The Interestings (3 page)

“No, you are having a pot party in here, I think,” she went on.

“Well,” said Goodman, “it’s true that there’s been an herbal component. But now that you’ve made us see the error of our ways, it’ll never happen again.”

“That is all well and good. But also, you are consorting with mixed sexes,” said Gudrun.

“We aren’t consorting,” said Cathy Kiplinger, who had rearranged herself on the bed right beside Goodman, neither of them appearing flustered to be seen so close together.

“Oh no? Then tell me what you are doing.”

“We’re having a meeting,” said Goodman, lifting himself up on one elbow.

“I know when my leg is being pulled on,” said Gudrun.

“No, no, it’s true. We’ve formed this group, and it’s going to be a lifelong thing,” said Jonah.

“Well,” said Gudrun, “I do not want to see you sent home. Please break this up now. And, all you girls, please go back through the pines at once.”

So the three girls left, heading away from the teepee in a slow, easy herd with their flashlights leading them. Jules, walking down the path, heard someone say “Julie?” so she stopped and turned, training her light on the person, who was revealed to be Ethan Figman, who had followed her. “I mean, Jules?” he said. “I wasn’t sure which name you preferred.”

“Jules is fine.”

“Okay. Well, Jules?” Ethan came closer and stood so near to her that she felt she could see right into him. The other girls kept walking ahead without her. “Are you a little less high now?” he asked.

“Yes, thanks.”

“There ought to be a control. A knob on the side of your head that you could turn.”

“That would be good,” she said.

“Can I show you something?” he asked.

“Your head knob?”

“Ha-ha. No. Come with me. I’ll be quick.”

She let herself be led down the hill toward the animation shed. Ethan Figman opened the unlocked door; inside, the shed smelled plasticky, slightly scorched, and he threw on the fluorescent lights, which stuttered the room into its full majesty. Drawings were tacked up everywhere, a testament to the work of this freakishly gifted fifteen-year-old boy, with some nominal attention given to the work of other animation students.

Ethan threaded a projector, then shut off the lights. “See,” he said, “what I’m about to show you are the contents of my brain. Since I was a little kid, I’ve been lying in bed at night imagining an animated cartoon that plays in my head. Here’s the premise: There’s this shy, lonely little kid called Wally Figman. He lives with his parents, who are always fighting, who are basically horrible, and he hates his life. So every night, when he’s finally alone in his room, he takes out a shoe box from under his bed, and inside it is this tiny little planet, this parallel world called Figland.” He looked at her. “Should I go on?”

“Of course,” she said.

“So one night Wally Figman actually finds that he’s able to go
into
the shoe box; his body shrinks down and he enters that little world. And instead of being this nobody anymore, he’s a grown man who
controls
all of Figland. There’s a corrupt government in the Fig House—that’s where the president lives—and Wally has to fix it. Oh, and did I say that the cartoon is funny? It’s a comedy. Or it’s supposed to be, anyway. You get the idea, I think. Or maybe you don’t.” Jules started to reply, but Ethan kept talking nervously. “Anyway, that’s what
Figland
is, and I don’t even know why I want to show it to you, but I do, and here it is,” he said. “It just occurred to me in the teepee tonight that there was a slight possibility that you and I had something in common. You know, a sensibility. And that maybe you might like this. But I’m warning you that you might also really, really hate it. Anyway, be honest. Sort of,” he added with an anxious laugh.

A cartoon sprang up on a sheeted wall. “FIGLAND,” read the credits, and antic characters began to prance and splat and jabber, speaking in voices that all sounded a little bit like Ethan. The characters on the planet Figland were alternately wormy, phallic, leering, and adorable, while in the excess light from the projector Ethan himself was touchingly ugly, with a raw sheath of arm skin etched with its own ugly dermatological cartoon. On Figland, characters rode trolleys, played the accordion on street corners, and a few of them broke into the Figmangate Hotel. The dialogue was sharp and silly at the same time. Ethan had even created a Figland version of Spirit-in-the-Woods—Figment-in-the-Woods—with younger versions of these same cartoon characters at summer camp. Jules watched as they built a bonfire, then paired off to make out and even, in one case, have sex. She was mortified by the humpy, jerking movements and the sweat that flew in the air, meant to signify
exertion,
but her mortification was immediately painted over by awe. No wonder Ethan was beloved here at camp. He was a genius, she saw now. His cartoon was mesmerizing—very clever, and very funny. It came to an end and the film flip-flapped on its reel.

“God, Ethan,” Jules said to him. “It’s amazing. It’s totally original.”

He turned to her, his expression bright and uncomplicated. This was an important moment for him, but she didn’t even understand why. Incredibly, her opinion seemed to matter to him. “You really think it’s good?” Ethan asked. “I mean, not just
technically
good, because a lot of people have that; you should see what Old Mo Templeton can do. He was sort of an honorary member of Disney’s Nine Old Men. He was basically the Tenth Old Man.”

“This is probably really stupid of me,” said Jules, “but I don’t know what that means.”

“Oh, no one around here knows. There were nine animators who worked with Walt Disney on the classics—movies like
Snow White.
Mo came in late, but he was apparently in the room a lot too. Every summer since I’ve been coming here, he’s taught me everything, and I mean everything.”

“It shows,” said Jules. “I love it.”

“I did all the voices too,” Ethan said.

“I can tell. It could be in a movie theater or on TV. The whole thing is wonderful.”

“I’m so glad,” Ethan said. He just stood before her smiling, and she smiled too. “What do you know,” he said in a softer, husky voice. “You love it.
Jules Jacobson loves it.
” Just as she was enjoying hearing the strange name said aloud, and realizing that already it had become a far more comfortable name for her than dumb old
Julie Jacobson,
Ethan did the most astonishing thing: he thrust his big head toward hers, bringing his bulky body forward too, pressing himself upon her as if to line up all their parts. His mouth attached itself to hers; she’d already been aware that he smelled of pot, but up against her he smelled worse—mushroomy, feverish, overripe.

She yanked her head back, and said, “Wait,
what
?” He had probably reasoned that they were at the same level—he was popular here but still a little bit gross; she was unknown and frizzy-headed and plain, but had captured everyone’s attention and approval. They could join together, they could
unite.
People would accept them as a couple; it made both logical and aesthetic sense. Though she’d gotten her head free, his body was still pressed against her, and that was when she felt the lump of him—“a lump of
coal
,” she could say to the other girls in her teepee, eliciting laughs. “It’s like, what’s that poem in school—‘My Last Duchess’?” she would tell them, because at least this would demonstrate some knowledge of something. “This was ‘My First Penis.’” Jules backed up several inches from Ethan so that no part of her was in contact with any part of him. “I’m really sorry,” she said. Her face was hot; certainly it must have been turning red in various places.

“Oh, forget it,” Ethan said in a hoarse voice, and then she saw his expression simply change
,
as if he’d made a decision to switch over into the self-protective mode of irony. “You have nothing to feel sorry about. I think I’ll find a way to live. A way not to
commit suicide
because you didn’t want to make out with me, Jules.” She didn’t say anything, but just looked downward at her feet in their yellow clogs on the dusty shed floor. For a second she thought he was going to turn away furiously and leave her here, and she would have to head back through the trees alone. Jules saw herself stumbling over exposed tree roots, and eventually Gudrun Sigurdsdottir’s sturdy flashlight would be used to find her in the woods, where she would be sitting against a tree, shaking. But then Ethan said, “I don’t want to be a dick about this. I mean, people have been rejected by other people since the dawn of time.”

“I’ve never rejected anyone before in my life,” Jules said fiercely. “Although,” she added, “I’ve never accepted anyone before either. What I mean is, it’s never come up.”

“Oh,” he said. He stayed by her side as they trudged back up the hill together. When they reached the top, Ethan turned to her, and she expected to be met with something sarcastic, but instead he said, “Maybe the reason you don’t want to do this with me isn’t even because of
me.
”

“What do you mean?”

“You say you haven’t rejected or accepted anyone before,” he said. “You are one hundred percent inexperienced. So maybe you’re just nervous. Your nervousness could be masking your real feelings.”

“You think so?” she asked, doubtful.

“Could be. It happens to girls sometimes,” he added, overstating his worldliness. “So I have a proposition for you.” Jules waited. “
Reconsider
,”
Ethan said. “Spend more time with me and let’s see what happens.”

It was such a reasonable request. She could spend more time with Ethan Figman, experimenting with the idea of being part of a couple. Ethan was special, and she did like being singled out by him. He was a genius, and that counted for a great deal with her, she understood. “All right,” she finally told him.

“Thank you,” said Ethan. “To be continued,” he added cheerfully.

Only when he’d dropped her off at her own teepee did he leave her. Jules went inside and stood getting ready for bed, pulling off her T-shirt and unhooking her bra. Across the teepee Ash Wolf was already in bed, encased in her sleeping bag that was red flannel lined, with a repeating pattern of cowboys swinging lariats. Jules intuited that at one point it had probably belonged to her brother.

“So where were you?” Ash asked.

“Oh, Ethan Figman wanted to show me one of his films. And then we started talking, and it just got—it’s hard to explain.”

Ash said, “That sounds mysterious.”

“No, it was nothing,” said Jules. “I mean, it was something, but it was strange.”

“I know what they’re like,” Ash said.

“What what are like?”

“Those moments of strangeness. Life is full of them,” Ash said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” said Ash, and she got out of her own bed and came to sit beside Jules. “I’ve always sort of felt that you prepare yourself over the course of your whole life for the big moments, you know? But when they happen, you sometimes feel totally unready for them, or even that they’re not what you thought. And that’s what makes them
strange.
The reality is really different from the fantasy.”

“That’s true,” Jules said. “That’s just what happened to me.” She looked with surprise at the pretty girl sitting on her bed; it seemed that this girl understood her, even though Jules had told her nothing. The whole evening was taking on various exquisite meanings.

A first kiss, Jules had thought, was supposed to magnetize you to the other person; the magnet and the metal were meant to fuse and melt on contact into a sizzling brew of silver and red. But this kiss had done nothing like that. Jules would have liked to tell Ash all about it now. She recognized that that is how friendships begin: one person reveals a moment of strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit it. Their friendship did begin that night; they talked in this oblique way about themselves, and then Ash began struggling to scratch a mosquito bite on her shoulder blade, but she could hardly reach it, and she asked Jules if she could put some calamine lotion on it for her. Ash yanked down the collar of her nightgown in back, and Jules dotted on some of the bright pink fluid, which had the most recognizable odor imaginable, appetizing and overbearing at the same time.

“Why do you think calamine lotion smells like that?” Jules asked. “Is it the
real
smell, or did some chemists just come up with this random smell for it in the laboratory, and now everyone thinks it’s what it actually has to smell like?”

“Huh,” said Ash. “No idea.”

“Maybe it’s like pineapple Lifesavers,” Jules said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, they don’t taste like actual pineapple at all. But we’ve gotten so used to it that we’ve come to think that that’s the
real
taste, you know? And actual pineapple has basically fallen by the wayside. Except maybe in Hawaii.” She paused and said, “I would give anything to try poi. Ever since I learned the word in fourth grade. You eat it with your hands.”

Ash just looked at her, and began to smile. “Those are kind of weird observations, Jules,” she said. “But in a good way. You’re funny,” she added in a thoughtful voice, yawning. “Everyone thought so tonight.” But it seemed as if
funny
was a distinct relief to Ash Wolf. Funny was the thing, other than calamine lotion, that she needed from Jules. Ash’s family and her world were high-test, and here was this funny girl who was amusing and soothing and
touching,
really, in her awkwardness and her willingness. Nearby, the other girls in the teepee were having their own involved conversation, but Jules barely heard anything they said. They were just background noise, and the central drama was here between herself and Ash Wolf. “You definitely make me crack up,” said Ash, “but promise you won’t make me
crack up
.” Jules didn’t know what she meant, and then she did: Ash had awkwardly tried to make a joke, a pun. “You know—don’t ever make me go insane,” Ash explained, and Jules politely smiled and promised she wouldn’t.

Distantly Jules thought of the girls she’d been friends with at home—their mildness, their loyalty. She saw all of them marching to their lockers at school, their corduroy jeans swishing, their hair fastened with barrettes or rubber bands or let loose in wild perms. All of them together, unnoticed, invisible. It was as though she was saying good-bye to those other girls now, here in the teepee with Ash Wolf sitting on her bed.