She told Kyle about an interaction she’d had with a student at Primal Instinct, a sure-of-himself type who liked to philosophize at length, and kept signing up for private classes with her, though he spent most of the time saying supposedly deep things and waiting for Mara to act impressed. “There’s so little we know about the universe,” he told her once, when he was supposed to be tying knots. He put down his rope and plucked a handful of grass at his feet and held it out, shaking dirt from the roots. “We don’t even know basic things. Like, what’s dirt? What’s grass? I think about that sometimes.”

“You and Walt Whitman,” Mara had said.

This bothered the student. “Who?”

“The poet? ‘What is the grass?’ He wrote about it.”

“You think this Walt guy is smarter than me?”

He’d said it lightly, but Mara could tell he wasn’t joking.

“And now,” said Kyle, “‘it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.’”

“Is that Whitman?”

“Yeah. That line always stuck with me.”

Mara nodded, like she understood, but the truth was that Kyle could have said anything and she would have believed it was Whitman. She didn’t know much about him, except that she wrote a paper about the grass poem once, back when her parents were still following an actual homeschool curriculum. She worked hard on the essay, which was something of a poem itself, a list of things she thought that grass might be. One item on the list was ladders of dreams, which seemed embarrassing in retrospect, but at the time Mara was proud of the turn of phrase.

Her parents said good job, but didn’t mention anything specific. Mara wondered if they had read it. After that, she started putting mistakes in her essays on purpose. Nonsense sentences, and then nonsense paragraphs, even on the first page. Her parents never said a word. Mara was hurt, though her neighbor Stormy was jealous, and told her that anyone should be happy to get out of schoolwork for free.

So when the client mentioned grass, Mara was happy for the chance to bring up Whitman, to prove that she had once learned something other than survival. “It wasn’t that I knew it, really,” she told Kyle. “It’s just that I liked knowing more than he did.”

Kyle nodded, like the impulse was unsurprising. Mara had never mentioned it to anyone before.

There was a strange way Kyle seemed happier, now that he was injured. Relaxed. It surprised Mara how easy he was to talk to. She wondered if she hadn’t tried before, or if he was the one who changed.

“So,” she said. “Chris McCandless. What do you like about him?”

She wasn’t sure if this was a good question or a bad one, given the circumstances. But Kyle lit up.

“He became what he wanted,” said Kyle. “You know, he threw everything away that was fake. And then he designed the person he wanted to be, and he became that. And he was good at it. Everyone talks about the fact that he died, but they don’t pay attention to everything he did first. He’s pretty incredible, if you read about him. He built a whole life for himself out in the Alaskan bush. I want to go out to his camp someday and see it. It’s still there, you know. People can go if they know how to find it. And it’s not really his fault that he died. He ate wild potato seeds, because his guidebook said they were harmless. But they were toxic. They poisoned him, and he didn’t know.”