Into the Woods

6 Footsie

6

FOOTSIE

Gretchen

I was in Target when I saw him, and good Lord, was there any escaping this guy? He was in the remote North Woods; he was in a multinational chain store a forty-five-minute drive from the remote North Woods.

He was also, unfortunately, in my brain. I would like to say the reason I’d had trouble falling asleep last night was that I was thinking about my artist-in-residence duties. About Little Women , but with dancing.

But no, I couldn’t sleep because I’d fallen down a Karlie Carroll rabbit hole. Yes, I’d creeped Teddy’s ex-girlfriend’s social media. She was everything you’d think a rock star’s girlfriend would be: skinny, generically pretty with big eyes and long balayaged blond hair styled in perfect beachy waves. She did sponsored posts on protein powder and retinol. But as much as I wanted her to be only that—macros and skin care—she was also into refinishing vintage furniture. Her pieces looked amazing.

If you scrolled far enough back, Teddy made the odd appearance in her posts. There were the usual “Happy birthday to this goofball” pictures with him in the background photobombing her and “Celebrating two years with the most amazing person in the world” posts with her on his arm on the red carpet at the Grammys. But there was also the odd domestic post. A picture of two sets of legs tangled together on a sofa, one barefoot and the other in a pair of Doc Martens I recognized. Or a flute of champagne and a glass of beer on a table on a balcony with an amazing city view.

I was embarrassed by how much I had told him last night. I’d had a lovely evening eating with Maiv on the beach. And drinking with Maiv on the beach—she had a literal box of wine in her cabin, and we’d filled water bottles from its spigot and, after our swim, toasted the end of week one at Wild Arts. And then toasted some more.

I hadn’t been drunk -drunk. But I had been happy enough, and vehement enough—I got overly invested in everything when I was tipsy—that I’d opened my mouth and vomited all my thoughts and feelings on Teddy Knight. Teddy Knight! Who didn’t even like me!

I’d been so relieved when he wasn’t in the van today. This morning Lena announced she was “going into town”—which apparently meant not into the tiny town fifteen minutes from camp that had a bar, a variety store, and a boat mechanic, but to a bigger place farther away that had a wider range of shopping—and had invited any of the adults to come. Danny and I had taken her up on the offer.

It wasn’t as if I’d said anything supermortifying last night, just that in the sober light of day, I felt I’d exposed myself too much. Or to the wrong person. Mistaken the level of emotional intimacy that was appropriate. So while I didn’t have anything to apologize for, or even any cause, really, to be more than slightly chagrined, I’d been happy to keep out of Teddy’s way. To let time soothe my self-consciousness. Monday would come, with its work and its routines, and things would feel more normal.

But no. There he was. Standing at an endcap in the men’s shoes section at Target examining a pair of orange Crocs knockoffs.

I gave some thought to ducking down an aisle, hiding among the shower curtains and toothbrush holders, and pretending I hadn’t seen him. But was I the kind of woman who hid from uncomfortable situations? I thought about the last time I’d seen Talon—speaking of last night’s oversharing—which had not been on our final, disastrous date, but in a situation much like this, where I’d seen him at a restaurant and then immediately departed said restaurant before he saw me. So maybe the answer was yes, I was the kind of woman who hid from uncomfortable situations. At least lately, if not historically.

But not anymore. I was here for the reset, right? I’d come to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately—to quote Teddy quoting Thoreau—right?

So I sidled up to him. “I’m not sure those are really your style.”

He seemed profoundly unsurprised to find me standing next to him at Target. “The problem is this is the only pair of remotely sandal-like shoes in my size, and I can’t do the rest of the summer in these.” He lifted a Docs-clad foot. The last time I had seen that foot had been on my phone screen, and it had been playing footsie with Karlie Carroll. “It’s too fucking hot for these. But yeah”—he shook the not-Crocs—“these are atrocious.”

“So you’re standing here contemplating the trade-off between self-respect and comfort.”

He barked a laugh. “I guess I am.” He set down the shoes and examined me. “What would you do?”

“This summer? I’d choose self-respect.” I made a face, and he intensified his study of me. “But also, they’re just shoes, not a moral statement on your self-worth, so probably you should choose comfort.”

“Hmm.” He put the shoes down.

“I for one would love to see you in orange fake Crocs at camp,” I added, feeling bad about projecting my issues onto his footwear choices, “and I’m sure the kids would, too.”

“Ha ha. It was probably dumb to think I could find decent shoes here. I only came in search of better bug spray”—he held up an industrial-looking aerosol can—“and I got distracted on my way to meet Jack.”

Ah, the cool kids drove on their own instead of taking the Lena bus. “What do you mean ‘better’?”

“The stuff Marion gave me doesn’t work. I’m getting eaten alive. Aren’t you?”

“Not really. When they start to get munchy, it’s a reminder to reapply, and then I’m mostly fine. Not so with you?”

“Nope. Doesn’t seem to matter how much I put on, or how often.” He held out his arm, and it was indeed covered with welts.

“Aww. I guess you’re so sweet they can’t resist you.” The notion was so amusingly outrageous that I cackled.

He looked around. “What are you doing here? You in the market for new shoes, too? Those shoes aren’t going to be good for hiking and shit.”

Those shoes. I wasn’t sure how he even knew what shoes I was wearing, as my feet were hidden from his view by a stool/mirror thing between us. But he was right. I stepped out from behind the fixture and examined my sandaled feet. My pedicure was starting to chip. “I packed hiking boots. I just haven’t gotten them out yet.”

When he didn’t say anything, just looked sternly down at my feet—Karlie Carroll probably never let her pedicures chip—I added, “I’m here to buy a couple essentials.” I held up a travel alarm clock. “I’ve decided to take the radical step of putting my phone away for the rest of camp, but I need a way to wake up for sunrise circle, so I’m going old-school.” Next I held up a bathing suit, a utilitarian red one-piece. “And I got this.”

“Don’t you… already have a bathing suit?”

“I need a second one. I’ve been swimming so much that my suit doesn’t dry by the time I’m ready to wear it again, and there’s nothing worse than trying to shimmy into a damp bathing suit.” When he still didn’t say anything, I kept going, for what reason I do not know. I didn’t think of myself as a person who rambled. “So now I’ll have this ugly Target suit for my morning swims and my existing suit for my evening swims.”

“You’ve been swimming in the mornings?”

“Not at the beach proper. Just a quick dip off the dock in our neighborhood.”

“Right in front of my cabin.”

“Yes.” What, did he think he owned the lake outside his cabin?

He blinked. “I gotta go find Jack.” He checked the time—he was wearing an old-fashioned wristwatch, which was, for some stupid reason, charming. Apparently I was into analog timepieces now. Maybe that was a crone thing. Made sense: Weren’t curses always coming due at midnight or princesses going into comas for a hundred days or whatever? A crone needed a way to keep track of this stuff.

“I’m overdue to meet him in the books section,” Teddy said.

“Jack’s in the books section? Why? So he can turn up his nose at everything there? So he can peel the Blair’s Book Club stickers off books he doesn’t approve of?”

“Probably.” He smirked. “See you.”

“Teddy,” I called after him, and he turned, eyebrows raised. I already regretted what I was about to say, but somehow that didn’t stop me from saying it. “I said a lot of stuff last night, and some of it was kind of embarrassing. I was hoping we could keep it between us.” He’d promised as much last night, but I wanted to make sure.

He came back toward me. “So you had some shitty dates. Who am I gonna tell?”

“Jack?”

“Nah.” The way he said it, as if Jack wasn’t worth telling secrets to, gave me a little thrill. “Anyway, right back at you.” He pointed at me with the orange not-Crocs.

“What do you mean?”

“I told you some embarrassing stuff, too.”

“Well, I can say, ‘Right back at you,’ too. Who am I gonna tell?”

“The tabloids? ‘Disgraced Musician Walks in on Influencer Girlfriend Cheating.’ They’d pay you for that scoop.”

“Oh, well, in that case…” I lifted my phone to my ear and pretended I was talking on it but cut off the joke when I saw something flash in his eyes. Just for a second, but it looked an awful lot like hurt. “Just kidding.” I slid the phone into my purse. “You know I’d never do that.”

“Do I?”

He had a point. He didn’t know me, not really, despite my drunken confessions. “You do,” I said firmly. “You might not like me, but you can trust me.”

“Who says I don’t like you?” The question came out with a hint of cockiness, of challenge. He was back to his old self.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “The feeling’s mutual.”

“Well.” He softened. “You can trust me, too.”

The weird thing was, I knew that I could.

Little Women , but with dancing wasn’t going superwell, and the kids could sense it. It wasn’t a disaster, but it wasn’t really coming together.

“All right,” I said at the end of our Monday-afternoon session, “everyone gather round for a minute, sit.”

I was probably overdoing this. This wasn’t in my job description. I was supposed to help with their end-of-camp performance, but I wasn’t expected to be knee deep in it like this. Caleb, for example, was letting the counselors run the drama sessions and popping in every couple of days to give notes. I could have done the same with the dance counselors, Grace and Brianna.

But Grace and Brianna seemed happy to have me around, and honestly, what else was I going to do all day? Unlike the other artists, I didn’t have a creative masterpiece making demands on my time.

“I think we need to regroup,” I said. “Maybe we’re overthinking the narrative part of this. This is the dance group, right? We don’t need to put on a play—that’s for the drama group. So why don’t we think of our mission as choreographing some dances that are inspired by Little Women rather than literally doing Little Women ? We’re so focused on the start of the book, the idea of introducing the girls and their trip to visit the poor. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but what if we set that aside for now and think about the book as a whole?” I paused. My brain was racing ahead of me, ideas zinging around faster than I could put words to them. “Or… what about scenes that encapsulate the themes of the book as a whole?” I made a mental note to ask the girls what they thought those themes were, but I had to keep going so as not to lose the idea that was coalescing.

“Consider the party scene,” I said, suddenly picturing them in it. “It already has dancing. We could do something with Meg and Jo sharing the pair of gloves, and Jo having to skirt the edges of the room because the back of her dress is burnt.” I’d loved that scene as a kid. I’d identified with the girls trying to hide their poverty among their peers. I’d downloaded the book and reread it on my phone over the last couple of days, and it still stood out. “But it’s not just about a dance, right? It’s a way to show the economic differences between the March sisters and everyone else. It’s about how being poor shapes a person, and about the eternal human desire to fit in.”

“ Yes ,” Brianna said vehemently. “We’ve been focusing on plot. On what happens to the characters. But the story is also about other, bigger stuff. And that big stuff is what makes the book resonate with people a hundred and fifty years after it was written.” She turned to me. “That’s what you’re talking about—there’s for sure an economic theme here.”

“It’s funny how they’re helping the poor, but they’re also kind of poor,” said one of the campers, Addison, a fifteen-year-old I’d clocked as the smartest in the group, if not the best dancer from a technical point of view. “I guess they’re just less poor? Or they’re something in between, because they’re poor but they’re going to fancy parties?”

“Great observation,” I said. “Maybe there’s a way we can represent all this.”

“But isn’t the book also about sisterhood?” asked another girl. “I hear what you’re saying about poverty and exclusion, but what I like about the book is how the sisters love each other, but sometimes they hate each other. That’s timeless.”

The other girls laughed, and one said, “Amen. I hate my sister, but I kind of miss her, too.”

“Yes!” I exclaimed. “This is all great. We should plan to sit and talk more in depth about what we think the themes of the book are. But do people agree that one of our dances could be the party scene? Beyond all this high-level, thematic stuff, it would be fun, don’t you think?” My other motivation for wanting to do the party was that it would be easier for everyone to have a good part. “We could do some actual ballroom stuff, some period dances”—I’d have to figure out what that would look like—“but then maybe we nest inside that some modern dance that communicates how out of place Meg and Jo feel.”

The girls loved this idea, and I did, too. I was getting a buzzy feeling in my body. Excitement, for me, had always taken on a physical form like this. It made me want to dance. Which I suppose was why I loved dance to begin with. It was a physical manifestation of what was going on inside me. It discharged emotions.

“Yeah, but what about Laurie?” one of the girls asked. “He’s central to that scene.”

“I have a lead on a Laurie for us,” I said. I hoped I did, anyway. “He won’t be a dancer, but maybe we can make that work for us.”

“Yes!” Brianna piped up. “He can be the eye of the hurricane, the still center around which the scene revolves.”

Everyone seemed excited by that idea, and when we broke for the day, I kept Brianna and Grace back. “Am I stepping on your toes too much here?”

They assured me I was not. Grace said, “It’s cool to have a real choreographer. Last year we had a ballet dancer, and she was great, but mostly she just helped the kids—and us—with technique. So the show was more a straightforward dance recital. A bunch of pieces that didn’t relate to each other. Which was fine. But I like this better.”

“I think you’re right on with the idea that we do something that’s less than a play but still has some thematic coherence,” Brianna said. “I have to choreograph a big piece next year”—Brianna was doing a BA in dance at the University of Minnesota—“so this is good practice for me.”

I was happy to have them on board but felt compelled to say, “You know I’m not a choreographer, right?”

Brianna shrugged. “Well, I don’t know what it is you’re doing here if not choreographing.”

Hmm.

On my way back to my cabin to get changed for my predinner swim, I passed by one of the music rooms. I could hear Teddy singing. I edged closer and peeped around the open door—it wasn’t as oppressively humid as that first day, but it was still hot enough that most of us kept our studio doors open. Teddy was playing guitar and a girl was playing banjo and they were both singing “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”

I sneaked closer. They sounded great . Teddy was singing harmony to her melody, and though I didn’t know that much about music performancewise, I could tell he was letting her take the lead instrumentally, too. Maybe not literally—he wasn’t playing a bassline or anything—but he was a fraction of a beat behind her, as if he wanted her to make her own way but was there to support her if needed.

I was transfixed. After they finished, Teddy complimented her, and they talked about a chord change that had been giving her trouble.

“Peter, Paul and Mary did ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon,’ too, right?” she asked after the debrief. “I feel like I remember that from the music classes I took when I was little.”

“They did. They did a bunch of songs you’d probably know if you heard them. They did a great cover of Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’.’”

“They don’t let us have phones here, otherwise I’d listen to a bunch of their stuff.”

I had intended to follow that no-phones rule, too. I’d bought that alarm clock yesterday for that very reason, but the pull of the Karlie Carroll rabbit hole had been too strong. What a waste. I needed to recommit to ditching the phone. I was done with my reread of Little Women . I was doing a virtual walk-through of the new building with Justin next week, but until then, I had no more excuses.

“You should listen to some of their stuff when you go home,” Teddy said. “It’s banjo friendly, and I think your voice would lend itself well to their songs—to the extent that you’re looking for songs to cover.”

“I have to say, I’m surprised you’re a fan of this kind of music.”

“You mean because my own music is harder?”

“Yeah—not that you’re not allowed to like different kinds of music,” she said.

“My mom was into the folky protest music of the sixties. Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and early Dylan. But especially Peter, Paul and Mary. I learned to play music—piano, initially—on their songs.”

“What’s your favorite song of theirs?”

There was a pause that seemed a little fraught, like it signified more than just Teddy trying to settle on his favorite song. He finally said, “I guess it’s this one called ‘Lemon Tree.’ My mom and sister and I used to sing it all the time.”

“Can you play it for me?”

There was another pause before he said, “How about this one instead? It’s called ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ It was actually written by Seeger—a lot of Peter, Paul and Mary’s hits were written by him.”

I shamelessly settled in to listen. The song seemed to be about the futility of war. It was beautiful. I didn’t dislike Concrete Temple, but I tended to mentally discard any music I couldn’t use for my kids at the studio, and Concrete Temple was too hard for Miss Miller’s of Minnetonka.

This song wasn’t recital material, either. It was—at least as performed by Teddy—plain, almost stark, but it was all the more beautiful for it. He had the perfect voice for it—a perfectly imperfect rasp. His voice reminded me of his calloused hands.

The song was circular—each verse built on the next, and the simple but powerful chorus was repeated frequently. Eventually Teddy’s student picked it up and started singing high harmonies on the choruses, then on the verses, too. As she grew more confident with the song structure, they both started messing around vocally, with volume and with more elaborate harmonies.

When they finished with a decisive chord, stopping the song abruptly, it was if I snapped out of a trance. Damn. That had been fantastic .

I could hear them wrapping up, so it was time for me to flee. I had to go to my cabin and get out the phone I wasn’t supposed to be using and look up “Lemon Tree.”

Later, on my way to swimming, I stopped by Jack’s porch, where he and Teddy were parked with their end-of-day drink.

“Hey, Knight, you promised me a Laurie, and I’ve come to collect.”

I’d listened to “Lemon Tree” three times back-to-back in my cabin, trying to figure out what Teddy thought about it. Why he called it his favorite but didn’t want to play it. The conclusion had been pretty obvious. It was a blatant antilove song, warning that no matter how pretty or fragrant a lemon tree was, its fruit was always sour.

Clearly Teddy wasn’t over Karlie yet. Which made me feel weird. Which was why I’d addressed him by his last name. We’d accidentally spilled some secrets to each other, and I wanted to put some distance between us.

But as his last name rolled off my lips, it sounded more like an endearment than a formality. Everyone else called him Teddy, but here I was calling him Knight, like I thought I had special status or something.

“Right,” Teddy said. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow.” He looked at me as if waiting for me to say something else, but I couldn’t imagine what. I transferred my attention to Jack, who was looking at me the same way he always did: with indifference that felt like it could tip over into disdain given the slightest nudge.

I didn’t wait for that to happen, just danced off. I had a lake to get to.

The next morning I slid into my crappy Target bathing suit. It must have been too late in the summer for there to be a lot of selection left; I’d had to settle for what I could get. It was a basic red one-piece that was not my color at all. With my pink-tipped hair, I probably looked like Pamela Anderson’s less endowed, arty cousin had come to visit the Baywatch set. But the suit was gloriously dry as I fumbled it on in the early-dawn light—I liked to not turn on any lights in my cabin and let the dawn function as a reverse dimmer switch, turning on the day while I was in the lake. And no one else was ever going to see this suit, so aesthetics didn’t matter.

“Hey.”

I shrieked as my heart kicked into high gear.

I had crept around Teddy’s cabin, as I did every morning. But unlike every morning, today he was sitting on his porch holding a guitar. It was momentarily discombobulating: that was his evening spot.

“Sorry. I was trying to not scare you. Didn’t want to startle you once you were in the water.”

So much for no one seeing my ugly suit. Well, what did I care? I was here on my man cleanse, right? My crone-ification project. Although crones probably swam either naked or in Victorian-style bathing costumes.

“A morning swim sounded good, so I thought I’d invite myself to join you.” He paused. “Unless I’d be in your way.”

“It’s a big lake,” I said with what I hoped was an air of nonchalance, but I was feeling very non-nonchalant all of a sudden. Very chalant, one might say. Because unlike Evening Teddy Knight with Guitar on Porch, Morning Teddy Knight was wearing swim trunks. And nothing else.

I reminded myself that I had already seen Teddy Knight naked and walked by him and stepped off the dock. I swam underwater for quite a way, and when I surfaced, he was in the water, too, but close to the shore. He was only up to his knees. I wanted to go closer so I could see his tattoos, but I refrained.

“Wow,” he called. “This is some seaweed. Do you call it that in a lake? Lakeweed?”

“Not much of a swimmer, I take it?” I called back.

“A swimmer, yes, but not in lakes.”

“Swim out farther. You’ll get to a point where it’s deeper and the weeds aren’t so high.”

He started out toward me, his arms working in the diffuse dawn light. He had a strong stroke.

“They cut the weeds in the official swimming area, out by the kids’ cabins, so it’s not as icky getting in over there,” I said as he began treading water a few feet from me. “If you’re getting in here, it’s better to jump off the dock than to wade in from the shore.

“Just a tip,” I added. Though I wasn’t sure why I was giving him tips. I didn’t want him to make a habit of crashing my morning swims, did I?

No. What I wanted was to get a look at his tattoos, but now that he was close enough, he was submerged up to his neck.

He rotated in a slow circle, treading. “I gotta say, this is worth the icky entrance.”

It was. A person could get complacent about lakes, living in Minnesota, the land of ten thousand of them, but this one, especially at this time of day, was objectively gorgeous. The sun was just coming up over the treed shoreline. “Look,” I said, pointing. “You can still see the moon. I love when you can see the sun and the moon at the same time.”

“I don’t think I ever have before.”

“Really?” That surprised me.

He’d been turned toward the moon, and when he looked back at me, assessing, he added, “I grew up dirt poor in New York, so there were no trips to the Hamptons or views from penthouse terraces where you could see the whole sky.”

That surprised me even more. Though I didn’t know why. I knew as well as anyone that people could transcend their humble upbringings. I didn’t want to make a big deal of it, though, so I kept my response light. “They should probably call it something other than ‘dirt poor’ when you’re in a city. Pavement poor?”

“I wonder if the phrase comes from the notion that you have dirt roads or dirt floors rather than pavement, so pavement is the fancy option in that sense? But yeah, no dirt roads in New York.”

“Hmm. I grew up dirt poor—well, cyclically dirt poor—in the suburbs. We lived in a trailer that I was embarrassed by, so I never had friends over. It wasn’t a well-to-do suburb, and most people lived in modest houses, but they were, you know, houses . So I guess I grew up trailer-trash poor.”

If he was surprised by that admission, he didn’t show it. “I suppose if you grow up poor in Minnesota, you still get to see the moon and the sun in the sky at the same time.”

“Yeah. Open spaces abound. Lakes, too. Lakes are more democratic here, I guess because there are so many of them. Even our trailer park had a ‘lake’ that was really a glorified pond in the middle of it. But this one is spectacular.”

“Yeah.” He sighed—a good sigh, like he was sinking into his body, making an overdue surrender. “What does it mean to be cyclically poor?”

I probably shouldn’t have said that. But hell, he’d started this whole confessions-while-treading-water thing. And the dim, slanted orange light of the sunrise gave the scene an air of unreality, like a stage set. Like if I told him secrets, it would only be an actress playing the role of Gretchen doing the telling.

“My dad would have these phases when he worked, and things would be relatively OK. We were still poor, but we could…” I assessed him. I’d never really told anyone the details of my childhood. Even Rory only knew the CliffsNotes version. So I had no idea why I was suddenly telling Teddy. And I was not an actress playing me; I was me. “We could still eat, you know?”

“Yeah,” he said gruffly, and somehow that one word telegraphed that he did know.

So I kept going. “He would have these periods where he would have ‘normal’ jobs. Low-wage ones working retail, or being on a landscaping crew, or whatever. Things would still be tight—my mom was a waitress—but money was coming in. But my dad…” I tried to think how to explain Len Miller. “He always had this idea of himself as bigger than he was. Like he’d found himself living the wrong life. So he’d do stuff like quit to write a novel—and then not write the novel. Or he’d get roped into pyramid schemes and we’d have a shed full of unsellable herbal supplements but no money for lunch at school.”

Teddy made a noise of understanding. A noise of understanding that was totally neutral: it contained no judgment, or pity.

He said, “I used to pretend I wasn’t a breakfast person to get around the fact that there was never any breakfast in my house.”

“But you were a breakfast person,” I said, because I recognized this strategy.

“Yep. Always used to wake up starving. But for a while I made ‘not a breakfast person’ into an identity. I started drinking coffee at thirteen because it was cheap and suppressed my appetite. It got me through to lunchtime. I got free lunch at school—when I was going.”

“You weren’t keen on school?”

“It was more that my mom wasn’t keen on it. She was… arty. She thought of herself as arty, anyway. We lived in a run-down building that had been colonized by artists—I was never clear on if everyone was there legally. And I guess my mom was arty in that she had a lot of natural talent, both musically and in terms of visual art. But she never did anything with it—nothing practical, anyway. She was always taking my sister and me out of school in service of her various whims—one week we’d be busking in Central Park, the next she’d have my sister on modeling casting calls. I wasn’t really keen on school—I was never that smart—but at least it was predictable.” He paused. “At least it came with lunch.”

“Do you find…” I thought about how to phrase this. I’d never imagined asking anyone this question. “Do you have any hang-ups about food as an adult that you think probably date back to childhood? Like, I do this thing where I hate to share food, even though I’m completely financially comfortable nowadays. It’s OK if I can plan for it, like I’m having a party and I’m feeding my guests. But if you want to share fries at a restaurant? I hate that. It gives me a genuinely bad feeling. I can’t shake the notion that I might not get as much as I want if I let someone else start eating my food before I’m done with it.” I huffed a self-deprecating laugh, slightly appalled that I had shared so much so easily. “I’m superfun on dates.”

“So maybe your dating problems were partly your fault.”

“Maybe they were.”

His expression turned stricken. “I was kidding. Not wanting to share your fries is not a character flaw.” He paused. “You know what a rider is?”

“Yeah. Like I demand M&M’s in my dressing room, but the green ones only ?”

He chuckled. “Exactly. Concrete Temple had a lot of lean years as a band. We won a Best New Artist Grammy ten years ago, but we’d been together for seven by that point. We did a lot of tours where my practice being hungry came in handy. But it felt different from childhood. It was part of a trying-to-make-it sort of hustle.”

“It was part of a life you chose,” I said. “It was in service to something, rather than this thing that was happening to you that felt like it was never going to end.”

“Exactly. And eventually things started taking off, and we started booking bigger venues. We upgraded to a tour bus, and later we started flying around. The funny thing is that as you’re making more money and you can afford to buy what you need, the venues start to come with all this free stuff. You can literally order whatever you want, like they’re your God damn butlers. The bigger we got, the more outlandish the guys got with their riders. By the time we were in arenas, their demands were, to my mind, insane.”

“Like what? Sushi served off the body of a model?” I thought back to that date with Scott. He’d told me he was “getting really into Buddhism” and accused the others of having crappy taste. He’d made it sound like he was subsisting on organic pomegranates and tempeh made by monks.

Teddy chuckled again. I was pleased with my ability to make him laugh. “Not quite, but all the stereotypical stuff you’d imagine. Tons of junk food, but also steaks, top-shelf liquor. Our lead guitarist always wanted a whole cheesecake with cherry topping. But then they’d also ask for all this healthy stuff they were never actually going to eat. Our lead singer would ask for fixings to make smoothies—he had this whole list of kale and mangoes and shit—and a Vitamix blender to make them in. Had to be a Vitamix. No other brand would do. But then he almost never made the smoothies.”

What a shocker, given what I knew of Scott Collier. “I imagine the idea of a rider is a little wild if you grew up like we did.”

Like we did. I’d phrased that as if there were a kind of solidarity between us, between this rock star and me. But the weird thing was, something was stretching out between us, here in this quiet, cool water, and it felt an awful lot like solidarity.

“Exactly,” he said. “There was so much waste. Of the healthy stuff, but also of other stuff. They wouldn’t be in the mood, or they’d say they weren’t hungry. Regardless, it would have been impossible for anyone to eat everything they ordered. It used to drive me completely batshit.”

He was talking fast, his arms paddling faster. I could sense his irritation rising. “What did you order?”

“You’re going to laugh at me, but usually a Caesar salad with chicken and a small amount of sushi—on a plate, not a model.”

“Not very rock star–like,” I said, and look at me, teasing Teddy Knight.

“I wanted to make sure I’d eat everything I ordered, and honestly, I never wanted to eat that much before a show. I’d eat the sushi, which was a good infusion of protein and carbs. Then I’d eat the salad afterwards. I did go through a phase where I asked for a chocolate croissant, but I had to nip that in the bud when I realized I’d gained ten pounds in six months and the only thing that had changed was those croissants. You don’t get a lot of exercise on tour. I used to swim laps when we were in hotels with pools, but that was pretty much it.”

“I always thought performing was very physically taxing.”

“Maybe if you’re Taylor Swift. Or, speaking of Minnesota, Prince—that dude was amazing live. But when you’re the grumpy bassist in a band like Concrete Temple, not so much. I mean, it was a lot of standing, but there was also a lot of time on buses and planes.”

The thought of Teddy Knight watching his weight was mind-blowing. But so was the idea of him having had a hungry childhood.

Not to mention the fact that we were treading water in a lake talking about all of it.

It started to feel like too much. An unsettling, heavy feeling rose through me, and my legs were having to work harder to keep me afloat.

“You OK, there, Miller?”

My discombobulation was showing. “Yeah, yeah.”

“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I guess because you haven’t called the tabloids yet.”

I hadn’t, but I had continued to creep his ex-girlfriend, lately because I wanted a look at her apartment that was really his. She’d had an overnight oats phase, and Teddy had a really nice kitchen. But now that I knew more about him, I felt kind of… icky for ogling his kitchen? I didn’t even know. I just felt weird. I guess it was going to take a while to adjust to the fact that Teddy Knight was actually, maybe, at least somewhat, a decent person. Celebrities! They are just like us!

“Haven’t called the tabloids,” I said. “In fact, I’m going to put my phone away.”

For real this time. I would call Rory, Justin, my Realtor, and my lawyer and tell them to call the camp office if anything came up, and then I would power that sucker down.

“That’s why you bought an alarm clock at Target, right?”

“Yep, but I’ve faltered a bit and have yet to fully cut the cord.”

“Have you backslid on your reset? Are you back on the dating apps?”

“No.” I’m just on your ex-girlfriend’s apps. “But what’s the point of being here if I’m on my phone all the time? You know how sometimes you look up and you realize you’ve been on it for two hours and you didn’t even feel the time passing?” He was looking at me blankly. “You don’t, do you?”

“I mostly use my phone to talk to my sister,” he said. “Some of the other guys in the band were attached to theirs like it was an umbilical cord. I don’t mean this to sound all judgmental. I certainly have my vices. But I don’t think cell phones were good for them. They’re probably not good for anyone . I have this theory that you should only use cell phones as proxies for things that existed before cell phones—so, like, use it as an actual phone, use it as a map, read a book on it. But don’t use it for things that can only be done with a cell phone, you know? By which I mean, don’t do social media. It messes with your brain. Changes your personality, and not in a good way.”

“How’d you get so enlightened?”

He smirked. “I guess it just comes naturally.”

I rolled my eyes. Time to get out of here. I was less unsettled than a moment ago, but here, again, I’d just told Teddy all this really personal stuff. And I didn’t even have alcohol as an excuse this time. “Well, it’s been nice chatting, but I gotta go. I’ll see you later. You still owe me a Laurie.”