The Interestings A Novel

EIGHT





Goodman Wolf, the Prep-School Park Perp, a clumsy and unmemorable name, spent the earliest hours of the bicentennial year alternately sobbing and sleeping in a holding cell in the detectives’ area at the local precinct, a windowless room he shared with two drunk men who had no memory of what they’d been told they’d done. One crime apparently involved public urination, the other assault. After Dick Peddy arrived and spent a long time inside, he came out to the waiting area and told the Wolfs and Ash’s friends that there was no way that Goodman would be arraigned today. He would have to spend what was left of the night here, and then probably the next day too. Then he would be brought down to 100 Centre Street and be put in another cell to wait for his arraignment. There was no point in everyone waiting here any longer, the lawyer told them, and he promised that he would take care of everything and stay in close touch with Gil and Betsy. As for Cathy, no one would give out any information about where she’d been taken.

“Happy bicentennial year, everyone,” Ash said under her breath as they walked out onto the street. She looked so small in her lavender party dress and incongruous ski parka.

A few photographers and reporters were waiting, and a couple of them stepped forward and said, “Did your son rape that girl in Tavern on the Green?” “Is he innocent?” “Is Goodman actually a ‘good man’?” They seemed rude at the time, but in retrospect they were astonishingly respectful, and when Betsy Wolf, short, graceful, and patrician, said, “All right, that’s enough now,” they obeyed her and backed off.

On the street, Ethan was the one to pull Ash close. Jonah hung back, uncertain in his role as Ash’s ex-boyfriend. It was as if he didn’t think he should presume she’d want to take comfort from him; over his entire life, he never wanted to presume. Both Wolf parents were too upset to talk anymore to their daughter and her friends, and they walked up ahead unsteadily, holding on to each other. Jules might have come and stood beside Ash, her closest friend, and looped her arm through hers, but Ash’s problems seemed suddenly overwhelming and far outside Jules’s understanding. So instead Jules walked alone, a few paces behind her. Ethan, though, immediately knew that Ash needed someone to help her right then. Without asking, he put an arm around Ash and brought her against him; her head promptly fell against his rounded shoulder as they walked down the street in the blue morning.

Taxis were procured, and good-byes said. In the last minutes, Ethan Figman kept holding on to Ash Wolf in a way that he’d never held on to her before. Jules saw this and didn’t comment, for it was clearly only an aberration. Ethan told Ash now that he thought she should go home and try to sleep. “I want you to get a few hours in, okay?” Jules heard him say. “Just shut everything out. Lie down in your bed with all those stupid stuffed animals—”

“They’re not stupid.” Ash was smiling a little; Ethan could cheer her up even now.

“Well, in my view they actually are a little stupid,” he said. “Eeyore. And Raggedy Ann with her bizarre head of yarn hair. You know, you could tie that yarn into knots, put her in a brown uniform, and call her Knottsy. With a K. Like Nazi.”

“You are insane,” Ash said, but she was still smiling.

“And there’s also that creepy Poppin’ Fresh Pillsbury Doughboy stuffed animal of yours, who’s all gray looking and, what, supposed to look like he’s made of raw dough? How unappealing is that? Some kids have teddy bears; you have a raw dough doll.”

“Give me a break, I sent away for him when I was eight,” said Ash, “with Pillsbury crescent roll proofs of purchase.”

“He’s not technically even an animal at all,” Ethan said. “But go lie down with all of them and get some sleep. I’ll take care of you.” The words were said lightly but with feeling; he was signing on, this was the moment it happened, and Jules saw it but didn’t know it.

Goodman’s story would have to be gone over carefully, again and again, and Cathy’s too. Jules shaped the narrative for herself to try to get it to make sense. In the floating sentimentality of New Year’s Eve, she thought, Goodman and Cathy had taken up where they’d left off when they’d broken up. In her version of the scene, Goodman and Cathy had been making out in that storage room, then it went further, and at some point Cathy probably remembered Troy, and tried to pull away. But Goodman couldn’t exactly stop. He was too close, he had to keep going, and Cathy’s protests sounded to him like ardor.

Why would she accuse him? Because, Dick Peddy later said, she was embarrassed. She worried that Troy would break up with her if he found out about this little adventure. No one was allowed to talk to Cathy, Dick Peddy had warned, for she was now the accuser, the opposition. But Cathy was also their friend, and even though she occupied a slightly odd role in the group—the sexual, moody dancer, the emotionally overwhelming girl—she was one of them, and she wouldn’t do such a vindictive thing to Goodman, and yet for some reason she had.

From then on, whenever Jules went to the Labyrinth, Gil and Betsy talked about the case, and also, often, about money. The legal bills were enormous—“grotesque,” said Gil Wolf. There was very little further conversation about the Democratic primaries, or the upcoming presidential election. No one cared about any of that anymore. And there were no more last mutterings about Watergate or the retreat from Vietnam or that movie Taxi Driver that was opening soon and was supposed to be so intense.

“Dick Peddy’s fees are disgraceful, and our wives have known each other since Smith,” Gil said one night at dinner, cutting into Betsy’s stuffed pork loin. “We’re all going to be in the poorhouse.”

“That’s not exactly true,” Betsy said.

“Would you like to have a look at our bills? Because I’m happy to turn them over to you, dear. Then you’ll see what kind of shape this has put our finances in.”

“You don’t have to be sarcastic to Mom,” said Goodman.

“Fine, I’ll be sarcastic to you, then. I’ll talk rapturously to you about how one day you’ll pay me back, no doubt, with all your earnings from your architectural career. Until your first building collapses because you didn’t pay attention during Structural Soundness 101.”

“Gil, stop it,” said Betsy, placing her hand on his arm. “Stop it right now.”

“What am I doing?”

“Creating tension,” she said, and her eyes filled and her mouth trembled and turned downward.

“I’m not creating it. It was already here.”

“I just want everything to be okay,” Betsy said. “I want to get past this bad part of our lives, and then Goodman can go off to college and study whatever he likes. Architecture . . . or . . . Zulu tribes. I just want it all to be okay. I want our family to be happy again. I want this to be over.”

Goodman was supposed to be going to Bennington College in Vermont in the fall, having been accepted there early decision (strings had had to be pulled, even for admission to such an alternative institution, given Goodman’s unstellar school record), but now the dean of student affairs had written a formal, chilly letter saying that Goodman couldn’t matriculate until his legal situation had been “resolved favorably.” In order for him to go to college in September, there would have to be a trial first; but the trial, Dick Peddy had warned, might not take place for a long time. The courts in New York were packed; city crime was remarkably high, and waiting for a trial lately was like waiting on line at the gas pump.

January stamped forward, with Goodman going to school each morning and seeing Dr. Spilka three times a week in the afternoon, and coming home only to disappear into his bedroom to drink work-boot vodka or smoke a joint, trying to both exist and not exist. Ash called Jules one weeknight and said, “My brother is really in trouble.”

“I know that.”

“I don’t just mean legally, I mean emotionally.”

From the next room Jules could hear her sister Ellen’s roaring blow-dryer, and the same Neil Young album that seemed to be on autoplay, with the singer’s thin voice now singing, “There were children crying / and colors flying / all around the chosen ones.” She tugged on the yellow cord of the phone until its coils unwound themselves, and the connection thinned out and disappeared for a moment, then was restored. Jules sat in her closet on a few pairs of different-colored clogs, settling in to the conversation. “Don’t forget that this happens with him,” Jules said. “He gets really screwed up, and then he’s okay again.”

“I don’t think he’ll be okay this time,” said Ash. “Dad is so furious. And Dick Peddy tried to reason with Cathy’s lawyer, but no, no, Cathy and her parents insist on going ahead with it. There’s really going to be a trial, Jules, can you believe it? My brother could actually go to jail for twenty-five years; it happens to innocent people all the time. He would be totally destroyed. Instead of doing whatever he’s meant to do with his life, he would become this grizzled con. Can you imagine that? This is just so surreal, and none of us can stand it. But Dick Peddy says that no one in my family is allowed to call Cathy; it might look like we were putting pressure on her.”

“That makes sense to me,” said Jules, who knew nothing.

“I guess.”

There was silence, and Jules thought the connection had died again. “Hello?” she said.

“I’m still here.” Ash paused, then said, “Maybe you could call her. Or even go see her.”

“Me?”

“Dick Peddy didn’t tell you not to, did he?”

“No,” said Jules after a long, considered moment.

“Then will you go?” Ash asked. “Will you go for me?”

• • •

Jules Jacobson arranged to meet Cathy Kiplinger at the fountain at Lincoln Center on a Saturday in February 1976 at noon, after Cathy’s dance class ten blocks south at Alvin Ailey. Snow was falling heavily on the plaza that day, and the pavement was iced over to the extent that the girls could have skated toward each other. There was Cathy in a long, eggplant-colored down coat, her face flushed red from the extreme heat of dancing and the extreme cold of the day. They warily nodded hello—it was the first time they’d seen each other since New Year’s Eve—and then they walked across Broadway and sat in a booth at a coffee shop. Cathy quickly drank down the first of several Tabs, “with extra ice,” she instructed the waitress, as though the ice might dilute this diet drink down to something so thin that not only wouldn’t it add a fraction of fat to a body on the precipice, it would also reverse the fat-gathering process. It was too late, though; Cathy had been right about her physical self that first summer; her breasts were too big for a professional dancer’s. “Sacks of mail,” she’d called them, and now they looked even bigger, and so did her hips. She did what she could to forestall bursting womanhood, drinking Tabs with extra ice and eating very little, but her body was taking its own form. Troy had a perfect dancer’s physique, thick and powerful. It was different for men. His arms could lift ballerinas into the air, and would do so for a long time with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, causing a need for cortisone shots and shoulder surgeries. But along the way he would dance constantly, and would get to do what he’d always wanted to do, never feeling he was settling or selling out or giving in to commercial forces. Cathy would have a very different life.

Now, at the start of it, she sat with her Tab, picking at her nails; Jules saw that those formerly perfect ovals were now like little slices embedded in her fingers. Each nail had been relentlessly chewed on since New Year’s Eve and was surrounded by shredded, inflamed, slightly puffed-out skin. If sex was like trying to eat the other person, this was like trying to eat yourself. Cathy lifted her hand and tore at her thumb skin; Jules almost expected to see blood on her mouth, as if Cathy were an animal that had been caught in a moment of predation and bliss. A cat with a bird in its mouth, staring defiantly at a human being and saying, So? What are you looking at?

Cathy was casual in her mutilation, and then she took another swig of Tab—a fingernail and finger-skin chaser. Jules remembered how, the year her father was dying, she had savaged her own hair. She hadn’t wanted her hair to look like that, and now Cathy certainly wouldn’t want her hands to look like this. But she drank her Tab and she ate her fingers, busy at the table, whether listening to Jules or, more of the time, talking. She didn’t even seem to find it strange or embarrassing to be doing this in front of someone else. But the gratification was so important, the relief so necessary, that she seemed like someone masturbating in a coffee shop. Jules wanted to say, “Cathy, are you all right? You’re frightening the shit out of me,” but what a stupid question that would have been, for Cathy had already told them all the answer.

Jules recalled the sexy go-go dance Cathy had done for the girls in their teepee, the wow of it all as she moved her snaky body freely, mostly unembarrassed by its encumbrances and also proud of its special powers. But now, Jules thought, that was over. No more freedom. No more pride. No more unselfconscious teepee dancing for Cathy Kiplinger ever again.

In college in Buffalo freshman year, Jules would attend a Take Back the Night march, walking through dark streets among hundreds upon hundreds of somber women carrying candles. Many marches like that one sprang up around the country, so different from the raucous SlutWalks that would come thirty years later, when young women would wear whatever the hell they wanted—baby doll pajamas, see-through blouses, leopard costumes—taking pictures of one another and posting them online seconds later. In the old days of Take Back the Night, you could march with other women and feel that all the rapists of the world were small and powerless. You with your candles had the power. Sisters! The men, those dead-eyed, furious losers who grabbed you in parking garages, had nothing at all.

“It didn’t happen the way he says,” Cathy said now, jamming the straw into the ice of her Tab like a little pickax. “It happened the way I said. I wouldn’t make it up.” She took a bite of her fingernail, and a string of skin became separated, unpeeled.

“I believe you, of course. But I guess I don’t think he would make it up either,” said Jules.

Cathy Kiplinger looked across the table. Cathy was mature, and Jules was a child, the best friend of the beautiful and anguished girl, sent here to do her bidding. “Why do you think that?” Cathy said. “He cheated in school, you know. He looked at another boy’s paper. Just ask him. That’s why he had to switch schools. They made him leave.”

“I know all about it,” said Jules.

Cathy had a distinctly cartilaginous nose; though she wasn’t crying now, her eyes were red rimmed because she’d been crying a great deal since New Year’s. “Honest, Jules,” said Cathy, “it’s like you just don’t know anything. You’re just so goony about him, and about Ash, and about good old Betsy and Gil. You think they all saved you from a boring life. But unlike you, I don’t despise my family. I actually love them.”

“I don’t despise my family,” Jules said meekly, shocked to have been discovered, her voice miserably disappearing into her throat as she spoke.

“My parents have been wonderful to me,” said Cathy. “And so has Troy, though I doubt he’s going to stick around much longer. I’m a mess, and he knows it. I can’t concentrate. I cry a lot. I’m not exactly the greatest girlfriend. The teachers at Nightingale are all being really nice about it, but this thing changed me, and now I’m different.” She leaned forward and said, “Goodman pushed himself into me. Jules, are you hearing me? I wasn’t ready; I was dry. Do you even know what I’m talking about—dry?” Jules nodded, though she also thought: Wait, do I really know what that means? She sort of did and sort of didn’t. Sex and secretions still existed only in half-consciousness for her. They lurked like light under a door, or more like water flooding under a door. Soon the whole floor would be covered, but not just yet. “I was dry and it hurt, it really hurt,” said Cathy, “and I yelled at him to stop, but you know what he did?” Her mouth went wavy. “He just smiled down at me like he thought it was funny, and he kept doing his thing. It was like he was turning a crank. Can you feel it now, when I say it?”

Yes, Jules felt it, and her jaw went stiff and her thighs automatically tensed; she and Cathy were on the rack together, and no one could help them. She wanted to eat her own fingers now. She looked at Cathy in desperation. Jules blinked, attempting to loosen herself. The crank turned the other way, releasing her. She regained herself and said the only sentence she could think to say. It would disappoint and disgust Cathy Kiplinger forever, but she lamely said it anyway: “You’ll probably start to feel a little better at some point, you know.”

Cathy took a moment, then said, “And what is this opinion based on? Some special research you did?”

“No,” said Jules, and she felt herself go warm-faced. “I guess I just meant that I want you to feel better.”

“Of course you do. You just want it to go away. But none of you knows what it felt like when he was f*cking me and I got abrasions, okay? That’s what the doctor said when he examined me. Labial abrasions. How’s that going to sound in court?”

Cathy was sitting across from Jules in the booth with her inflamed face and tiny, hard eyes and ten maimed fingers. Somehow Jules had really believed that Cathy would “come around” and that the force field of sentimentality that surrounded the six of them would be the catalyst. Jules would be able to go to the Wolfs’ apartment tonight knowing that Cathy was bagged and passive. Jules would be the heroine of this story, and all the Wolfs would admire her, including Goodman, who would rise out of his extended dark mood and give Jules a crushing hug. She pictured his long face and big strong teeth.

“Couldn’t you have misinterpreted what happened?” Jules said. “Isn’t there a way that that’s possible, even slightly?”

“You mean, isn’t there another view? Like Rashomon?”

“Yes, something like that,” said Jules. Ethan had taken her to see that film recently at the Waverly Theater in the Village; it was one of his favorites, and she’d wanted to love it too. “I loved it theoretically,” she’d said to him afterward as they walked out; this was the way she’d learned to speak.

“This is nothing like Rashomon,” said Cathy, and she stood up. “God, Jules, you are so incredibly weak.”

“I know,” said Jules. Cathy’s remark seemed to be the truest thing that anyone had ever said about her. In times of self-laceration she’d thought herself to be ignorant, awkward, unschooled, clumsy. But weak was what she really was. Even more miserably now, speaking out of that weakness, Jules asked, “But do you really need to take him to court? He could be sent to jail for twenty-five years. His life could go one way, or it could go another. All because of something that was maybe a misunderstanding. We all only get one life,” she added.

“I’m fully aware of how many lives we get. My one life has already been f*cked up,” Cathy said. “And do I need to take him to court? Yes, I do. If it was a stranger who had jumped out at me in a stairwell, you’d be saying, ‘Oh, Cathy, you have to take him to court, and we’ll all be there to provide moral support.’ But you’re not saying that, because it’s Goodman. And because you’re so completely captivated by him, and by those supposedly magical summers at camp, and by some idea about the end of childhood, and being accepted for the first time in your life. Troy can’t even believe that I hung around with all of you for so long. Your totally privileged group. You know, he was on scholarship at Spirit-in-the-Woods. He always felt completely different from everyone else there. That camp was extremely white, have you ever noticed that? I mean, my parents wanted me to go to a traditional all-girls camp in Maine where you wear uniforms and play sports all day and salute the flag, but I told them no thank you, I already go to an all-girls school. I wanted something different. I wanted to dance; I wanted to get outside my little insular life. But just look at Spirit-in-the-Woods. When Troy first got there, he said he felt like a freak.”

“So did I!” said Jules. “It’s not just him. And by the way, I was on scholarship too, just so you know.”

Cathy was unimpressed. “The point is that you got caught up in some fantasy, and now you can’t see anything at all. But I can.” Cathy’s mouth took on a feral shape. “The only one of you who’s tried to find out how I am is Ethan,” she said.

“Ethan?” Jules was really surprised.

“On that first night, after it happened, he left a long, tortured, Ethan-y message on my parents’ answering machine.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Yes. And he still calls me. Mostly I rant, and he listens. He never tells me to buck up, or whatever the rest of you think I should do. Sometimes,” she admitted, “I even call him.”

“You call Ethan? I had absolutely no idea.” Dick Peddy had expressly said they were not to talk to Cathy; Ethan had apparently just ignored this order, without clearing it with Ash or anyone.

“But the rest of you, Jesus,” said Cathy. “You were all my closest friends—not that you and I ever had that much to say, let’s be honest.”

Jules couldn’t fully explain herself. She had said all the wrong things here from the start. In Improv class at camp Jules had once acted out a scene based on “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and she’d had to recite a line to the boy facing her across a tea table, the way Cathy faced Jules now. She’d looked into that boy’s eyes and said, “‘That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.’”

It wasn’t supposed to go like this with Cathy. “We should have tried to talk to you,” Jules said. “You’re right, we really should have. But it was complicated. That lawyer was so insistent. It scared me. I’d never been in a situation like this before.”

“Truly, you make me want to puke,” Cathy said, winding her crocheted scarf around her neck. “When are you going to learn to think for yourself, Jules? You’re going to have to eventually. You might as well start now.”

Then the teenaged version of Cathy Kiplinger was gone from the coffee shop and summarily gone from them. In twenty-five years she would return through a time portal in a changed, late-middle-aged-woman form. Her hair would be artificially made the same yellow color it had once naturally been, her breasts would be surgically reduced after two decades of chronic back problems, and her tense face would shine from low-concentration Retin-A cream and the occasional oxygen facial, but the tension itself would never be unlocked and released.

“Here you go,” said the waitress, lightly slapping down the check. Cathy had drunk six Tabs. Jules paid for them, then in a sick fog took the subway up to the Wolfs’ apartment, where Ash was waiting.

“Well?” said Ash. “What did she say?”

Jules threw herself facedown onto the cluttered bed and said, “She’s a total mess.”

“So?”

“What do you mean, so? Isn’t the question why is she a total mess? If she was making it all up, would she really be such a mess? Wouldn’t she be more of a fake mess? More, you know, photogenic? More studied?”

After a few seconds of silence Jules craned her head around from where she lay on the bed, in order to see Ash in the swivel chair at her desk. Even from this angle, she could see that her mood state had changed. Ash stood and said, “I think you should go home now, Jules.”

Jules scrambled to stand too. “What? Why?”

“Because I can’t believe you’re saying this.”

“We can’t even discuss it as a possibility?” Jules said. “Cathy’s our friend too. She’s never made things up before. She seemed genuinely f*cked up, Ash. You should see her fingernails.”

“What do her fingernails have to do with anything?”

“They’re all chewed up, like a cannibal ate them.”

“And because of her fingernails, my brother’s guilty?”

“No. But I just think we owe it to her to—”

“Please go,” said Ash Wolf, and she actually went to the door and held out her arm. Hot-faced, shocked, Jules walked out of the room and down the hall, passing the gaggle of family photos. In the distance, she saw Goodman in the living room with headphones on, nodding dully to a private, thudding beat.

Nearly two weeks of an unbearable freeze-out passed. Jules cowered and hulked in Underhill, walking through the school halls blankly, paying no attention in class. If she couldn’t be at the Labyrinth with Ash and Goodman and their parents, then what was the point? Jonah stayed in touch sometimes, and Ethan tried to cheer her up on the phone every night. “Ash will come around,” Ethan said.

“I don’t know. How do you manage to walk this tightrope?” Jules asked him. “Having everyone like you and respect you no matter what you do.”

There was silence on the line except for Ethan’s mouth breathing. Finally he said, “Let me see. I guess, maybe, I don’t rush to conclusions. By the way,” he said after another pause, lightly, as if trying not to make her feel too bad about what he was about to say. “Jonah and I had dinner at the Labyrinth last night.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. It felt very weird not having you there. But even if you were there, it would’ve been weird because it’s very tense. In case you’re interested, Betsy made sea bass and orzo.”

“What’s orzo?”

“It’s this new kind of pasta, shaped like rice but bigger. You’d like it. The food was good, but the mood over there is getting even worse. They’re all scared to death of the trial, but no one says it. Goodman’s used to having everything work out for him. Even after getting kicked out of Collegiate, they got him into Walden, right? And he’s a powerful guy. He can’t believe things aren’t working out this time; that none of the fail-safes are in place. He thinks he might really be in danger now. He pulled me aside after dinner and told me that he needed me to know he didn’t do anything wrong. I told Ash it’s not my place to figure out what happened that night at Tavern on the Green, or what should happen now. I said that’s what a trial is for—like I even know what I’m talking about. My credentials are basically that my dad and I used to sit around and watch Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law.”

Jules said, “Did Ash say anything about me?”

“She said she misses you.”

“Well, she’s very angry with me.”

“No, not really,” said Ethan. “Not anymore. I’ve been smoothing that out. She’s embarrassed that she made you leave the apartment. She wishes she could take it back, but she doesn’t think you’d let her.”

“I’d let her.”

So Ethan brokered the peace between them. He refused to attempt to broker an end to the legal fight between Goodman and Cathy—it was corrupt to try and interfere with the legal process, he said—but he was happy to help Ash and Jules become friends again. Later that night, Ash called Jules and said, “I’m so sorry I acted like that. I don’t know if you can forgive me, but I hope you can.” Jules told her yes, of course she already forgave her. Jules didn’t need to say that she knew Goodman hadn’t done anything wrong; instead, she only had to agree that the situation was horrible, and that the trial would correct the wrongness of the accusation; and she had to agree to return on Saturday to the Labyrinth.

Over the next weeks, Ethan was the only one of them who really spoke at all about Cathy Kiplinger. “I talked to her last night,” he announced one day when they were all sitting together on a bench in Central Park in cold sunlight.

“Who?” said Jonah.

“Cathy.”

Goodman and Ash gave him a sharp sidelong look. “Cathy?” Goodman asked.

“Cathy?” Ash echoed.

“Hope you two had a very nice chat,” said Goodman.

“I know it’s hard for you to understand,” Ethan said. “I get that.”

“I just can’t believe you’re speaking to her,” Ash said, lighting a cigarette and holding the match out to her brother, lighting his cigarette as well.

“I see why you feel that way,” said Ethan. “But I just wanted her to know I was thinking about her. I felt that this was important to convey.” He sat up straighter on the bench and said, “I have to make my own decisions about what’s right.”

“‘Thinking about her,’” said Ash. “Well, I guess that’s true enough.” Then she said, “My feeling is that Cathy’s probably gone a little insane—remember how Jules described her when they went to the coffee shop?—and now she actually believes her own story. That’s what Dr. Spilka told Goodman. Isn’t that what he said, Goodman?”

“I don’t know,” said Goodman.

The trial was expected to be in the fall, and it was all that any of them could talk about over the rest of the school year. The outside world and its political chatter remained remote and of only intermittent interest, while Goodman’s upcoming trial and, well before that, the “adjourned date” in late April, when certain motions would be filed, the lawyer had explained, were far more compelling. Goodman prepped with his lawyer and his lawyer’s two associates; they wore him out with all their prepping. But no one saw the extent to which Goodman had just had enough of all this and could not take much more. The extent to which he was frightened, or to which maybe he felt guilty. Cathy had been strong and believable in the coffee shop, but Jules couldn’t hold on to her words. If she held on to them, if she remembered them and completely absorbed them, then she might not have still been lingering around the Labyrinth.

His family believed Goodman to be entirely innocent—though actually, Ash had confessed to Jules, she’d had an odd moment late one night with her mother, when Betsy had come into Ash’s room. “Sometimes I think the male of our species is unknowable,” Betsy Wolf had said, despairingly, in response to nothing. And Ash had tried to find out what she meant, but then her father appeared in the doorway, looking for her mother, and it became clear to Ash that her parents had been having an argument. Then they said good night to her; and weeks later, when Ash told the story to Jules, she said that she hadn’t known if her mother had been trying to find a way to talk about Goodman and who he was. Or whether, instead, she’d only been making a comment about Gil, after a marital argument that, one way or another, must surely have been about Goodman. Maybe Betsy, who’d always protected and loved her difficult son, even as she pushed him in certain ways, had briefly wavered. But there was no way to know, because she never again said anything to suggest it. In fact, she even seemed to become more righteous about his innocence, disgusted by what Goodman had to endure.

None of the Wolfs had spoken to Cathy, as Ethan and Jules had. But even having spoken to her, Ethan and Jules were only sixteen years old, and much later it would be clear that they couldn’t have been expected to know what to do, or exactly what to feel. Cathy’s words had been disturbing, even shocking, but the firm, unified belief of the Wolf family carried its own, more significant weight.

At the Wolfs’ apartment, everyone nervously watched Goodman, and they saw him become almost a non-person, and they said to one another, “At least he’s still going to Dr. Spilka,” as though this psychoanalyst they’d never met could keep him intact. Even when Ash heard Dr. Spilka’s halting voice on the Wolfs’ answering machine on a Thursday afternoon in early April, she wasn’t made anxious. “Hel-lo, this is Dr. Spilka,” he said in a formal voice. “Goodman did not show up for our appointment today. I would like to remind you of my twenty-four-hour cancellation policy. That is all. Good day.”

Ash, home after school and sitting in the kitchen with two classmates eating raw cookie dough and rehearsing for the upcoming Brearley play, Paul Zindel’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, had been the one to play back the message on the machine, but she didn’t particularly worry when she heard it. So Goodman hadn’t been to his shrink today; big deal. He wasn’t a reliable person. She imagined he was lying on his bed down the hall right now listening to music or perhaps getting high, but she didn’t feel like interrupting her rehearsal to go in and visit her brother in his lair.

Ash Wolf had a great tolerance for the ways of boys; she forgave them their primitive traits, and she sympathized with Goodman almost entirely. When something happened to him, she’d once explained to Jules, it seemed as if it were happening to her too. She and her school friends rehearsed their lines from the sad and wonderful play about an emotionally disturbed mother and her daughters, and then after the other girls left, her own relievedly undisturbed mother came home from an afternoon of stuffing envelopes for a muscular dystrophy charity run by a friend whose son had the disease, and Ash helped her make dinner.

Even in the midst of Goodman’s tremendous problems, Betsy Wolf continued to prepare excellent meals. Ash was handed a rubber-banded bunch of leeks, and at the sink she unbound them, then soaked the individual thick-bulbed stalks to remove the sand and dirt, and chopped and sautéed them, and by the time her father walked into the apartment right before seven, already muttering about the latest legal bills, Ash remembered the phone call from Dr. Spilka, and that Goodman hadn’t yet left his foul cave. She felt uneasy suddenly, and went to his door, banged once, then entered. The place was much cleaner than usual. Sometime between last night and this morning when he was supposed to have left for school, her brother had actually cleaned his room. He had lined up his little architectural models on the desk, and he had made his bed. It was as disturbing in there as a crime scene, and Ash turned and ran back down the hall to get her parents.

Goodman was really gone; gone with the passbook from a special account his maternal grandfather had set up for him at Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust. His parents had arranged for a cap on all withdrawals, making sure Goodman never dipped in too deeply to buy drugs or do something stupid. Today, they learned, he had made the maximum withdrawal. He was also gone with his passport, as well as every other relevant official document that he’d been able to find, including his birth certificate and his social security card, which had been kept in a catchall drawer in his parents’ bedroom bureau. He’d just dug around in there when no one was in the room and grabbed whatever had his name printed on it. Maybe he was planning on leaving the country, maybe not. If you thought of Goodman Wolf, there wasn’t any one place that you imagined he might go.

Except, said Ash, for Spirit-in-the-Woods. He loved it there so much; he was a powerful figure there, he had currency, he was seen as big and important and erotically charged and free of his father’s criticism, and, of course, he was happy there. It was a long shot, but Gil Wolf called the Wunderlichs and asked if by any chance their “wayward son” had turned up today. Gil tried to keep his voice light. The Wunderlichs, who already knew something about the legal situation, said no, they’d been away in Pittsfield for the day, but to their knowledge Goodman had not been there.

Next the Wolfs called Dick Peddy, who instructed them on what and what not to do. “We don’t have to jump to conclusions,” Dick said.

“Jesus, I’ve already done that, Dick. The kid is gone.”

“You don’t know that. Consider his absence a kind of reflective vacation.”

“Reflective? Goodman doesn’t reflect; he just does.”

“As long as he shows up on the adjourned date,” said the lawyer, “then all will be well.”

The Wolfs knew that Goodman was not likely to show up then; why would he have left home, only to appear in court on the appointed day? Their best hope was that he was with some pot-smoking friend in the city who they didn’t know about—and that he would crash at this friend’s place in the interim and eventually would come home, or would even just show up at the court in a couple of weeks in wrinkled, unwashed clothes.

At nine a.m. on the adjourned date, Betsy and Gil Wolf sat very still in the paneled courtroom on the fourth floor of a courthouse downtown, and waited with their lawyer. The assistant DA coughed repeatedly, and the judge offered him a lozenge. “Fisherman’s Friend; works wonders,” said the judge, taking out a little rattling tin box from a drawer and handing it to the bailiff, who handed it to the assistant DA. Minutes passed; Goodman did not show. A bench warrant was issued, and Detectives Manfredo and Spivack took the Wolfs aside and instructed them that as soon as they heard from Goodman, they needed to report it, as well as urge Goodman to turn himself in.

When the city tabloids found out that the boy who’d been arrested on New Year’s Eve at Tavern on the Green had not shown up for a court appearance, they sent photographers to hang around outside the Labyrinth, and Ash was discreetly approached as she headed for the crosstown bus to school. “Prep-School Park Perp Flight Shocker” was not a story with much traction, though, because in the last days of April, two men were apprehended after they’d robbed and shot a fifty-year-old woman in Central Park, near the Boat Basin. Now, whenever Goodman was occasionally mentioned in the Post and the Daily News, it was in the context of the dangers of Central Park, particularly for women. Unrelatedly, a hundred-pound tree branch broke off and killed a teenaged girl in the park near 92nd Street, but still all these stories were unsettling. The whole city had begun to seem even more unsavory, and not just the park. Muggings were constant. The squeegee men stood at the mouths of tunnels with their tools and buckets of dark water, aggressively approaching cars. Goodman Wolf, Prep-School Park Perp, became just a small part of a big, seething story, mild in comparison with what would come.

It would be ten years before the notorious case in which another prep-school boy attacked a girl in Central Park, but that boy also killed that girl. And it would be thirteen years before a young female investment banker out for a jog in the park at night was raped and beaten into a coma, thought to be the victim of a gang of boys out “wilding,” as people called it, though much later the convictions would be overturned when someone else confessed. Who ever knew what really happened? The park was a dark, beautiful, and now intimidating stretch of green that seduced and divided the city.

Decades earlier, Manny and Edie Wunderlich had traveled through New York on elevated trains. They went to Socialist meetings and avant-garde operas, and then, eventually, to folk club after folk club, and every single activity apparently cost “a nickel,” at least the way they told it. The Hudson River shone on one side of Manhattan, the East River on the other. Between the two rivers, young bohemians owned this place. Now they no longer did, and because of that it was all much worse. But Goodman wasn’t lumped in with the worst; he was given a tiny mention in the catalog of the great city’s decline; and with a little time, he faded away.

But here he was now, still—vivid, fresh, the locus of a pain that didn’t lessen. Ash was on the phone constantly to Jules, crying and smoking and talking, or else just being silent; she missed Goodman so much, she said. She knew he was a f*ckup, but until now all his f*ckups had been redeemable. This had been his role since they were kids; and it had been almost funny back then, because he was also charming and bad and always made family life so much livelier. He used to dress their dog, Noodge, in Ash’s training bra. He used to wake Ash up in the middle of the night and take her up onto the forbidden roof of the Labyrinth, where they would sit sharing a bag of mini-marshmallows while looking out over the paused, exhaling city. Her parents’ sadness at their loss was intolerable now, and so was her own.

One Saturday morning in May, Ash took the Long Island Railroad out to Underhill to spend the weekend at the Jacobsons’. There was a time when Jules would have dissuaded her from coming, but not now. None of her friends had seen her small house or her dull, unfancy suburb; they had all expressed an interest in visiting her before, but Jules had deflected it, saying something meaningless like, “All in good time, my pretty.” But now Ash needed to get away from her parents and the city. Before she arrived, Jules went around the house, glaring at everything, trying to find clever ways to make the place look better. She stalked through the rooms, her eyes narrowed in assessment, snatching up an ugly ashtray and spiriting it into a drawer, removing a pillow that her mother’s sister, Aunt Joan, had embroidered from a kit with the words Home Is the Place Where When You Have to Go There They Have to Take You In—Robert Frost. Jules couldn’t bear the image of Aunt Joan, who had never read a poem in her life, stitching the name Robert Frost in green yarn, as if that somehow made her “literary.” The pillow went into the drawer beside the ashtray, and as Jules closed the drawer her mother saw her and said, “What are you doing?”

“Just straightening up.”

Lois glanced around the room, noticing the way the rug had been vacuumed within an inch of its life, items on surfaces had been regrouped, and a shawl had been thrown across the couch, not to hide any stain or imperfection but to hide the couch itself. Seeing her mother see the house from Jules’s perspective made her ashamed of herself. Suddenly Lois Jacobson, who had been given no credit for anything, seemed to know everything. She’d lived through the death of her young husband, and now she was a single mother with two daughters, one in college at nearby Hofstra but living at home for financial reasons; and one who had made it clear that she preferred a richer, more sophisticated and engaging family over her own. Lois had recently started working again for the first time since getting married. “Women’s lib had something to do with it,” she’d said. “But also I need the income now.” She had gotten a job as an assistant to the principal at the Alicia F. Derwood Elementary School, where Jules and Ellen had once been students, and she liked being out of the house and in the jumping, unpredictable environment of the school.

“Well, it looks very nice,” Lois finally decided to say as she took in all that Jules had done to the living room. “Thank you.”

The bigger surprise that weekend was that Ash liked her mother, and that her mother liked Ash. The only uneasy person here was Jules, who found it hard to manage the overlap of these two worlds. When the train arrived, Ash stepped off onto the platform looking like a child who has been sent to the countryside to escape the London blitz. Jules, in the parking lot with her mother, leapt out of the car and strode up the metal steps to greet Ash, as if her city friend wouldn’t be able to descend these stairs without assistance.

“Welcome to Underhill,” Lois said when Ash climbed into the backseat.

“Yes, welcome to beautiful Underhill,” said Jules in the sort of voice that might be used to accompany a corny old educational filmstrip. “A bustling metropolis that is home to three art museums and six orchestras. In addition, the next summer Olympics will be held in our fair city.”

Ash pretended not to hear her. “Thank you, Mrs. Jacobson. I am really glad to be here. I had to get away. You don’t know it, but you’re kind of saving my life.”

“First stop, the extremely glamorous and elegantly named Cindy Drive!” said Jules as they pulled into the development of identical ranch houses that sat shoulder to shoulder along the straight street. When you took a shower at the Jacobsons’, you could see right into the shower at the Wanczyks’. Once, Jules and Mrs. Wanczyk had stared straight at each other with a neck-up view, while water simultaneously beat down on their heads. “Did you know that Zsa Zsa Gabor lives across the street?” Jules said to Ash. “No, really, right over there! Nine Cindy Drive. There she is, putting on a boa! She is such a sweet person. Hallooo, Ms. Gabor!”

“Please ignore my daughter, Ash,” said Lois. “She seems to have gone mad.”

The weekend was spent partaking of all the suburban activities that Jules generally hated. Ash Wolf was actually grateful for the Walt Whitman Mall, whose name Jules had mocked mercilessly with her friends in the summer. Decades later, archly describing her childhood at a dinner party, she would say, “Could there be a bigger oxymoron than the Walt Whitman Mall? Maybe only . . . the Emily Dickinson Waterpark.” Now Jules and Ash walked together around the enormous space, laughing at almost anything, going in and out of stores. They also went to the movie theater to see All the President’s Men, and while it played, Jules thought again about Nixon’s departure from the White House lawn, which the entire camp had watched. But really, before that day all the campers had been like industrious cobblers at work in a forest, only partly aware of the outside world—the move toward impeachment, the noise—and willing themselves a way to stay in that indefensible state of half-consciousness as long as they could. Now, out in the world and much more conscious, Ethan had begun devoting his energy to drawing sketches of Jimmy Carter as a figure in Figland, and perfecting that drowsy Southern accent. “I wish we had someone a lot more liberal, but I think he’s pretty ethical, which is rare,” said Ethan. “I’ll take what I can get.”

At night during that weekend in Underhill, Jules and Ash lay together in her bed, with Ash’s head against the footboard. Many years later, they would lie across other beds with their children playing all around them, and it was a relief to know that even in getting older and splitting off into couples and starting families, you could still always come together in this way that you’d learned to do when you were young, and which you would have a taste for over your entire life. Ash, up close in Jules’s bed in Underhill, having performed a series of elaborate nighttime ablutions in the house’s single, peach-colored bathroom, now smelled milky and peppery at once. Maybe the soap she’d brought with her from the city was called Pepper Milk, Jules thought as she grew sleepy. Whatever it was, anyone would want to be around that smell, to drink it in from a girl if they couldn’t drink it in from a bottle.

“So what do you think will happen to Goodman?” Ash asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Because he’s a boy it’s probably easier for him out in the world,” said Ash. “But because he’s Goodman it’s harder. It’s always been harder. He just sort of blunders through. He doesn’t even try to play the games you need to play. Like, I always knew, since I was little, how to please teachers. I would write these really elaborate short stories and turn them in for extra credit. You want to know the secret? The stories were long. They weren’t all that good, but they showed purpose. That’s my strength: purpose. I’m sure they wore my teachers out. ‘The Secret of the Gold-Leaf Mantelpiece.’ ‘The Carson Triplets on Wandering Bluff.’ They were exhausting! I also made birthday cards for my parents every year—I mean, I spent hours on them. Once I even tie-dyed a card—and Goodman would completely forget about their birthdays, and I’d remind him, and at the last minute he’d ask me to let him sign the card I’d made. But they never thought he’d spent a second on it. I know we live in a very sexist world, and a lot of boys do nothing except get in trouble, until one day they grow up and dominate every aspect of society,” Ash said. “But girls, at least while they’re still girls and perform well, seem to do everything better for a while. Seem to get the attention. I always did.”

“I never did,” said Jules. “Not until I met all of you.”

“Do you think we’re horrible narcissists—those of us who swept you up into our clutches?”

“Yes.”

“You do? Thanks a lot.” Ash tossed a pillow at her in a halfhearted attempt at female playfulness. But that was not what their friendship was. They didn’t sit around polishing their nails and talking dreamily; their roles were different from that. Ash still fascinated Jules and showed her how to be in the world; Jules still profoundly amused and comforted Ash. She still cracked her up without cracking her up.

“I’m kidding,” Jules quickly said. “Of course you’re not narcissists. And by the way, you smell really good right now.”

“Thank you.” Ash yawned. “Maybe, if I don’t make it in the theater, they can write that on my gravestone: ‘She smelled really good.’”

“‘She had olfactory brilliance.’”

They were quiet. “I wonder exactly when we’ll die,” Ash said. They both thought of their own eventual deaths and felt sorry for themselves, but that passed quickly, like a shiver. Then Ash said, “I wonder when Goodman will die. And if he’ll do anything with his life first. If only he’d had someone like Old Mo Templeton to guide him along and be his mentor. Help him with his architecture, or whatever else he decided to do. If only he’d had a talent that was brought out and worked on. That would have helped. Talent gets you through life.”

At the end of the weekend in Underhill Ash seemed stronger. “I can’t thank you enough, Mrs. Jacobson,” she said as she stood in the kitchen, clutching her weekend bag. “It’s just been so stressful at home, and I didn’t know what to do—” Here her voice collapsed, and Jules’s mother impetuously hugged her.

“I’m so glad you came,” Lois said. “I see why Jules is so fond of you. And you’re beautiful too,” she added. Jules knew that mentioning Ash’s beauty was an indirect comment on Jules’s lack of it, but somehow it was okay, even pleasurable, to hear her mother say this. Jules took pride in Ash’s beauty, as if she’d had something to do with it. “You are welcome anytime,” Lois went on. “Just say the word.”

“Yes, there’s always a place for you on exclusive Cindy Drive,” Jules said. “Only three blocks away from the Dress Cottage.”

Ash said, “Oh, shush,” smiling, and waved her off.

That afternoon, after they’d driven Ash back to the train and then returned home, Jules went into the drawer of the hutch cabinet and took out the ashtray and the embroidered pillow, returning them to their rightful places in the living room. Within half an hour, though, she saw that her mother had removed them again. From then on, Lois Jacobson didn’t seem to feel as threatened when Jules went into the city weekend after weekend.

Life at the Wolf household remained in trauma mode. Still no one knew where Goodman was; he might be anywhere at all. Whenever he was found, or whenever he returned home, he would immediately be arrested; the lawyer had made this clear to them. They waited for Goodman to call or write so they could find out if he was okay and urge him to come home, telling him they knew he’d gotten frightened, but this wasn’t the way to handle it. They knew he was innocent, they would remind him, and soon everyone else would know it too. Come home, they would say. But he didn’t contact any of them, and the school year ended like a regular school year, except Goodman didn’t graduate from high school, didn’t advance in life as he was meant to do. He hadn’t had a chance to mature into something other than what he was. His story paused there.

This was to be the last summer the rest of them would spend at Spirit-in-the-Woods, except now Ash didn’t even know if she could bear to go. Cathy wouldn’t be coming back, of course; she still wasn’t speaking to any of them. Troy was too old now even if he’d wanted to come back, which of course he didn’t. The absence of Goodman—who also would’ve been too old to come back, since he was supposed to have gone off to college in the fall—made the idea of a summer there seem wrong. But the following year they would all be too old, so Ash, Jules, Ethan, and Jonah decided they would go back one more time.

Not long after Jules arrived again in Belknap at the end of June, she knew it was a mistake. Most of the other campers seemed so much younger now. There were plenty of new ones, and some were a little different from campers of the past. On the path to the lake, Jules overheard a very basic, crude fart joke. Did these kids not know that if you were going to make a fart joke, the punch line would have to have something to do with, perhaps, Brecht? In Girls’ Teepee 2 for this final summer lived Jules, Ash, Nancy Mangiari, and Jane Zell. Sleeping in Cathy Kiplinger’s old bed was a new girl, Jenny Mazur, an introverted glassblower with a habit of talking in her sleep, the only time she let loose. “Mother! I did not betray you!” she cried as the others listened with prurient fascination.

Ash’s sadness and preoccupation with Goodman were known throughout the camp. Sometimes at night, when the trees scratched the roof of their teepee, or a flashlight popped on through the pines and then the beam dashed away, Ash briefly held the fantasy that Goodman had come back. “It’s not impossible, Jules. He knows where to find us,” Ash once whispered. “He’ll tell us he’s been hiding out somewhere around here, maybe living in some shitty apartment in Pittsfield. There was this Grimms’ fairy tale that our mother used to read us,” she said. “A brother and sister run off into the woods to get away from their evil stepmother. It’s always a stepmother, never a stepfather; even fairy tales are sexist. Anyway, the brother gets really thirsty, but the stepmother has enchanted all the springs. And there’s this one spring that, if he drinks from it, he’ll turn into a deer. And the sister says, ‘Please don’t drink from it, because if you turn into a deer you’ll run away from me.’ And he says, ‘No, no, I promise I won’t,’ and he drinks from it and of course he turns into a deer.”

“And runs away from her like she predicted, right?” said Jules. “To join a hunt? I remember this fairy tale.”

“Yes, right. And she’s devastated. But he keeps coming back to visit her in his deer form, and with his hoof he knocks on the door of the house where she’s staying, and he says, ‘My little sister, let me in.’ He keeps doing this, night after night, and he goes back and forth into the woods. And one night he comes to her and says, ‘My little sister, let me in.’ And she lets him in and sees that he’s been wounded. That’s what I keep thinking,” said Ash in an agitated voice. “That Goodman’s going to show up one night, and he’ll be wounded in a way. Something will have happened to him out there. And I’ll let him in, and take care of him, and make him stay with me.” She looked somewhat childishly at Jules. “Don’t you think it could happen?” she asked.

“In real life?” Jules said, and Ash nodded. “Maybe,” was all she could bring herself to say.

But Goodman didn’t come. The scratching heard on the roof was an overhanging claw of a branch, and the footsteps outside the teepee were wandering counselors, whose flashlights threw yellow scattershot beams among the pines. Everything was different this summer. Even Gudrun Sigurdsdottir, the Icelandic weaver and lifeguard, had not returned. Someone said she’d gotten married over there. The Wunderlichs, too, seemed exponentially older. Ida Steinberg, the cook, looked especially tired. Those three had been there since the founding of Spirit-in-the-Woods—the Wunderlichs were Spirit-in-the-Woods—and they always said that the camp kept them young, but perhaps you could not drink from that particular spring forever.

Ethan did the best work he’d ever done, working side by side with Old Mo Templeton, who was now, Jules remarked once to Ethan—then immediately regretted it—Decrepit Mo Templeton. One day Jules saw Ethan helping Mo walk to the animation shed, carefully holding the arm of his mentor to make sure he didn’t trip and fall. Sometimes, Ethan would mention to Old Mo a detail from the early days of animation and ask him a complicated question about it, and in the past Old Mo had always replied expansively. But now, when Ethan referred to the short Skedaddle, from the Slowpoke Malone series of 1915, Mo smiled and just said, “Yes, that was good work they did back then.” Yet when Ethan wanted to hear more about it, Mo touched his hand and murmured, “All your questions, Ethan, all your questions.” And that was that. It was as if Mo Templeton was conserving his energy for waking up in the morning when the day started, and walking down the hill, and sitting among these teenagers and their ideas, and looking at their drawings of figures who seemed suddenly and exhaustingly in motion.

It was time for the old to step aside and the young to take a big step up. It was unequivocally time. Over the summer, Jules and Ash walked everywhere together around the grounds, going deep into the pine forest where they’d never wanted to go before. Two girls less interested in nature and natural phenomena could hardly be found anywhere on earth. But now nature walks seemed to be called for, and the Dr. Scholl’s sandals that Jules and Ash both wore pressed down on the bed of red and brown pine needles. Occasional groups of mushrooms popped up after a rainstorm like carbuncles. Both girls jerked away when they saw an embryonic bird that had been munched upon by a carpet of flying and walking creatures. When you looked closely at anything, you could almost faint, Jules thought, although you had to look closely if you wanted to have any knowledge at all in life.

One afternoon Ash wasn’t around to take a walk. Jane Zell said she’d seen her leave the teepee looking upset, the way she often looked this summer, but Jane had no idea of where Ash had gone. That night, in bed, in a humidity of a particularly savage degree, the five girls tossed and flopped. They talked a little, each of them telling stories from their home lives, except for Jenny Mazur, who only began to talk after the other talking ended. In her sleep she said, “The man had a face! He had a face!”

“Don’t they all,” said Nancy Mangiari.

Someone yawned. “It’s crazy late,” said Ash. “See you in the morning, ladies.”

The others hushed; the sleep talker stilled. Even through the heat, their bodies had circadian rhythms, and they managed to fall under. But later, close to two in the morning, after the counselors had ceased their halfhearted patrol, Jules awakened to the sound of the teepee door opening and footfall on the wooden floorboards. It was a male step, and in her half-conscious state she thought she actually might hear Goodman Wolf say the words, “My little sister, let me in.” Jules traveled up the flume of sleep in hopes of being fully awake at the moment when Goodman was reunited with his sister, and then with all of them. Tired, worn-out, maybe even injured Goodman, back from his misguided, panicked journeys. He would be a deer or he would be a boy, but it wouldn’t matter. Whatever had happened to him, he could be restored. His legal problems would slowly be worked out, Jules thought. The lawyer would get on the phone to the DA’s office and cut a deal that most likely would involve probation but no jail time. The trial would take place eventually, as it was supposed to have done, and in the end Goodman would no doubt be acquitted. Cathy, in time, would admit that she’d been immature back then—really f*cked up and overly dramatic—and now she’d seen that maybe she’d distorted what had actually happened. What mattered was that Goodman was here now. Jules, still lying in bed, felt a bolt of dopey hope that awakened her further.

But once awake, she heard only, “Shh,” and then a chuckle, and then the sound of Ash fiercely whispering to someone, “No, over here. That’s Jenny Mazur. She’ll start to shout about the man with a face.”

“What?” he said.

“Come here. It’s okay. They’re asleep.”

Ethan Figman climbed into the bed of the most beautiful girl he’d probably ever seen, and if happiness made its own light, it might have pulsed from the bed across the hexagonal interior surface area of that teepee, radiating outward into the dark. Surely he was vibrating with happiness—but so, possibly, was Ash. Ethan and Ash. Ethan and Ash?

It made no sense. A pulse jumped in Jules’s eye as she tried to understand this. How was it possible that Ethan was the one Ash wanted? Jules hadn’t wanted him. But of course people were different, she remembered; they were allowed to be different. Everyone’s neurologies and tastes were singular. She forced herself to think about this as she turned her own body sharply away from their bodies, facing the window and the hot night, which expelled a small quantity of bad air through the screen. The voices across the teepee became low and unified, and then became coos, as if two doves were huddling together in bed. Sad, lovely, delicate Ash Wolf, and wonderful, ugly, brilliant Ethan Figman, improbably together, improbably pressed together on this extremely hot night, for privacy’s sake inside the sleeping bag with the red lining and the repeating pattern of cowboys and lariats, began to murmur and babble. Ash whispered to him, “Take off your shirt,” and he whispered, “My shirt? I don’t think so.” “You have to.” “Well, okay. Wait, it won’t come off. Look, look, it’s stuck.” And Ash whispered, “You are insane,” and in response, agreeable Ethan laughed insanely, followed by the soft, almost imperceptible sound of him most likely taking off his shirt in front of a girl for the first time ever. “There you go. That’s nice,” Ash whispered. “See?”

Then there were slurping, excruciatingly human sounds, and the doves returned again, and there was rotisserie-style turning inside overheated flannel. Love could not be explained. Jules Jacobson-Boyd would eventually know this when she became a therapist, but now Jules Jacobson knew it anecdotally, and she felt suddenly snide and defensive in response to it. Furious, actually. She felt as if she’d done everything wrong, as always. She had a wild need to say something to Jonah tomorrow about what she’d witnessed tonight. She imagined coming upon him as he sat curled over his guitar, and telling him, “Guess what? Apparently opposites really do attract, freakish though that is in this case.”

In the morning, the air returned to a reasonable temperature, and only the five girls remained in the teepee. They sat up in their beds to the opening strains of Haydn’s Surprise Symphony, which the Wunderlichs still played each day on a turntable and blasted across all of Spirit-in-the-Woods, waking everyone from their slumber.