Into the Woods

13 Camp Boyfriend

13

CAMP BOYFRIEND

Teddy

I spent a lot of the next week using my phone to do research—so much for my big speech on how phones should only be phones or books or maps.

I looked up all kinds of stuff related to phobias—agoraphobia, but I also learned about kenophobia, which was fear of open spaces. It wasn’t that I thought I could or should diagnose Auden, but I couldn’t do nothing. Regardless of what label would ultimately be applied, it seemed like a pretty severe case of anxiety must be at the root of what was going on.

I also looked up therapists—read reviews, cruised websites, combed the listings in Psychology Today . I stopped short of sending them to her, but I did book a plane ticket home for the break between camp sessions. I needed to see Auden. Lay eyes on her. Even if it wouldn’t solve anything.

I also needed to get my own house in order—literally. But also metaphorically. I needed to get my life ready for me to reinhabit it in the fall.

It wasn’t all kenophobia and plane tickets, though. I worked with the kids, individually and as a group. “Bohemian Rhapsody” was in good shape. It was a bit ragtag, but in some ways that was in the spirit of the song.

Anna continued to blossom. As much as I hated that word as a metaphor, it was apt. Every time I saw her, she had new stuff for me. It wasn’t all album material, but a few of her songs were fucking phenomenal, and now that I was officially cowriting, I could roll up my sleeves and get in there. We had a couple songs that I was prouder of than anything I’d done with Scott. They made my limbs buzz with an energy that I hadn’t realized I’d been missing. They made me want to get up and dance.

Dancing, of course, was not something I did. But one afternoon when I was getting the dancing feeling, I went over to the dance studio to spy on Gretchen’s Little Women rehearsal like I was James fucking Bond.

Until I, in a very non-Bondlike twist, got caught.

“Can I give you a piece of friendly advice?”

That from Jack, who’d sidled up next to me.

“Can I stop you?” I asked.

“ I know why you’re here. You know why you’re here.” He paused. “Well, maybe you don’t. Anyway, I know you’re not skulking around looking at teenage girls in leotards, but you might want to think about the optics of this.”

“I…” Could not argue with that. I wasn’t spying on the kids—gross. But I was spying on Gretchen. The question was why. Jack said I knew, but apparently I wasn’t as smart as he thought I was.

It made no sense for me to be here. I had Gretchen in my bed every night—the one night she’d seemed out of sorts and stayed away had turned out to be, as she’d said, just about her being tired. I’d thought she was ending our last hurrah prematurely. But no, she’d only been having an artistic crisis of confidence, apparently followed by an artistic blossoming—there was that stupid word again—to do with a hole in the ground. I got that. I mean, I didn’t get the hole-in-the-ground part, but I wasn’t supposed to. I respected both artistic crises of confidence and artistic blossomings.

And every night, after Gretchen danced in or around her hole or whatever, we went at it like it was our last week on earth. Which I guess, for our purposes, it was.

The point was, I had Gretchen’s thighs in my bed. Wrapped around my waist. Or my neck. I didn’t need to be ogling them as I slow-walked by the dance studio like I was a fucking teenager.

I hadn’t been like this when I was a fucking teenager.

I went back to my cabin and wrote another song. Like it was no big deal. Like I was Anna, with a direct line to the songwriting mojo of the universe.

It was so easy it was almost scary.

When I was done, it was cocktail hour. But I put on my swim trunks before I walked over and knocked on Jack’s door.

“Hey.” He stepped out, bottle in hand.

“Let’s go swimming.”

“I’ll pass, thanks.”

“Come on. You came to the campfire last weekend.”

“That was an aberration.”

It was true that he hadn’t shown his face much this week. I’d dragged myself to sunrise circle this morning—it being Friday, it had been the last one for this session. The other artists seemed to have had the same idea, but not Jack. I hadn’t seen him anywhere except for our customary cocktail hour, and I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but he’d been more sullen than usual this past week.

“Suit yourself.”

When I got to the beach, Gretchen wasn’t there. She was probably in her hole.

Which was fine because it wasn’t like I’d gone to the beach to see her. I’d gone to the beach to swim. I would see her later. Tonight.

Where the hell was Gretchen? It was nearly midnight and she wasn’t here.

I checked myself. Maybe I shouldn’t assume we were going to have sex every night. Just because that was how it had been going didn’t mean that was how it was always going to go. There had been that one night she’d been too tired.

We could take a night off.

Well, there was no we when it came to taking a night off. She could take a night off. I didn’t want a night off. We only had two nights left, and if it was up to me, we’d make the most of them.

I got up and looked out the living room window, which faced her cabin. Her light was on. What was she doing over there?

I did some pacing.

I made a cup of coffee to keep myself awake, because I was apparently now the kind of person who couldn’t stay up past midnight without the assistance of a stimulant.

I looked out the window again. No change.

I couldn’t text her. I didn’t even know her number. She didn’t have her phone on anyway.

Well, hell, I was just going to go over there. We always got together at my place, but that was a habit, not a rule.

We didn’t have rules. That was the whole point. We weren’t in a relationship where we made demands on each other. Therefore, it was perfectly reasonable for me to go over there and see what was up.

Which did not explain why I had butterflies in my stomach as I did so. I crept around my cabin, trying to be casual. I didn’t care if anyone knew we were hooking up, but Gretchen did. I glanced around furtively. While this amateur spy shit was cute on Gretchen, I was aware that I probably looked like a fucking idiot.

The butterflies went into a frenzy as I knocked softly.

No answer. Maybe she wasn’t in there despite the light. I knocked again, and I was about to give up when she swung open the door.

“Teddy?” She was all disheveled and blinking—and adorable. She was wearing a leotard and shorts, and she had creases in the side of her face. “Oh my God, I fell asleep. What time is it?”

“I’m sorry I woke you. I’ll go.” Disappointment sliced through my gut, displacing the butterflies.

“No!” She pulled me inside. I was probably more flattered than I should have been.

She sniffed her armpit. “I gotta shower. We had a big day—the final rehearsal. Then I spent longer than anticipated on the project I’m working on. I intended to lie down for a few minutes, but I guess I conked out.”

“If you’re tired, we don’t have to… you know,” I said, offering her an out I hoped she wouldn’t take.

“Hell yes, we do.”

I—and my dick—swelled with pride.

“It’s our last chance, so we gotta make the most of it.”

Wait. “What?” I tried to be casual. “We have two more nights before session one is over, right?”

“Yes, but my friend Rory is coming to the show tomorrow—

she’s the pregnant one. She doesn’t want to sleep in a cabin. So she’s got a hotel room in Duluth that she’s driving back to after the show, and then she’s going back to the Cities the next day. It made sense for me to go with her. Plus, I’ve missed her.”

“So this is it,” I said, realizing how much I’d been counting on us having two more nights. Finding out that it was in fact just one… well, it stung.

“This is it,” she echoed. Was I imagining that wistfulness in her tone? She was all business as she said, “I’ll run and take a shower. You want to wait here, or should I come to your place?” So yeah, I guess any wistfulness in this exchange had been imaginary.

“Let’s swim,” I said, letting the impulse rise in my brain and flow directly out of my mouth.

“What?”

“Come on. It’s your last night.” It was our last night, but I wasn’t going to say that.

She stared at me for a beat, and I could not read her expression. She looked more like herself when she finally said, “OK.”

We made arrangements to meet on my porch, and as I waited for her, I thought about how if I’d known tonight was her last night, I would have suggested a campfire. A proper send-off. But it seemed like everyone was preoccupied with tomorrow’s show.

Anyway, did I really want to spend my last night with Gretchen in the company of everyone else? I could give her a very proper send-off all by myself. Heh.

She appeared a few minutes later, the beam of the flashlight she was carrying slicing through the darkness—though it wasn’t dark-dark. It was clear, and the nearly full moon pinned over the lake had poured a glaze over the night.

She lowered herself onto the glider next to me. She was wearing the Target swimsuit and carrying a shower caddy.

“Going for the full bathing experience, are we?”

“I really do not smell good, so I either gotta wash in the lake or take this to the shower afterward and you’ll have to wait for me.”

You’ll have to wait for me.

A strange feeling came over me, like I would wait for her in any setting, for any amount of time. I quashed it. “Let’s do the lake bath. I could stand to get clean, too. I’d suggest a joint shower later—I’m wagging my eyebrows lecherously, but it’s too dark for you to see them—but although I’m always up for adventure, I’m not sure you want to risk discovery.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure Marion would take kindly to her artists getting it on in the shower.”

I chuckled as I rose, giving some thought to whether I should offer her my hand. Would it come off as too solicitous, too much like a date, which she was always insisting she didn’t want?

It occurred to me that I was spending a lot of mental energy trying to make this last bit of time we had together exactly the way she would want it. Which felt an awful lot like I was approaching this as a date. Could it be a date and a not-date at the same time?

“You OK there, Knight?”

“Yeah.” I was, of course, standing there like an idiot, paralyzed while I fretted over whether to take her hand or not. Fuck it. It was dark, we were going to have sex later. And more to the point, I felt like offering her my hand. She could ignore it if she wanted to. So I stuck my hand right into her beam of light, just to make sure this gesture that was almost certainly an overstep would not be ambiguous, and said, “Shall we?”

She took my hand.

Not only that, she handed me her shower caddy to free up her hand—she had her flashlight in the other—so she could take mine.

Something happened in my chest—there was… a bubbling up. Which was ridiculous, because all she was doing was holding my hand as we crossed the beach.

I needed to get out of my head.

She leaned down to set the flashlight on the dock, but she kept hold of me, so I did the same with the shower caddy. When we were both upright, she swung my hand forward to indicate we should jump in together. “Ready?”

“Yes.” I was not ready for a lot of things, maybe—to make an album, to figure out how to help my sister, to face life after the last session of Wild Arts—but jump in a lake with Sourplum? Yes. A thousand times yes.

We had to separate as we hit the water, and when we surfaced, I could feel her grin. Her giddiness to be here, in the dark, quiet lake.

Or maybe that was my own giddiness.

She swam off, and when I caught up, she rolled over into a lazy sidestroke. “How come you never came back to swim in the mornings after that one time?”

“You said it was your time to get ready for the day, to get your head screwed on. I thought I shouldn’t intrude.” And after we’d talked that morning, she’d swum off and ignored me.

“Oh.”

“Should I have intruded?”

“I… don’t know.”

Well. That was a big fucking missed opportunity.

We swam out farther until, as if by silent agreement, we reached a spot where we stopped and trod water. Last time we floated in a lake together, at the official swimming area, I’d vomited out my sob story about my mother and the lemon tree.

I still felt sheepish about that, but what Gretchen said had really made a difference. It had changed how I thought about it and had led to that conversation with Auden.

I wanted her to know that. And this was—apparently—my last chance to tell her. “I was thinking about what you said about how I’m reacting to the lemon tree thing.”

“What did I say?”

“You said to lean into the shitty way it made me feel. That holding on to things gives them power over you. I mean, not that I’m suddenly magically over my mother and all her bullshit, but you were right. And that made me think about how my sister said something similar about the album I was thinking I’d write while I was here—she said it was reactive, and she was right. I was doing it to get back at Scott. I was even thinking of it as ‘the revenge album.’”

“Hmm.”

I’d expected her to say more, to dispense more of her hard-to-hear but correct advice, but she only rotated in place while she trod water.

I assumed she was still listening, so I continued. “I’ve been thinking maybe I should reach out to Scott. Apologize. See if I can salvage something.”

She stopped rotating, but she wasn’t facing me. I could see her face in silhouette thanks to the moonlight. “You mean like a friendship or a professional partnership?”

“I don’t know, either? Both?” Did I want that, though? I was clearly writing different kinds of songs, at least for now. And as for friendship, how would that even work? We’d never been friends outside the context of the band.

Gretchen hadn’t said anything, so I asked, “You don’t think it’s a good idea?”

“Oh, no, I have no opinion.”

“Say it like you mean it.”

“You should do what you think is right.”

You should do what you think is right? Something was off here. She was spouting generalities, and she was sounding uncharacteristically uncertain. “I’m just feeling like most of the way we left things is on me. Scott is not a bad guy. You’d like him.”

“Does your sister like him?”

What an odd question. “Not so much.” Auden had never come out and said it, but I hadn’t gotten the sense that she was the president of the Scott Collier fan club. “But she doesn’t really like anyone. She tolerates him, though.” Or maybe I should say “tolerated,” past tense. Because unless I did reach out, I probably wasn’t going to see Scott again. That was a sobering thought. How could someone who’d been such a big part of my life just be… gone forever?

“I think I have to tell you something,” Gretchen said, sounding more like her usual, decisive self.

“OK.” My stomach dropped. But why? It wasn’t as if I were getting dumped, which was what her tone brought to mind. You couldn’t get dumped if you weren’t in a relationship to begin with.

“I should have told you this a long time ago.”

Now I was getting freaked.

“I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.”

Which is it? I wanted to ask. You should have told me a long time ago, or you don’t know why you’re telling me?

“It’s not like it has any impact on what you do or don’t do with respect to Scott.”

Huh?

“It’s not a big deal, is the point. I’m building it up like it’s a big deal, but—”

“Will you just tell me!”

“I went on a date with Scott.”

My blood turned to ice water. “ What? ”

“We matched on Tinder. He was my last hurrah that I mentioned.”

“What?”

I couldn’t think of anything else to say. What? was the only thought in my head right then. It was taking up all the available space, pushing up against the edges of my head—of my whole body.

“I didn’t know it was him,” she said quickly. “And even once I knew it was him, I didn’t know him. I couldn’t have named any of the members of Concrete Temple at that point, and I couldn’t have picked Scott—or any of you—out of a police lineup. I only recognized you at the Minneapolis airport because I’d googled you after Marion wrote to us about joining the staff at Wild Arts.”

I didn’t like this feeling of having one giant, unsettling thought in my head. An angry thought. This was how I ended up smashing TVs in Hilton Garden Inns. Not that I was going to lash out violently here. I was more confused than anything.

But more than that, I needed to not be the kind of person who lashed out violently in general. Ever. So I forced myself to replay what she’d said and to react to it in a normal way.

“I’m sorry I was such a dick that day at the airport. I was… I was a mess. I was coming off more media attention than I’d ever had in my life, and it was all focused on behavior I wasn’t proud of. The most attention I’ve ever got coincided with the worst day of my life. Not that I wanted any attention.”

“You know,” she said quizzically, “you always hear famous people saying they don’t want to be famous, but it always seems at least partially disingenuous. But with you it seems real.”

“It is. I accept that a certain amount of fame comes with the privilege of getting to make music for my job. If you want to make money playing music, you can’t do it without an audience. But usually people recognize me only in specific settings, and that’s how I like it. But…” I was trying to find a balance here, of not going all Hulk-smash but also getting my needs met. I needed to talk about this date. So I took the remarkable yet unremarkable step of opening my mouth and asking, “Can we talk about Scott, though? Can you tell me about this date?”

She proceeded to spin the most astonishing tale. Everything she said made sense. We had been in Minneapolis that night. Scott had been in the hotel room next door to me, for fuck’s sake.

The way she described Scott was both familiar and not. As difficult as it was, I let her speak without interruption. The pit that had opened in my stomach when she first said she’d gone on a date with him slowly started to fill with… something. Dread, I suppose, though I felt it physically, like tar. I felt responsible for this having happened to her, though I understood with my intellect that Scott was not me and I was not Scott.

Maybe that was what I’d been needing to understand, to articulate, all along.

Scott was not me and I was not Scott.

We’d made a lot of music together, but it didn’t necessarily follow that that was the only way we could do music.

Well, shit.

I told myself to shelve this revelation to examine later. Right now my job was to listen to Gretchen.

“He wasn’t violent or anything,” she assured me.

He wasn’t violent. That was a low bar.

She cleared her throat. “But he was actually the one who inspired me to give up dating.” Her tone was, on the surface of things, light. Almost glib. I could see beneath the surface, though. “Well, that’s not fair. I’d already decided. I guess he was the nail in the coffin.”

“So what you are saying is Scott turned you into a crone,” I said. It sounded wrong, though. I’d been trying not to overreact, but I feared I’d come off like I was making light of what had happened to her.

“Well, remember I’m only an aspiring crone. But yeah. But also, not just Scott. He and all who came before him.”

“For the record,” I said, “maybe your encounter wasn’t physically violent, but it sure as hell sounded… psychically violent.”

“Yeah,” she said quietly. “That’s a good way of putting it.”

“I kind of want to get out of this water, hunt him down, and break his face.” It was the truth, but in my ongoing attempt to not overreact, I kept my tone calm, even.

“I assume you know that’s a bad idea.” She chuckled. “Though I do appreciate the impulse.”

“I do know it’s a bad idea.” I paused. “I don’t know if you read the tabloid stuff about me smashing a TV.” I didn’t wait for her to confirm whether she had. “I know probably every rock loser who’s trashed a hotel room has said this, but I don’t know what came over me. I’m embarrassed by it. I’d like to say that wasn’t really me. I’ve been thinking about it all summer, and I guess I have to face the fact that it was me. It wasn’t like that TV smashed itself. Anyway, my point is that while I say I’d like to break Scott’s face, it really is, in this case, a figure of speech.”

“Maybe it’s Scott. He’s the common denominator in these crappy encounters.”

I wasn’t sure if she was making a joke, but I took the proposition seriously. “He wasn’t always like that.” I paused. “Or maybe he was. That’s the upsetting part. Did I just have bad judgment? Years of bad judgment? But anyway, I don’t want to turn this around and make it about me. I’m sorry that happened to you. I’m sorry it happened to you at the hands of someone I used to call a friend.”

“Used to call a friend” because this settled it. I’d answered my previous question about whether I should reach out, try to mend fences. Scott and I were done. Hopefully I’d get to the point where I’d remember the good stuff—the crowded van in those early days when we were so full of hope and ambition, the shared awe of our first stadium show, the addictive eureka feeling of nailing a song during a writing session.

“No need to apologize,” Gretchen said. “You’re not responsible for him.”

“I know that, but to some extent we’re judged by the company we keep, you know?”

“I actually did judge you, initially, by the company you kept.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“I tried not to, mind you, but then you were kind of a jerk at the airport.”

I couldn’t deny it. I told myself not to try to explain away my behavior again. She’d heard me the first time.

“But then I realized you and Scott are totally different.”

That was interesting. At the risk of continuing to make this all about me, I asked, “How so?”

“You’re not smooth and charming like he was. You’re a lot grouchier. Less appealing.”

I barked a laugh. “Thank you very much.”

“Initially,” she clarified. “But really, you guys are inverses of each other. He’s all smooth and charming, but he’s rotten inside. You’re all…”

“Go on.”

“You’re prickly on the outside, and you can be an asshole, but inside you’re actually very upstanding. Honorable. Kind, even.”

Damn. The water was cool, but I could feel myself flushing. “I think you’re giving me too much credit.”

“I’m not. Look at the way you booted Tristan out of here. The way you’re helping Anna.”

“Arguably, that is called doing my job.” For some reason her characterization made me uncomfortable. I wanted to be those things: honorable, upstanding, kind. I just wasn’t sure I was .

“Well, then you’re doing your job well.”

“Well, maybe, but I’m also lazy—I went to a grand total of two sunrise circles while the kids were here. And I am kind of a dick—I basically ignored a couple of the music kids because they were talentless wannabes.”

She splashed me, signaling that she was done enumerating my good qualities, which was honestly a relief. “Anyway,” she said, “I’m still not sure I should have told you about my date with Scott. It’s been stressing me out not telling you, and when you brought him up, it felt like lying to keep silent. But maybe it was selfish, dumping this all on you. It’s not as if you can do anything about it, and I’ve probably messed with your mental image of one of your best friends.”

“We were never best friends, but we were tight. We worked really well together. And his family was… really good to me.”

“Where did you meet?”

“We met at band camp, basically, if you can believe it. The band teacher at my school was pals with some other teachers in the city, and they organized an informal battle of the bands one summer—a round-robin tournament. I was in a shitty band at that point with some guys from my school. Scott went to a fancy arts high school, and his band was much better than mine. But we ended up vying for the title, and I don’t know, I guess we had a lot of respect for each other. We started jamming. His parents were wealthy—they had that big apartment on the Upper East Side that I told you about—and I spent all my free time there until we graduated. Then they basically bankrolled the band through the lean years. And when I’d eat dinner there, which was often, they always sent me home with leftovers, which I’d give to my sister. They were good folks.”

Which was why it was so hard to hear what a shithead their kid became.

But also, hearing the story of what a shithead Scott had been to Gretchen made me feel less bad about how I was feeling about him.

“Well, you show different sides of yourself to different people. Just because he was one way to me doesn’t mean—”

“If you’re about to say what he did to you doesn’t make him a bad person, you’re incorrect.”

“I don’t want you to feel like you have—”

“I don’t feel like I have to do anything. I’m glad you told me. It makes it easier to just stay out of touch, actually.”

“Are you sure?”

I had never been more sure of anything in my life. Her story was the last piece of a puzzle clicking into place. I was done with Concrete Temple. I was done with Scott. I was in another phase. My protest music era, or whatever. I didn’t even know yet. But somehow, it was easier to be in a new phase knowing the old one was really, truly behind me.

“I’ve been wondering about his wife,” Gretchen said.

“Meaning should you tell her he’s on the prowl?”

“Yeah. I mean, I don’t know how I’d do that. Send her a DM on Instagram, I guess.”

“They’ve been separated more than a year now, if it makes you feel better.”

“It does, actually.”

“Well, good. Honestly, I don’t know the ins and outs of their separation, but I think we can both feel OK about letting go of the Scott fallout in our lives.”

She heaved a big, relieved sigh. “I feel so much lighter now that I’ve told you.”

I felt so much lighter now that she’d told me. And I had gotten to explain the TV smashing incident. “I guess this is why people go to confession. Come on. Shampoo time.”

We swam back to the dock, and I shimmied up far enough to grab her shower caddy and to angle the flashlight so it was illuminating us. I squirted some shampoo into my hand. “Hold on to that post.”

“You’re going to wash my hair?” she exclaimed in disbelief.

“This is a full-service confession, ma’am.” I paused. “Unless you don’t want me to.”

“Oh, by all means, knock yourself out. And remember I paid for the shampoo with extra scalp massage.”

I chuckled and got to work.

“Oh my God,” she said after a few seconds. “That feels amazing.”

I had never washed anyone’s hair before, and I didn’t know what had possessed me. I mean, partly it was that I was ready to move on to the indoor portion of our evening. But mostly I just… wanted to take care of her. Not to make up for what Scott did to her, but to show her that… I don’t know, that she was worth caring about. Even if she was happily on her way to cronedom.

Sourplum: she was confusing. But I was used to it now. I could exist inside the confusion.

Eventually she submerged herself to rinse, and when she came up she asked, “Are you doing the conditioner, too?”

“Sure.” I got started on that and said, “I’ve never really understood the point of conditioner.”

“You don’t use it?”

“Nope.”

“How is your hair so shiny and pretty, then?” I chuckled, and she added, “I assume your masculinity isn’t so fragile that you object to having your hair called pretty?”

“Nope. Remember I’m the guy who gets his nails done at strip malls in Cincinnati. So I’m fine having pretty hair. And as for why it is that way, I don’t know. Conditioner wasn’t something we had lying around as a kid. These days, they definitely put it on me when I get my hair cut, and sometimes I buy a bottle, but then it seems like an extra step that’s just a time suck, and I fall off the wagon.”

“Isn’t your hair hard to comb through when it’s wet, though?”

“Sure is.”

“Well, this will help.” She swatted my shoulder, seeming to want me to turn around. I did, and damned if she didn’t start shampooing my hair. “Uhn,” I said. It wasn’t like I didn’t know, objectively, that having someone massage your scalp felt good, but there was something extra about Gretchen doing it in a lake under the moonlight. Something that felt very close to what I’d been trying to make her feel: cared for.

She didn’t linger, though. “Rinse,” she ordered, and after I did, she combed conditioner through my hair with her fingers. “You’re supposed to let it sit for a while, but I’m impatient.”

“You are, are you?” I teased. “Why?”

“Because you’re making sex moans as I’m washing your hair.”

“You started it.”

She swatted my shoulder. “Rinse.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

We both ducked—she still had her conditioner in. It took me longer to rinse—I guess my hair was thicker and longer—and when I came back up, she was soaping her armpits. Why was that so hot?

“You want this?” She held up the soap. “It’s biodegradable and approved for lake use—so was the shampoo and conditioner—in case you were wondering.”

I had not been wondering. It had never occurred to me that products used to clean would somehow be bad for nature, but as was well established, I was not a natural—pun intended—when it came to nature. “I’m good, thanks.”

“All right,” she said, plunking the soap in her caddy. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

She suggested we go to her cabin, where she said she had some spray detangler that she wanted to use on me, so we crept across the road.

“You’re missing your oh-so-effective hoodie disguise,” I teased.

“Eh,” she said. “I’m pretty sure everyone’s onto us. Maiv and Jack, anyway.”

Maiv I wasn’t surprised by. Even if Gretchen hadn’t told her, Maiv was perceptive. I suppose it was her painter’s eye. “Jack knows?”

“Yeah. That time I came over to your place with a condom, I’d gotten it from him.”

“Well, damn.”

“He’s never said anything, though.” She wrapped her towel around her hair as we walked. “You know, I’m starting to wonder if I’ve misjudged him.”

“I read his book,” I said.

“Really?”

“Yeah. I downloaded it on my phone after my first few drinks with him.” I shrugged. “I don’t know, I was curious. And I’ve been thinking about how I used to read a lot when I was younger. I wasn’t a great student, but my library card got a lot of use. I fell out of the habit somewhere along the way.” If the next phase of my life was going to be less relentless, with its hippie folk music and its lack of punishing world tours, I intended to acquire the habit again.

“How was it?”

“It was great, actually. It really made me think, and it was just a good story—a page-turner.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“What? Why?”

She looked around as we mounted her porch and gestured me inside before saying, “Because he’s such a jerkface.”

I chuckled. “I think he’s just insecure.”

“I think you might be right. I feel bad I misjudged him.”

“Well, he does come off as a jerk, and you can’t be everyone’s psychologist. Just mine.” I winked. “But if Jack knows we’re sleeping together and hasn’t said anything yet, I think our secret is probably safe.”

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter who knows. I’m gone tomorrow.”

“Right.”

Right.

As I watched her disappear into her bathroom, I started to… I didn’t even know. What was this strange fluttery feeling in my stomach?

I was nervous. I’d felt like this in the early years of Concrete Temple, when we’d started leveling up from dive bars to small concert venues, and then again in a bigger way when we graduated to arenas. Stage fright.

I told myself that was ridiculous. It was just Gretchen. We were old hands at this by now. We knew each other’s bodies. There was no performance anxiety. She was, frankly, easy to get off. And she really did it for me, too.

It was going to be strange not to have her around.

“You know that song ‘Moon River’?” she asked as she emerged from the bathroom holding a hairbrush. She made a game show hostess gesture to a cascade of moonlight angling in through her window.

“Look at that, we’ve got our own moon river.”

She shimmied out of her swimsuit, and she stood and wrapped her towel around herself, securing it under one armpit. I did the same, tying my towel around my waist—and then I shocked the hell out of myself by holding my hands out and saying, “Dance with me.”

I’d shocked the hell out of her, too, judging by the face she shot me.

I moved into the moonbeam. “Come on.” I started humming “Moon River.”

“You are such a weirdo.”

She came into my arms, though, and rested her head on my chest. I switched from humming to singing as I got to the line “Wherever you’re going, I’m going your way.” Ironic, given that this was our last night.

“What do you think a ‘huckleberry friend’ is?” she asked after I was done.

“I don’t know, but it sounds good.” I ran through the lyrics in my head. “Maybe a friend you go on an adventure with? A friend you can roam free with?”

“Like a camp friend. Remember Marion talking about that?”

“Yeah.” Though camp friend felt like not a strong enough designation for us—if in fact she was implying we were camp friends.

We kept swaying even though the song was done. That was the nice thing about dancing in the moonlight to imaginary music—you could do it as long as you wanted to.

“You know,” she said, her voice muffled against my chest, “at some point I started thinking of you as my camp boyfriend.”

“What?”

“I know I’m the one who’s been hyper over saying nothing we’ve done was a date and we aren’t together—and nothing was and we aren’t. But I don’t know…”

“Dancing in towels in the moonlight is a pretty romantic thing to do.”

I expected her to scoff, or to deflect, but she just said, “Yes.”

“But also illegal, according to the Gretchen Miller view of the world.”

She laughed. “Also yes. But maybe there’s a loophole if you’re only my camp boyfriend, you know?”

“Is a camp boyfriend one step up from an imaginary boyfriend?”

“Exactly. Low effort. Superlow in this case, as you didn’t even know you were my camp boyfriend until the eve of our breakup.”

She was saying all this laughingly, with a hint of self-deprecation. I couldn’t get with the vibe. I couldn’t stop glitching on this idea that she’d been thinking of me this way and I hadn’t known. “Except,” I said, “I think if you’re using the camp friend analogy, the idea is that camp friends see each other every summer, right?”

What was I saying? That I wanted to see her next summer? I wasn’t going to be back next summer.

Was I?

Would I even be invited if I wanted to come back?

“Sure, sometimes,” Gretchen said, “but I was talking to the dance counselors recently about this very topic, and they said sometimes a camp friend doesn’t come back.”

“And what happens then?”

“Nothing. They’re sad for a while, but there’s enough else happening that they get over it.”

I for one was never going to forget Gretchen. I wasn’t sure if what I’d undergone this summer was attributable to the place or to her or to some alchemical combination of the two, but I was a different person from when I’d arrived. A better person.

I didn’t know how to say any of that, though, so I let the hand that had been wrapped around her float up and rest on her cheek so I could tip her head up and kiss her.

She sighed into my mouth, and something like a sigh happened to me, too, to my whole body. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever been so relaxed, so rooted. We kissed for a long time. Maybe we were making up for those early, kissless encounters. Or maybe we were banking kisses for the future. Things eventually heated up, but not in the usual way. Normally when we had sex, things were frantic. We’d be tearing our clothes off and going at it like teenagers—that was why we’d skipped the kissing initially. This time, though, it was slow. I would have said lazy, but that wasn’t the right word. We were exacting in our ministrations, careful as we let hands glide over skin, as we let towels fall to the floor. “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately.” The line snaked through my consciousness as we touched each other with such focused intent.

Eventually she led me to her bed, and we lay on our sides facing each other. She stroked my face, like she had that night in the forest. It felt like she was trying to memorize me. I wanted to do the same. Not that I was in any danger of forgetting her—that was impossible—but I wanted the sense memory. I wanted to caress her face and tangle my fingers in her hair. I wanted my hands to remember what she felt like. So I did all those things. I wondered if she’d been struck with a similar impulse, because she brushed her hands over my tattoos—the ones she could reach, anyway. She would find one, rub her fingers over it in a little circle, and look at me with an expression I couldn’t decode. Something that contained fondness, but also sadness.

When she was done with her tour of my ink, which felt like she was done with her tour of my life, she heaved a big, shaky breath and turned away to get a condom. She tipped me to my back and climbed on top. I grabbed her hands, and she rode me, staring at me and holding my hands like she never wanted to let go. I knew I didn’t. She was upright, and the moon river hit her, painting her shoulders and breasts in its white light.

“Gretchen, I—”

“Shh.” She shook her head, and I swallowed the rest of the sentence. Once it was gone, I wasn’t even sure what it had been.

Slowly we carried on, staring at each other and holding hands as she ground herself on me. When she came, it was with an almost surprised-sounding cry. And it was a cry. A wail, almost.

I knew this feeling. It was building in me, too. It was pleasure, but pain. Sorrow. It was goodbye.

When we’d finished, she slumped forward and buried her head in my neck. We lay there a long time. It reminded me of when she’d slept in my arms in the woods. Except this time, when we got up, it would be the end.

I wasn’t used to being in Gretchen’s cabin. The nice thing about mine—aside from not having to do the James Bond walk of shame to get home—was that I didn’t have to make the decision about when we were done. She could leave whenever she wanted. Which, historically, had been not long after our encounters. She’d usually loll around a bit. We’d even had one or two serious post-sex conversations—about teaching, about our childhoods. But she never fell asleep. She always left.

So I should probably do the same.

But now, with us wrapped up in each other after the most intense sexual experience I’d ever had, I didn’t know how to leave.

We’d been lying silently for a good ten minutes when she shifted against me. “Is it OK if I stay a bit?” I whispered into her hair.

“Assuming you don’t mind slumming it in my low-thread-count sheets, sure,” she said, turning onto her side to face away from me. She flashed me a smile over her shoulder that felt like it was scooping out my insides.

Would it have been that easy all along? If I’d asked her to stay over at my place any of the nights we’d gotten it on, would she have?

It seemed that skipping morning swims wasn’t the only opportunity I’d missed this past month.

I lay there in my big spoon position thinking about how we’d never done her leave-in conditioner, or even combed our hair. We’d gone straight to dancing in the moonlight. I was going to have a mess of tangles in the morning, but I didn’t care. I wondered what Gretchen’s hair would be like when she woke up.

“Mm,” she sighed.

I hadn’t realized I’d started playing with her hair. She liked it—she was angling her head into my touch like a cat chasing scratches.

So I lay there stroking Gretchen’s hair as she fell asleep. Until long after she fell asleep, actually. I was content, partly. But underneath that contentment was a hole, and as Gretchen’s breaths expanded, so did the hole. I had the oddest sense that like Gretchen’s literal hole, I’d dug it myself.