I said. “What’s your—” I paused— “number?”
    “Sixteen,” he said. “But I’ve only been to four continents.
    So far.”
    He told me a story about a Turkish bath in Istanbul, where he’d gone with his ex-girlfriend. She got felt up. “Not by me,” he added. He looked like he needed to spit.
    We had somehow moved into a corner of the kitchen. I spotted a mousetrap on the floor by the stove, near his feet.
    “Watch out,” I said, and pointed.
    He took a step away from the mousetrap, closer to me. “I like the little gap