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before they went to sleep; Jules cracked her up often but listened well to her too; Ash was observant and offered guidance about a range of subjects, though never bossily. They sometimes whispered for so long after lights-out that the other girls had to shush them.
    Now, after the concert, Ethan sipped his punch like it was brandy from a snifter, and when he was done he tossed his paper cup into a bin, and dropped his arm upon Jules’s shoulder. “The way Susannah sings ‘The Wind Will Carry Us’ is so sad,” he murmured.
    “Yeah, it really is.”
    “It makes me think of the way people devote their lives to each other, and then one of them just leaves, or even dies.”
    “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” said Jules, who had never understood those lyrics, in particular how a single wind could carry two people apart
.
“I know this sounds picky, but wouldn’t the wind carry them
together
?” she asked. “It’s
one
breeze. It just blows one way, not two.”
    “Huh. Let me think about it.” He thought briefly. “You’re right. It doesn’t make sense. But still, it’s very melancholy.”
    He was somber, watching her, seeing if the melancholy mood could make her respond to him again. When he kissed her moments later as they stood slightly away from everyone else, she didn’t stop him. He was ready, like a doctor who’s given his patient a little bit of an allergen in the hopes of triggering a reaction. He wrapped his arms around her, and Jules willed herself to want him as her boyfriend, for he was brilliant and funny and would always be kind to her and would always be ardent. But all she could feel was that he was her
friend
, her wonderful and gifted friend. She had tried so hard to respond to him, but she knew now that it probably wouldn’t ever happen. “I can’t keep trying,” she said all in a flood, unplanned. “It’s too hard. It’s not what I want to do.”
    “You don’t know what you want,” said Ethan. “You’re confused, Jules. You’ve had a major loss this year. You’re still feeling it in stages—Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and all that. Hey,” he added, “she’s got an umlaut too.”
    “This isn’t about my father, okay, Ethan?” Jules said, a little too loud, and a few people looked over at them in curiosity.
    “Okay,” Ethan said. “I hear what you’re saying.”
    Galloping into the lantern light at that moment came Goodman Wolf, along with a pouting ceramicist from Girls’ Teepee 4 who always had clay under her fingernails. They stopped on the edge of the circle and the girl tipped her head up toward his, and Goodman leaned down and then they kissed, their faces both dramatically lit. Jules watched as Goodman’s mouth pulled away with what she could swear, even from a distance, was a smear of the girl’s colorless lip gloss on his lips, like butter, like a prize. Jules imagined exchanging Ethan’s face and body parts with those of Goodman. She even imagined debasing herself with Goodman in some crude, Figland-type way. She pictured cartoon drops of sweat flying out from their joined and suddenly naked selves. Thinking about this, she was suffused with a blast of sensation like the light from Ethan’s projector. Feelings could come over you in a sudden wild sweep; this was something she was learning at Spirit-in-the-Woods. She could never be Ethan Figman’s girlfriend, and she was right to have told him she would no longer try. It would have been exciting to be Goodman Wolf’s girlfriend, of course, but that wasn’t going to happen either, ever. There would be no pairing off this summer, no passionate subsets formed, and though in some ways this was sad, in other ways it was such a relief, for now they could return to the boys’ teepee, the six of them, and take their places in that perfect, unbroken, lifelong circle. The whole teepee would quake, as though their kind of irony, and their kind of conversation and friendship, was so strong it could actually make a