The Interestings Read Online Free PDF

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.
    But the newly forming friendship was paused briefly by the presence of Cathy Kiplinger, who moved into the center of the teepee, taking off her own big, complicated bra and unharnessing her duo of woman-sized breasts, distracting Jules with the thought that these spheres inside this conical building were the equivalent of a square peg in a round hole. Jules wished Cathy weren’t here at all, and that Jane Zell wasn’t here either, or somber-faced Nancy Mangiari, who sometimes played the cello as if she were performing at the funeral of a child.
    If it were just Jules and Ash, she would have told her everything. But the other girls were circling, and now Cathy Kiplinger, dressed only in a long pink T-shirt, was passing around a huckleberry crumble purchased at the bakery in town that afternoon, and a warped fork from the dining hall. Someone—could it have been silent Nancy? Or maybe Cathy?—said, “God, it tastes like sex!” and everyone laughed, including Jules, who wondered if sex, when it was really good, actually offered the pleasures of a huckleberry crumble—all goo and give.
    The subject of Ethan Figman was now lost for the night. The crumble went around a few times, and everyone’s lips became tribally blue, and then the girls lay down in their separate beds and Jane Zell told them about her twin sister who had a shocking neurological disorder that sometimes caused her to slap herself in the face over and over.
    “Oh my God,” said Jules. “How awful.”
    “She’ll be sitting there, just totally calm,” said Jane, “and she suddenly starts to smack herself. Wherever we go, she makes a scene. People freak out when they see it. It’s horrible, but I’m used to it by now.”
    “You get used to whatever you get,” Cathy said, and they all agreed. “Like, I’m a dancer,” Cathy continued, “but I have these enormous boobs. It’s like carrying around sacks of mail. But what am I supposed to do? I still want to be a dancer.”
    “And you should try to do what you want,” Jules said. “We should all try to do whatever we want in life,” she added with sudden and unexpected conviction. “I mean, what is the point otherwise?”
    “Nancy, why don’t you take out your cello and play us something,” Ash said. “Something with atmosphere. Mood music.”
    Even though it was late, Nancy got her cello from the storage area and sat on the edge of her bed, her bare legs opened wide, intently playing the first movement of a cello suite by Benjamin Britten. As Nancy played, Cathy stood on someone’s camp trunk, her head perilously near the slant of the ceiling, and she began to perform a slow, free-form routine like a go-go dancer in a cage. “This is what guys like,” Cathy said confidently. “They want to see you move. They want your boobs to swing a little, as if you could hit them in the head with them and knock them unconscious. They want you to behave like you have
power,
but also like you know they’d win the battle if it ever came down to it. They are so predictable; all you have to do is move your hips in a kind of swivel, and get a kind of jiggle rhythm going, and they’re completely under the influence. It’s like they’re cartoon characters with eyeballs popping out of their heads on