Into the Woods

12 Stumble Through

12

STUMBLE THROUGH

Gretchen

“I think I made a mistake assuming we needed a boy for Laurie.”

I looked out at a sea of surprised faces and tried not to fidget. I’d called a special weekend meeting of the dance group, and I was here to apologize.

I’d never had to do that before, and it was making me twitchy. At my studio, I ruled with a (cheerful) iron fist. I enforced Miss Miller’s Morals. I choreographed recitals and taught the kids their parts. I was the boss.

I wasn’t the boss here. I was the artist in residence, though I still didn’t really know what that meant. I was aware that the campers looked up to me, or at least to my position—the other artists in residence were bigger deals in their respective fields than I was in mine. I wasn’t in charge, was the point. We were putting on this show together. Which, of course, was part of why I was so excited about it. It was a collaboration. The campers were the ones who’d inspired the idea for the theme of the show to be “girl” songs. We were still doing Little Women —kind of—but after all our chat about the book’s themes, we’d decided to pick a few scenes and set them to iconic songs by women that referenced womanhood or girlhood in powerful ways. But we were also inspired by the title of the book in its regular adjective-noun format: little women. What is it like being a girl today? How does a girl assert her power in a world that doesn’t naturally tend to give her any?

It was going to be amazing.

After I got rid of the dead weight.

“Last week wasn’t the greatest, right? Not because of you all, but because of Tristan.” A murmur went through the group. They were surprised I was speaking so openly. “I’m not sure what his problem is, but clearly he has one. But I’ve been thinking, I’m not sure we need to let his problems be our problems, you know?”

“Are you going to kick him out of the show?” Addison asked.

“I think I should.” I had pretty much made up my mind but thought I ought to talk to the girls first. We were in this together, and I was the one who’d told the other artists to treat the kids like peers. “Do you all agree?”

“But what are we going to do without him? What about the ballroom scene?” asked Hong, who, in the role of Jo, was his partner for a large part of that scene.

“I have some thoughts about that, but first I really do want to apologize.” I’d meant to open with that, but we’d gotten sidetracked. “From the start, Laurie should have been one of you. There was no reason to bring a nondancer in, even one who was going to be decent about it. And beyond that, the show is supposed to be about girl power, right? So why have we been so stuck on this boy? Remember when we first decided to do the ballroom scene? We talked about how Laurie would be the eye of the hurricane, the center of the scene?” There were nods of agreement. “That was wrong from the get-go, Tristan aside. And as we evolved the theme of the show to be more overtly about girlhood and the power of girls, it became even more wrong. I should have seen that sooner. I’m sorry I didn’t.”

“I don’t think there’s any need to be sorry,” Addison said. “I think this is what choreography is like sometimes—it’s probably what all art is like, or at least art you make with other people. It’s a process. Sometimes you have to stumble your way through to the right thing.”

Wow. I’d been correct in my early assessment of Addison as the smart one. And that was what was different about what I was doing here. At the studio, I unilaterally imposed recital choreography. I might consult Rory, but there was no “stumbling through” with the dancers themselves. There was no creating something together. Partly because most of them were so young. But partly because that just wasn’t how a dance studio like mine operated.

“So let’s stumble our way through this,” I said. “We have one week till the show. What do we do about Laurie?”

Some discussion followed, and it was decided that a girl named Harper should play Laurie, because she had the smallest role in this particular number, so pulling her out of it would cause the least amount of disruption.

“But will she fit into his costume?” asked one of the girls. “Or can we get it altered?”

“We can get it altered,” I said. “Or Jo could dance with a girl. Lori spelled L-O-R-I?” They laughed at that. “Remember that’s what Tristan first thought it was when he heard the name? Then the costume is irrelevant. We could just dispense with boys altogether.”

Hong raised her hand. “I actually like girls in real life. In, you know, that way. Not boys.” She was blushing, and I kept my face open and neutral. I had no idea if she was out generally, if everyone else knew this about her. At the very least she was coming out to me with that statement.

“That’s great.” I was trying to be positive but to play it low-key. “And since this is acting as well as dancing, it will probably read as more authentic.” I swung around to Harper. “Are you up for it?”

“I don’t want you to feel weird,” Hong rushed to say. “Or uncomfortable. It would just be acting.”

It was Harper’s turn to blush. “I won’t feel weird or uncomfortable.”

Then we ran the scene and damn, I was pretty sure both Harper and Hong did “feel weird,” but in a good way. A way that was creating chemistry and making the number crackle with energy. Hong had not had this with Tristan. We should have made this change a long time ago. But, I told myself, it was OK: we were stumbling through together. And now it was going so well that no one would be able to tell we’d only had “Lori” for a week.

After we got the number nailed down, I sought out Tristan and fired him. Hilariously, he did a version of what the Mediocre Men of Tinder so often did when faced with rejection. He told me my show sucked, that he’d never wanted to be part of it anyway, that dancing was lame in general, that ballroom dancing was especially lame. The funny part was that he was talking quietly, so quietly I had to strain to hear him. But then I thought, Why? Why am I doing this? Dude can’t even speak up with his toxic bullshit?

I laughed, and I didn’t even feel bad about it. Maybe I should have, on account of his being a kid and my being an adult and authority figure, but I didn’t.

That should have been it, but he followed me out of the studio, repeating his mumbled insults, except this time with less mumbling.

I was suddenly finding this encounter less hilarious and more of an affront.

I’d been headed to the dining hall, but I stopped and faced him. “You didn’t even want to be in the dance show anyway. As you just said. And as you made abundantly clear every time you ‘practiced’ with us, so I don’t know why you’re so up in your feelings about this.”

Never tell a boy—of any age—that he’s getting emotional.

His insults turned personal. “Bitch.”

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been shocked, but I was. I guess I assumed a kid at Wild Arts, no matter what he was thinking, would be smart enough not to vocalize something like that. So I was set back on my heels for a moment, blinking, unable to quite absorb the fact that yes, this was happening now.

“Fucking dance bitches. You think anyone will ever—”

“You will stop talking now.”

Teddy. Suddenly there.

He was clearly beyond angry at Tristan, but he wasn’t expressing it with yelling or any kind of theatrics. “You are an embarrassment.” His tone was cold—icy—and utterly controlled. Somehow that was scarier than a more overt display of rage would have been. “You are fired from the music group, and if I have anything to say about it, this is it for you at camp.” They stood facing each other, Tristan blinking, eyes wide, and Teddy staring, eyes narrow. “Come with me,” he finally said, and he turned, apparently trusting that Tristan would follow.

He did.

I did my best to shake off the encounter and went to dinner. I often got my food to go after a long day, but I was still feeling off. Unsettled. So I collected my taco salad and banana pudding—oddly, I was going to miss camp food—and sat by Jack, the only other artist present.

We nodded at each other and ate in silence for a minute.

“How’s the book coming?” I finally asked, just for something to say.

He didn’t answer. Why had I ever expected Jack Branksome to be chatty?

But then he said, “It’s not. I haven’t done shit since I got here, and to be honest, I hate myself for it.”

I almost choked on a piece of taco shell.

Wow. I didn’t particularly like Jack, but I didn’t wish him ill, and the idea of him hating himself, much less copping to it, was making me reevaluate him. “Maybe that’s OK. Part of the point of being here is resting and recharging. Creativity isn’t a widget you can produce on demand.” Lest he think I was being too presumptuous, I added, “I mean, maybe. I don’t know. I’m not a writer.”

He shrugged like I wasn’t automatically and/or totally wrong.

I decided to press my luck. “Do you have a hard deadline?”

“January first.”

A little less than six months from now. I didn’t know if that was a lot of time or not a lot of time when it came to book writing. “Maybe you can really crank on it starting next week when you’re in between camp sessions.”

“You’d think I could,” he said in a way that was self-deprecating enough to make me continue reevaluating his whole persona. I wasn’t sure how to respond, but I didn’t have to, because I heard a low “Hey” from behind me.

Teddy, carrying a dinner tray, and sliding onto the bench next to me.

“Hi.” I raised my eyebrows, not sure what to say in this context. Thanks for rescuing me? I didn’t like to think of myself as the kind of person who needed rescuing. Especially from a teenager. But I could not deny it had been nice to have the Tristan problem handled. And more than that, it had been good to have someone have my back. Well, not someone. Teddy.

That was an alarming thought I should probably analyze later. Or not. I didn’t have that much longer at Wild Arts, so why bother?

“I hope you don’t think I overstepped with Tristan,” Teddy said. I smiled. It was like he could hear my thoughts. “I happened to overhear what he was saying to you, and I felt responsible. He was a music kid, and I was the one who stuck you with him. But you were handling it. I should have let it be.”

“No, I was happy to have him be your problem.” I sent him a jokey smile, both to show there were no hard feelings and to cover my own unease at how much I had enjoyed being rescued by Teddy.

He squirted some hot sauce on his taco salad. “Well, he’s Marion’s problem now. She’s kicked him out and called his parents, and she’s driving him to Duluth to meet them.”

Jack made a noise that was half astonishment, half inquiry, so I turned to him and said, “Shitty kid had a meltdown and called me some unflattering things, and Teddy went on the warpath.”

“Mm.” Jack looked back and forth between us. “I see how it is.” He shot me a smile-smirk hybrid, but not an unkind one. I knew he was thinking of the condom he’d given me, but apparently he was going to keep that thought to himself and not be a jerk about it. Could have knocked me over with a feather.

“We were just talking about Jack’s book, which is due January first and isn’t coming along,” I said to Teddy.

Jack rolled his eyes and said, “It isn’t even starting along.”

“Yikes,” Teddy said.

“I’m about to email my agent and ask how long I can push it until they make me give the advance back.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have been so quick to turn your nose up at Blair Kellermoon,” Teddy said jokingly.

“Maybe so.”

I waited for the sneer, but it didn’t come. Had Wild Arts mellowed Jack? If so, forget crones in the woods, this really was a magical place. “We’re having a campfire tonight. You should come.”

Jack shrugged noncommittally.

“Seriously. Singing, s’mores, goodwill, camaraderie. It’s right up your alley.” I cracked up.

“Maybe.” Jack pushed back from the table, looked between Teddy and me, and said, “I’ll leave you two alone now.”

I was about to protest that there was no reason to leave us alone, but I thought better of it. Protesting would only make me seem guilty.

Guilty of what? Of wanting to be alone with Teddy?

I was guilty of that.

It was a good thing I was out of here at the end of next week.

I was late for the campfire because I’d gone to the dance cabins to report to the counselors on Tristan’s firing, and we’d gotten to talking. The kids were in bed, if not asleep, so the three of us went and sat on the porch of one of the cabins.

“I wish you were staying for the next session,” Grace said.

“Me, too,” Brianna said. “You handled the Tristan situation like a pro.”

I was chuffed by their praise. “Honestly, I thought I was fumbling it.”

“I wouldn’t have had the guts to confront him like that,” Grace said.

“Me either,” Brianna said. “Or I would have gotten Marion involved. Regardless, I would have lost a ton of sleep over it. You just handled it.”

“I did lose some sleep over it,” I said. “But I’ve been thinking lately about how we—women, I mean—sometimes go to extreme lengths not to offend men. Or boys. Do you agree?”

“Yes!” they said in unison.

“I’ve been trying to stop doing that.”

“Though to be fair,” Brianna said, “I think there are situations where you need to not offend men, you know? Situations in which you might actually be in danger.”

“Oh for sure,” I said, alarmed. I didn’t want to radicalize my counselors such that they got themselves hurt. “You have to read the situation. And I’m not saying any of this to tell you what to do. I’m a lot older than you. This attitude, which does not come naturally, by the way, has been a lifetime in the making.”

“I wonder,” Grace said thoughtfully, “if part of the problem is that sometimes, in the moment, it can be hard to distinguish between situations that might become violent and situations that probably won’t. Maybe our bodies, our fight-or-flight responses, don’t always know the difference.”

“Yes,” I agreed. Silence fell, and, sensing we were done with this heavy topic, I asked, “Will either of you come back next summer?”

Grace was going to, but Brianna wasn’t sure, as she was going into her last year of college. “It depends what I can scare up jobwise after graduation.”

I asked some questions about Brianna’s upcoming year—she’d mentioned previously that she would be taking a choreography course. Hearing about it all was fascinating. I was a little jealous, actually, but I quashed it. There was no point in getting lost in the what-ifs. I’d done what I needed to do to survive, and that hadn’t included an expensive four-year degree.

“Will you two keep in touch after this summer?” I asked.

“Oh for sure,” Brianna said, and Grace agreed.

“So you’re actual friends rather than just camp friends.”

“Yeah,” Brianna said. “Though I never went to camp as a kid, so I don’t really know about the whole camp friend thing firsthand.”

“Oh, I did,” Grace said. “Every summer. Not arts camp like this, just regular camp.” She smiled at Brianna. “But we’re real friends, you and I.”

“So you’re an expert on the camp friend phenomenon,” I said to Grace. “Tell me about it. Why can’t camp friends port into the real world?”

“It’s not that they can’t . They just usually don’t. You go back to your regular lives, you go to different schools that might not even be in the same city. If you want to keep in touch, you’re reliant on your parents for logistics and transportation.” She shrugged. “So you see your camp friends at camp, basically. You have this intense but time-limited friendship.”

“What if your camp friend doesn’t come back the next year?”

“It’s sad. But you get over it.”

“And do you think about them?”

“Maybe. I guess you think you were lucky to have had that summer with them.”

You were lucky to have had that summer with them.

As I approached the campfire, Grace’s words were reverberating in my head. I was going to keep in touch with Maiv. I vowed I would make it happen. She didn’t live far from me, and we both had flexible jobs and were single with no kids. It was doable.

But the rest of them? Camp friends, probably. A bittersweet category of human relationship I hadn’t even known existed before I came here. As I approached the fire and saw everyone gathered around it, the flames making their faces glow, I was struck with a longing, a kind of homesickness in reverse, for them, for this place.

Teddy was holding his guitar but not playing, and there was a spot open next to him. It would have been logical for me to sit there. It was right in front of me. But I was afraid we had the chemistry my Lori and Jo did. If people had been gossiping about us earlier in the week, I hated to think what they were saying now.

Also, I was starting to get spooked over how much I liked him. Actually liked him. Beyond the sex. Which I also liked.

Distance seemed prudent for a variety of reasons.

So I stepped over the log, skirted the fire, and sat in the other empty spot, next to Danny, noticing as I did so that the conversation had come to a halt.

“Wow, do I know how to bring down a party or what?” I joked, thinking that if my aim had been to deflect attention from my and Teddy’s… thing, going out of my way to avoid him was probably not the way to do it.

Or I was overthinking this all.

Let’s go with that.

“Jack was telling us about his book,” Maiv said, and I was shocked. By the fact that Jack was talking about his book, but also by the fact that he was here to begin with. I hadn’t noticed him initially, in my angst over where to sit.

“By all means, continue,” I said.

“Eh, I think that’s about it. I’m stuck. Not much more to say.”

“I don’t know anything about writing novels,” Caleb said, “but when I get stuck on a play, I sometimes think about if I can tell that part of the story—or the whole story—through the point of view of a different character.”

I expected Jack to say something snarky, but he just made a vague murmur of acknowledgment. Wow, was this nature-and-artistic-collaboration stuff finally working on Jack Branksome?

For a while, the only sounds were the lapping of the waves and the crackling of the fire, but then my second shock of the evening was delivered in the form of Teddy’s saying, “Anyone want to hear a song I wrote?”

The group’s answers ranged from “Yes” to “Hell yes.” I said nothing because I wanted to hear his song so badly, the wanting opened a pit inside me.

The song wasn’t a ballad per se. It was peppy, but it was acoustic. Well, of course it was acoustic; he only had a guitar with him. But it sounded like it was meant to be acoustic.

It was about… well, I wasn’t sure. On the surface of things, it was about a lake, a lake that the narrator originally saw during a storm and found menacing. But then it turned out that the lake had moods, a kind of sweetness beneath the choppy waves. I wondered if this was the song he’d told me about called “Sweet and Sour.” There was a line about lying back in bed at night and still feeling the waves that, for reasons I couldn’t articulate, choked me up.

There was a moment of silence when he finished, then everyone started clapping and hooting. I kept looking at my feet, trying to stave off tears. The homesick feeling was deepening. I was going to miss these fires. Hearing people’s music. Watching Maiv take a blank canvas and turn it into something breathtaking.

Everything everyone was making here was so beautiful and terrible. It was like watching baby birds hatch and leave the nest. I’d done that once, when a robin had made a nest in a planter on my porch. The things that came out of those eggs hadn’t looked like birds at all; they’d looked like tiny alien reptiles. They were ugly, but I hadn’t been able to stop looking at them, standing there on my tiptoes in my entryway, spying on them through the little window at the top of my front door. Over the next week, they grew feathers and doubled in size and seemed less like creepy miniature aliens and more like proper animals of the sort that belonged on Earth.

And then they were gone. Out in the world somewhere with flimsy new feathers that made actual flight seem like a long shot.

I was on my feet before I even realized it. I had to leave. Something was happening to me. Something was breaking inside me, or about to break.

“I didn’t realize how tired I am,” I managed to say. I heard myself speaking as if listening to a recording of someone impersonating me. “I have to be up early tomorrow,” my impersonator said. “I have some work to do on a piece for the end-of-camp show.”

Everyone said good night, and I was almost free when Teddy said, “I’m going, too.” He smirked. “Sorry to run off, but I kind of can’t believe I played that song to you guys, and now I’m going to flee.”

He didn’t even try to be subtle about the way he followed me, bypassing his own front door. If anyone was watching us, it would be obvious. I was too freaked out to care. And tired. I hadn’t been lying back there; I’d suddenly become overwhelmed with exhaustion, my limbs made of cement.

“Hey, hey, Miller.”

I stopped, though I didn’t want to. Or maybe I did. Maybe I just didn’t want to want to.

“You OK?” The porch light from my place shone on his face. He looked genuinely concerned.

“Yeah, sorry. I’m really beat. I don’t think I’m up for anything tonight.”

He waved a hand dismissively. “Yeah, fine, but are you OK?”

Was I OK? I didn’t know. I probably would be tomorrow. “Your song was phenomenal,” I said, which I realized didn’t answer his question, but it was the truth.

The next morning, I overslept so severely that I had to vault out of bed and run to the dining hall so as to not miss breakfast. I’d been so weirdly overwrought when I got back to my cabin last night that I’d forgotten to set my old-school alarm clock, so I’d missed my morning swim.

I’d freaked out last night, and I wasn’t entirely sure why. The homesick-in-advance feeling had stuck around, kept me tossing and turning until the wee hours. I felt better this morning, but jumpy. I told myself I would chill as I worked on the new Lori dance, which was my plan for the day. I would, of course, be workshopping it with the counselors and the kids, but we were tight enough on time that I was going to get moving on some ideas.

I ate a big bowl of oatmeal with fruit and headed out. I took the extreme step of locking myself in the dance studio. Generally we kept the doors open. Because of the heat, but also because of the overall vibe of Wild Arts. There was something about being surrounded by people making art that upped your own game. I thought of the times I’d listened in on Teddy and Anna.

But not today. I could only hope that as was generally the case on weekends, the kids and counselors would be off doing regular camp things—there was a two-hour canoe trip this morning that at least some of the dance girls had opted into.

The Lori dance wasn’t that hard. I knew Hong and Harper. Not just as dancers, but as people. I knew how the dance was meant to slot into the overall performance, in terms of both pacing and style. It was like adding a missing paragraph to an essay or finding a missing puzzle piece under your sofa.

As I ran through it one final time, doing Harper’s new part, I found myself adding a calypso leap on the end. It didn’t belong there. It made no sense within the grammar of the dance. But my body wanted to do it. To add it on like an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence. Except that wasn’t right, because this leap wasn’t a punctuation mark that signified an ending. It was more of a transition. A beginning, even.

I’d been doing this particular leap off Teddy’s porch a lot. I didn’t even know why, except that it just… came out. Maybe his porch was a good height.

Which made no sense, because the whole point of a leap was that you started on the ground and ended on the ground. Starting from a higher vantage point, like a porch, gave you a head start. It was cheating, basically.

So why couldn’t I stop doing it?

Why did I run over to the potting studio and liberate an unused bench they sometimes used to display pieces and drag it back to the dance studio and leap off it approximately a million times?

What did it all mean?

I wasn’t sure, but suddenly there was a flash of lightning in my brain and I started thinking about the opposite concept: how would I execute a calypso leap—or any leap—if I wanted to start on the ground and land on the bench?

I asked myself again why I would want to. What it would mean.

What did it mean when I leaped off porches or off that bench? Why was I doing that?

I thought the answer was that it was an expression of joy. The head start made the leap extra big, made my body feel extra buoyant. I tried to put some specificity to that feeling. Like, what would be an example?

The first thing that came to mind was Teddy. Well, not Teddy per se, but that feeling I’d had when we were negotiating the last hurrah. I don’t feel like I have to watch what I say, or care what I look like, because I don’t care what you think I look like , I’d said, and I’d literally laughed out loud from the thrill of it.

So… I was leaping because I was liberated. That wasn’t very deep.

I closed my eyes and summoned one of the vignettes that had been accumulating in my mind. It was a woman dancing up a hill. Not dancing in a happy way, but working hard against gravity, exhausting herself.

So if leaping with a head start—off a porch, or a bench—was liberation, was the opposite also true? If I tried to leap but started from “below” somehow, from downhill, my body having to fight against gravity to make it happen, would the resulting leap signify heaviness, strife?

My legs got jumpy.

I had no way to try out this scenario. I did consider actually trying to leap onto the bench, but it was narrow and rickety and I didn’t want to hurt myself and leave the dance group leaderless. Instead, I… pretended. Imagined a giant slope that I never managed to crest. Did it over and over again, thinking about the woman in the vignette in my head until I became her.

The piece was about the shitty men of Tinder, it turned out. About what it felt like to be the recipient of their unsolicited opinions, even as one was doing one’s best to live up to their expectations.

I suspected it was also about men generally. About life generally. What an uphill climb it was sometimes to exist as a woman in the world, in both the personal and professional realms. But when I thought about it like that, I got spooked. That was too big a theme. So I just danced.

At seven, when I emerged, I felt… new. Scraped clean, somehow. I decided to knock on Caleb’s door, to tell him about my day. I’d followed my body through the negative-start leaping it had seemed to want to do, and, after doing it enough times, I’d started to get what it meant. The meaning was coming through the steps. I’d never done things in that direction. For recital pieces at my studio, I had selected music, often according to a theme, and then put steps to the music.

I stopped on my way to Caleb’s. Would he get it, though? Maybe I should find Maiv. She would give me some box wine and be thrilled to hear about my day.

I knocked on Teddy’s door.

I mean, of course I did.

He answered with his eyebrows raised. “She lives.”

“Yeah, sorry, long day.”

“You didn’t swim this morning.”

“Did you swim this morning?” He hadn’t been back since that one morning he’d joined me.

He paused. “No. I just… sometimes notice when you are.” Another pause. “I mean that in the least stalkerish way possible.”

I grinned. “You got anything to eat? I missed dinner. And lunch.”

“In fact, I do. Jack and Maiv and I went into town, and I got some groceries. I heard you like Cheetos.”

“Oh my God, I love them. Though I should probably try to go beg something more substantial from the kitchen staff, assuming they’re still there. I haven’t eaten since breakfast, and I burned a lot of energy today.”

“I also picked up some of the famous Kuhn family cheese spread.”

“Did you love it?”

“Eh.”

“Oh come on. You loved it.”

“I did, but I’m not keen on being the kind of person who loves a product labeled ‘cold pack cheese food.’ What does that even mean?”

“Cold Pack Cheese Food should be the name of your next band.”

He smirked. “The problem is I ate all the crackers. Wait. I’m having a flash of inspiration.” He made jazz hands. “I have some bread—and this hot plate.” He plugged in the single-burner stove and bent down and rummaged through a cupboard and emerged with a beat-up frying pan. “Cold pack cheese food grilled cheese sandwich? With a side of Cheetos?”

I cracked up. “Sounds perfect. How come you have a loaf of bread? Seems random.”

“I’ve been oversleeping breakfast—when I’m not noticing you swim in the least stalkerish way possible—so I usually just make toast.” He made a face. “I may be doing better on the participation front, but I’m still not a morning person.” He moved to the minifridge. “You want classic cheddar, port wine, or herb and garlic?”

“Wow, you really went all in on the cheese spread. I don’t know what to pick!”

“I’m getting another brain wave. We’ll make finger sandwiches. Little fancy sandwiches. Then we don’t have to choose.”

“Brilliant.” I made my way over to him. “You want to cut the bread first or make the sandwiches whole and then cut them?”

He hip-checked me. “Shoo. I’ll do this.”

“I can help.”

“Nah, you sit. I got this. You want some bourbon?”

“Sure.”

He herded me to the little table and gave me a drink. “You probably aren’t going to believe this, but I am an expert at grilled cheese.”

“I believe it. Grilled cheese is classic poor-people food. Filling and cheap.”

“Exactly. A brick of Velveeta, a loaf of Wonder bread, a tub of margarine, and you’ve got a week’s worth of dinners.” He was spreading cheese on bread as he spoke. “Though today you get your sandwiches fried in real butter, because that’s what I put on my toast these days.”

“Fancy.” I sipped my bourbon and watched him work. He was shirtless, wearing only shorts and the orange rubber clogs. He had an unselfconscious ease in his body that was compelling. It interested my inner choreographer.

Oh, who was I kidding? It interested my inner horndog.

“I thought maybe you were done with me,” he said over his shoulder. “When you turned in early last night and then I didn’t see you all day.” In another context the statement would have been loaded, but he didn’t seem bothered.

Did I… want him to be bothered by the idea that I was done with him? Which I most decidedly wasn’t.

I was overthinking again. “Not done with you,” I said. “I’ve just been preoccupied.”

I waited for him to ask with what, but he only said, “Mm,” as he flipped sandwiches.

“I’m afraid when I go back to my regular life that it’s not going to be enough for me anymore,” I blurted, and whoa, I hadn’t known I felt that way until I said it. Yelled it—I’d gotten rather vehement there.

He turned around and leaned back against the counter. “Well, shit.”

“Exactly.”

“You want to elaborate?”

“I spent the day choreographing. For the kids, but also… for me.”

“That’s… great?”

“Is it?”

“I don’t know?”

“I made the beginning of this… I don’t even know what to call it. Dance. Story. Story-dance. But I have no idea what to do with it. How to finish it. Whether to finish it. I barely even know what it’s about .”

“Making new things, new kinds of things, is scary as hell.”

“Right. But here’s the part that’s new for me: the idea of not making them is, suddenly, also scary as hell. Or not scary, really, but, I don’t know… soul destroying?” I laughed at myself. “That’s too melodramatic. I’m just in a weird headspace.”

He was looking at me really intently, gearing up to give me advice, I was pretty sure. I somehow knew it was going to be a speech on how I couldn’t let go of this new creative side of me, how I had to make room for it in my life. Easy for him to say. He wasn’t the one who had his entire professional and financial future on the line, tied up in a very expensive new building.

“I think your fancy poor-people sandwiches are starting to burn,” I said, sniffing the air.

“Shit!” He danced around the kitchen for a minute. “I think I’ve saved them.”

He plated them—he had made three sandwiches and cut each into quarters, so we each had six little squares. He poured some Cheetos on my plate and set it in front of me with a flourish. “Milady.”

“Thanks,” I croaked, suddenly emotional. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had cooked for me. Someone besides Rory and her husband.

“Oh my God,” I said through my first mouthful. “Why are these so good ?”

“Mm,” he agreed. “I wonder if you can get cheese spread in New York.”

“Ha. I’ve converted you.”

“Maybe so,” he said thoughtfully, and after a minute of silent munching, he added, “You know what I do when I’m all up in my head over a song?”

“What?” A moment ago I hadn’t wanted his advice, but when it came like this, with a window into his creative process, into him , I found myself desperate to know.

“I do the next thing. I write the next line, or I let a chorus I’ve been humming and ignoring come out. I try not to overthink it. I just do one thing.” He paused. “Now, I’m not saying I always do this. But when I can make myself do the next thing without worrying about how it’s all going to fit together— if it’s all going to fit together—it usually works out.”

“Hmm.”

“I’m aware that I’m saying this like it’s simple, and I’m aware that it is in fact not simple, but ask yourself, What’s the next small thing?”

“I need to dig a hole,” my mouth said.

“Literally?”

“Literally.” Because I knew, suddenly, in a way that went beyond language, that it wasn’t a hill my dancer-self protagonist was trying to dance up, it was a hole she was trying to dance out of.

And so I found myself, post–cold pack cheese food sandwiches, stealing a shovel from a shed where Lena kept her lawn mower and tools.

And we really were stealing it: Teddy was picking the lock.

“How’d you learn to pick locks?” I asked as the door clicked open.

“I can only do these crappy locks where the lock is inside the doorknob.” Yeah, there was no deadbolt or high security here. “I used to have these phases where I’d go to school before it was open. The front doors would be unlocked, I guess because the custodians would be there, but none of the classrooms were. I used to break into the band room. But just to sit there. Maybe noodle around a bit—they had an electric guitar and amp there with headphones so no one could hear me.”

“This is my first episode of breaking and entering,” I said as I let my eyes adjust to the shed’s dim interior.

Teddy grabbed a big shovel. “We’re not breaking and entering. We’re entering and borrowing. Come on, let’s go.”

I caught sight of a crate full of hand tools—spades and such—and grabbed a small hand shovel. When Teddy shot me a questioning look, I said, “Detail work.”

We both burst out laughing.

After we tiptoed out, he said, “Where is this hole going? May I suggest somewhere off the beaten path so a camper doesn’t fall in?”

“Yes. Also so no one sees me.”

We settled on a spot behind the off-the-map shower building, and Teddy got to work digging. I kept expecting him to ask me what the hell I needed a hole for, but he just dug with cheerful diligence, refusing my offers to take a shift.

“You want to come in and measure?” he asked, after having established that I was going for knee height. We switched places, him jumping out and me jumping in.

“This is good,” I said like I knew—like I had any idea what I was doing. “A good depth, but I think I need it to be a little wider.” I needed to be able to get momentum.

Teddy started widening the hole, and when he was done, I could no longer stand how noninqusitive he was being.

“Why are you being so cool about this?”

“What do you mean?”

“I said I wanted to dig a hole, and you were like, ‘OK, let’s dig a hole.’ Aren’t you curious? What if I need to hide a body? What if you’re an unwitting accessory to a crime? Don’t you think this is at least a little bit weird?”

He shrugged. “I guess art is weird sometimes.” He excavated a few more shovelfuls, paused, and shot me a wicked grin. “Anyway, I would help you hide a body any day, Miller.”