The Greenleaf Lodge was above the village, far off the road on a knoll of hemlocks and pines. It was a small, elegant resort with riding stables and tennis courts. Its clientele was younger than the residents of the Inn, and often, at night, we could hear the gaiety of their partying drifting down from the knoll.

The path from the road to the Lodge was through the hemlocks and pines, and at night it was a path of shadows, with pits of darkness under the umbrella limbs of laurel. Carter had jokingly called it the Make-Out Road.

That night, with Rene, I understood what he meant.

We were in the woods, between the road and the Lodge, when she stopped walking.

“Can we wait a minute, Bobo?” she asked. “I don’t want to go up there with my eyes all red.”

“Sure,” I said.

She sat beside one of the laurel bushes, in the darkness, and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. I sat near her.

“I hate him at times,” she said after a moment.

“Carter?”

“He gets so mad so easy,” she whimpered. “I didn’t do anything to make that man come on to me, Bobo. I promise I didn’t.” She looked at me. I could see the dots of her eyes, bubbling from tears, and her puffed lips. “He’s not like you,” she added softly. “You’re nice.”

“Uh—thanks,” I said. “Carter’s all right. He’s just a little jealous. It means he likes you.”

Rene ignored my remark. “Sometimes I think about you like you’re my big brother.”

“Is that right?” I replied. I glanced through the underbrush of laurel and the wall of trees to the Lodge. I could see the silhouette of a man walking under a night-light. I wondered if it was Carter. Then I saw two children race to him.

“But I don’t always think that,” Rene added.

“I’m sorry. Think what?”

“That you’re like my big brother. I only think that sometimes.”

I felt suddenly uncomfortable.

“Sometimes I wish you were Carter,” she confessed quietly.

I did not speak.

“Sometimes I wish Amy weren’t here, either,” she continued. “It’s not that I don’t like her. I do. I mean, she’s really nice, but sometimes I wish she weren’t here.”

I did not understand what she was saying. “Why?”

She smiled sadly. Her voice was a whisper: “I shouldn’t tell you this, since you and Carter are such big friends, but I think about it sometimes: if Amy weren’t around, I wonder if I wouldn’t be dating you instead of Carter.”

“Rene, you shouldn’t talk like that. You’re right: Carter and I are good friends.”

“So?” she said. She slipped closer to me. “What Carter doesn’t know won’t hurt him, will it?”

“Uh—look, Rene, I—”