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(profile) The American Girl, Age 18

by Ian Burnette

We’re far away from Little River, South Carolina when McKayla Conahan brings up her summer job at The Brentwood, a white victorian off the Grand Strand’s Highway 17 just north of Myrtle Beach. According to The Brentwood’s website—an HTML contraption of bygone days set against a tiled background of wine corks—the house was converted into a restaurant sometime in the ‘80s and changed hands several times before finally metamorphosing into the low country French bistro it is today. But Conahan isn’t interested in The Brentwood’s history, or at least not the kind of history you might find on an informational pamphlet from the maitre’d’s station. Instead, she seems genuinely fascinated with the people she encountered there, including Kim Masson, overlord wife of executive chef Eric Masson. “The restaurant itself was haunted. There were uh, orbs,” Conahan says, one side of her mouth turning up into a wry smile. She pauses, enjoying the tension of this opening line. “[Kim] loved to take photos and catch these orbs on film,” she says. Conahan tells me about one occasion in particular where a camera set up to record any spectral activity after hours captured images of a black shadow gliding down The Brentwood’s main staircase.

After talking to Conahan for a few minutes, I notice the care with which she chooses her words. Everything she says is expertly curated, and this meticulousness seems to extend elsewhere. Not only is Conahan a curator of conversation, but of an entire image, something she has no reservations admitting to. “In seventh grade I was like ‘I’m such a Beatles fan,” she says, beginning to list what phases she can remember. She wore a bandana every day for an entire year, garnering her the nickname “Rambo” from one of her middle school peers. For a time, she noticed her uncanny resemblance to Ally Sheedy’s character Allison in the John Hughes film The Breakfast Club. A dark lipstick phase marked her sophomore year of high school. “Now I guess I just strive to be a badass,” Conahan says, pulling out the smile again, this time with teeth. While I can’t attest to her being a badass, she’s the master of a quiet charm that sneaks up on you when you least expect it. In a conversation I had with Kirby Knowlton, Conahan’s roommate, a few days later, I learned how Conahan goes about crafting her badassery at the beginning of each day. “What’s funny to me is that I think she’s done and she’s going to walk out [the door] but then that’s only the beginning. When I finally think she’s ready, she puts on something extra,” Knowlton said, evoking images of a flower crown of faux carnations I’ve seen Conahan pair with a vintage sweater with the word GEEK displayed prominently across the chest.

Today, Conahan is wearing a t-shirt advertising the town of Taos, New Mexico beneath a cutoff denim jacket and a southwestern skirt in muted reds and oranges. It’s one of the first days of spring and we’re sitting beneath an umbrella in the courtyard of the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, the residential arts high school in the new southern boomtown of Greenville, a solid five hours upstate from The Brentwood and the Atlantic Ocean. Conahan has been living here since her junior year of high school studying creative writing. Now she’s four weeks out from graduation and no doubt looking back on the work she’s done during her time here.

Conahan allowed me to read her poem “The Last House of Myrtle,” prior to our third and final meeting, and I found it to be a true testament to her ability to piece together an image from discordant elements in the context of writing, the place where one could argue this kind of curatorial prowess matters most. Conahan’s poetry is, in fact, a kind of mirror-image of her personal identity. A collage, which seems to shift constantly and yet always firmly, definitionally remain McKayla. During our discussion of her poem in a downtown coffee shop early one Sunday morning, Conahan explains her obsession with the ocean and the role it plays in her concept of home. The poem makes mention of a teenager who drowned while surfing in the wake of a tropical storm. “Here we have paddle-outs for boys reclaimed / by tropical storms like beached starfish / tossed back into the ocean’s throat,” the poem begins. “I wanted to celebrate how basically I live on an island separated by the ocean and the inter-coastal waterway, and how we’re just living in a place surrounded on all sides by something so beautiful, that can also kill us,” Conahan says. “That tension. I guess I’ve always felt it.”

Far away from the beach and her home, Conahan is dealing with some not-so-seaborne tension as she looks to the future. Recently, she’s faced more than her fair share of disappointment on the college admissions circuit, having been denied or wait-listed by the majority of schools she applied to, and ultimately enrolling at College of Charleston, a school she had considered only as a backup. “My first choices had been Swarthmore and Brown,” Conahan says. A few weeks ago, she was disappointed, but she’s matter-of-fact talking about it now. Her reasons? After living on the coast most her life, a permanent move inland would be difficult. “I would feel completely disoriented,” she says. During her life on the coast, she came to use the ocean as a natural point of reference. Living in Greenville for the past two years has taken a toll on her maritime equilibrium, though she tells me she’s recently devised a new way to ground herself. When she’s up into the small hours of the morning working on calculus with her classmate Mary McSharry, Conahan listens for the whistle of a cargo engine that rolls through town regularly. As she puts it, at night it’s just “Me, Mary, and that train.”

Nights like these happen more often than Conahan would like, but there’s no denying that calculus has been a major undertaking for her this year. When I ask her where she can be found on any given night between midnight and one a.m., she responds, “Sitting in the hallway working on calculus; sitting in the study room working on calculus; sitting in my room procrastinating.” A few days after my first interview with Conahan, I talk to her close friend Wade Nix. “It’s what she focuses on. She has a really good handle on everything except calculus,” he says. “It would be really lame if I failed calculus,” Conahan says casually, though I know she’s more serious about it than she lets on. She’s the kind of girl who marvels at her own ability to succeed in the face of a challenge. If calculus is her one axe-to-grind, there’s no way she’s going down without a fight. Even so, it gives her grief. “The first time I saw her break down, everything was happening at once for her…she just stopped and froze,” Nix says. When I ask him how she deals with the stress of a full course load, our conversations veers in an unexpected direction.

“She loves talking about the universe,” Nix says. “She’s so overwhelmed by everything close that she wants to talk about the all-encompassing.” During my conversation with Conahan in the courtyard, she starts in on yet another of her eloquent anecdotes, this time about the deep space probe Voyager I and how it has already exited our solar system. In the process, the tiny chunk of metal and it’s various accouterments have produced a recording of sound waves produced by vibrating ions in the plasma of interstellar space and successfully sent said recording back to Earth. I find this difficult to wrap my head around, but Conahan manages to explain the concept with ease. “I can only go so much with it,” says Conahan’s roommate Knowlton, who seems a bit perplexed by her roommate’s interests and desires, though I think she summarizes them well.

“McKayla wants to be surprised and taken on an adventure by a boy who plays the harmonica,” Knowlton says. Conahan tells me she’s only been on two dates in her entire life, but nearly every one of her stories seems to involve a boy, from Jack, the boyish-looking but legal bus boy at The Brentwood who Conahan admits to kissing in the blind spots of Eric Masson’s carefully monitored network of security cameras, to Storm, an eighth grade heartthrob who remains a point of fascination for Conahan to this day, to Nix, who admits there are some unresolved feelings between them. When I ask Nix what Conahan thinks about, he scratches his beard in thought before deciding. “Boys, and calculus,” he says. Later, he offered more insight. “She likes guys who frustrate her. And the guys who frustrate her are the guys she can’t quite wrap her head around.” When I asked Nix if he might fit the bill, he responded, “I don’t think I’m nearly confusing enough.”

Despite Conahan’s fascination with boys, none of her flirtations have turned into a serious relationship. But maybe that’s not what she wants. After all, Conahan says her idea of a perfect date is hanging out with someone she cares about, “before it turns into anything,” she says. It seems Conahan is more in love with the mystery of people than with their companionship, that for whatever reason she prefers to keep them at a stargazer’s distance. Her interest in boys suddenly seems akin to her interest in the Voyager I spacecraft, a far off, beautiful thing glinting in the darkness of the vacuum, unspoiled by a complete knowledge of it’s inner-workings.

The second time I meet Conahan, we’re in a different part of the school, a smaller courtyard bounded by the library on one side and the creative writing department on the other. The temperature couldn’t be more perfect. There’s a strong breeze coming in, forecasting thunderstorms later in the day, but neither of us seem to mind. Conahan is wearing a black pleated skirt. The wind plays tricks with her dark brown hair, which is usually perfectly shaped. Mid-neck length. High volume. “I wish I had photosynthesis,” she says out of the blue. I could tell she was thinking about something before she said it. “There’s an old man in India. His body has started to do photosynthesis in some strange way and he has this little sugar ball in the back of his throat,” Conahan says, gesturing to her neck. “He never has to eat.” Her face goes back to some deeper place. I wait patiently. “I might sneeze,” she says. A moment passes. “Nope.” This is how Conahan is. She procures these small, beautiful things in the midst of the utter banality of the world around us. I come to expect this from her so wholly that an oncoming sneeze at first appears to be a spark of inspiration.

Later in our conversation, I bring up her father, Cormac, who has been away for long periods at a time ever since she can remember. He works on oil rigs in the remote corners of the world, operating ROVs, robotic submarines that inspect wells for leaks. Now he installs them, but at least for now this still necessitates him spending months at a time away from home. Right now he’s in South Korea. “He’s going to be home for graduation because he definitely doesn’t want to miss that,” Conahan says.

Conahan’s family maintains a strong sense of their Irish heritage, and along with that an interest in symbols. Her father has a number of tattoos. “My dad’s got a Celtic-weave arm band…And there’s a wolf howling at the moon across his chest,” Conahan says. The wolf is a symbol of her family. She hopes to get a tattoo of Canis Major, a constellation that depicts a dog and integrates Sirius, the dog star. She also wants a tattoo of the maritime signaling flags the sixteen year old protagonist of the Studio Ghibli film From Up on Poppy Hill raises each day to beckon the return of her own father, a sailor lost at sea. Conahan recounts how her mother used to lead she and her brother in a song with a somewhat similar purpose. Here, in the courtyard, she sings a bit of it for me, completely impromptu. “Bring back my daddy to me,” she sings. When she finishes, her face is completely solemn.

This summer, now a mere three weeks away, Conahan will return to Myrtle Beach. She’ll be in her element again. The edge of the world will be at arms length, or at least at the other end of a five minute drive. Maybe she’ll get the tattoos she told me about or maybe she won’t. Maybe she’ll meet a boy. Maybe things will be different this time or maybe they’ll be just the same. Maybe she’ll bus tables at The Brentwood again. In any case, I have no doubt she will continue to be in control of her own life, and to let no choice go unmade or unconsidered. And I have no doubt she’ll keep a close eye on the universe and let us know should Voyager I leave the Kuiper Belt and charge head-first into the Milky Way.

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