If she was the flaw in Hunter, then the porch was where he was flawless.Įmmie knew about the porch. But the longer she stayed in that staffhouse, the more it became obvious that it was weakness, that she was a weakness: a flaw in the algorithm of Hunter that everyone wanted to isolate and extract. She didn’t want to admit that liking her - or even the bare minimum of not ignoring her - could only be seen as a weakness in someone, rather than a genuine result of her inherent value. She didn’t know Hunter, but his kindness seemed to prove a weakness (a willingness to include her) in him that wasn’t there in the others.Įmmie didn’t want to call it weakness. She walked down the trail without waiting for anyone else to say goodbye, and she heard their silence. She wasn’t hungry, but she didn’t want to sit there listening to them talk about people she didn’t know, so eating food seemed like the only thing to do. And even if he left Emmie at the back of the group, even if he only talked to one of the guys about their college program, he still said, “See ya,” when Emmie announced to the air that she was going back because she was hungry.
He had, after all, invited her on the hike the boys were all doing, on the trail that only staff knew about. The fact that he did exist – and continued to exist – was an irritating reminder of her own stupidity. If you plotted everything he was against everything she was, even to the most forgiving mathematician they were only curvilinear asymptotes: destined to get closer without ever connecting, ad infinitum.Įmmie was not a forgiving mathematician. Everything about him indicated that he was shallow and immature, content to while away the summer drinking on the porch with the boys, or – when things needed shaking up – going on fishing trips. The thing was this: Hunter was cute when he shouldn’t have been. He hovered there awkwardly until she’d stared past the point of politeness, and then he left, relieving them both.Ī benefit of hindsight is that the truth has become brutally clear: the algorithm of Hunter, with all his unexpected curves, seemed to fit the secret, desperate wants Emmie had wrestled into silence, only for them to speak again. He never quite came into her room, but he asked her how moving in was going, where she’d worked in parks before, why she’d picked this park. Just as she finished, Hunter appeared beside the door she’d left open. She did let herself unpack her books onto both shelves, so it would look more like home. Emmie took her time setting up her room, making sure to keep the other half empty in case she got a roommate later. It was away from the boys who all knew each other and therefore away from every living person. It was a sly, low kind of intelligence (Emmie used any diminishing qualifier she could justify), but it was precisely this intelligence that haunted Emmie, because Fucking Greg was smart enough to know who she was, and he chose to ignore her.She spent the evening after meeting Fucking Greg alone in her room, in the otherwise empty dormitory wing of the staffhouse. He was also one of only two people there who had an intelligence lurking inside them. Fucking Greg was no different from the rest of them, but had been there longer, thereby earning some sort of status. He reigned supreme over the other boys, whose main activity seemed to be feeding off each other’s stupidity, and trying to outdo it. But when Emmie met Fucking Greg, her eagerness to please and her fear that she wouldn’t, painfully obvious in her self-conscious smile, her swooping wave to the whole group, and her sweet, “Hey, I’m Emmie!”, were so clearly understood by Fucking Greg that she had to look away.įucking Greg had earned his name because no other epithet captured exactly how much Emmie feared and loathed him. No, out of the seven boys sprawled over every chair in the common room, the first one she met was Fucking Greg.Įmmie has - at least theoretically - referred to Fucking Greg as something other than Fucking Greg. It’s possible that he really was funny and cute, but it’s impossible to tell from the distance of memory.ĭespite everything that would come after, Emmie did not meet Hunter first.
Or maybe she was so relieved to see anyone in the park staffhouse that she conflated her relief with attraction. Or maybe they met and she thought he was funny.
It happened like this: Emmie met Hunter and thought he was cute.
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