The Interestings Read Online Free PDF Page B

springs. Like something Ethan would draw.” Beneath the pink T-shirt her body moved in snake segments, and once in a while the shirt would ride up so that the vaguest hint of pubic darkness was revealed.
    “We are the modern music and porn teepee!” Nancy cried with glee. “A full-service teepee, to meet every male’s artistic and perverted needs!”
    All the girls felt fired up, overstimulated. The stark music and the laughter, drifting from the teepee and scribbling among the trees, headed toward the boys, a message in the darkness before lockdown. Jules thought of how she was nothing like Ethan Figman. But she was nothing like Ash Wolf either. She existed somewhere on the axis
between
Ethan and Ash, slightly disgusting, slightly desirable—not yet claimed by one side or the other. It was right not to have agreed to go over to Ethan’s side just because he had wanted her to. As he’d said, she had nothing to feel sorry about.
    •   •   •
    O ver the following few weeks of the eight-week season, Jules and Ethan spent a great deal of time alone together. When she wasn’t with Ash, she was with him. Once, sitting with him by the swimming pool at dusk, with a couple of bats soaring around the chimney of the Wunderlichs’ big gray house across the road, she told him about her father’s death. “Wow, he was only forty-two?” Ethan said, shaking his head. “Jesus, Jules, that’s so young. And it’s just so sad that you’ll never see him again. He was your
dad
. He probably used to sing you all these little songs, am I right?”
    “No,” said Jules. She let her fingers drape through the cold water. But then suddenly she remembered that her father had sung her one song, once. “Yes,” she said, surprised. “One. It was a folk song.”
    “Which one?”
    She began to sing in an unsteady voice:
    “Just a little rain falling all around,
    The grass lifts its head to the heavenly sound,
    Just a little rain, just a little rain,
    What have they done to the rain?”
    She stopped abruptly. “Go on,” Ethan said, and so, embarrassed, Jules continued:
    “Just a little boy standing in the rain,
    The gentle rain that falls for years.
    And the grass is gone,
    The boy disappears,
    And rain keeps falling like helpless tears,
    And what have they done to the rain?”
    When she was finished, Ethan just kept looking at her. “That killed me,” he said. “Your voice, the lyrics, the whole thing. You know what that song’s about, right?”
    “Acid rain, I think?” she said.
    He shook his head. “Nuclear testing.”
    “Do you know
everything
?”
    He shrugged, pleased. “See,” he told her, “I heard that back when it was written, when Kennedy was president, the government had been doing all this aboveground nuclear testing, which put strontium ninety into the air. And the rain washed it down into the ground, and it got into the grass, where all the cows ate it and then gave milk, which children drank. Little radioactive children. So this was a protest song. Your dad was political? A lefty?” he said. “That’s very cool. My dad is a bitter slug ever since my mom left. You know the fighting that Wally Figman’s parents do in my cartoons? The shrieking and wailing? I think you can guess where I get my ideas.”
    “My father wasn’t political,” said Jules. “And he definitely wasn’t a lefty, at least not in a big way. I mean, he was a Democrat, but he certainly wasn’t radical,” she said, with a laugh at the absurdity of this idea. But she clipped off her own laugh as she thought of how she hadn’t known her father all that well. He had been Warren Jacobson, a quiet man, a ten-year employee of Clelland Aerospace. He’d once told his daughters, without their having asked, “My job does not define me.” But Jules hadn’t asked him what did define him. She had almost never asked him anything about himself. He was thin, fair-haired, burdened, and now he was dead at forty-two. So she began to get