Of course I’d told them everything. If I’d learned anything, I’d learned not to keep secrets from Nora and Em. I’d already told them what Little Ray had said about the boy who couldn’t take his eyes off her—he was just some kid who wasn’t shaving. I’d already told them what those old Tenth Mountain Division men had said—how Paul Goode reminded my uncles of a little mountaineer they’d met at Camp Hale, an alleged Aspen local. Ghost or no ghost, I’d told them about my prior sightings of the young snow shoveler, too.

“I’m sorry, Em—I just forgot!” Nora was saying, while Em was acting out an excruciating giving-birth-while-trying-to-write scenario. “What Em is trying to tell you, kiddo, is that Paul Goode has the writer gene,” Nora told me. “I forgot to tell you—he was the screenwriter for The Wrong Car, not just the getaway driver.”

Even the little Barlows, that indefatigable writing team, had missed the screenwriting credit—“it’s not a great gangster movie,” was all John Barlow had said.

“But the guy who plays the driver of the getaway car is really noir—he’s someone special,” Susan Barlow had weighed in.

I suspected the snowshoer would be thrilled to know his parents had missed the screenwriting credit, but I was disheartened, because the writing of The Wrong Car was the worst thing about it. The writing, the snowshoer had said, was the most über-noir thing about it. If my writer gene came from Paul Goode, I was thinking, I would have to fight against the über-noir in myself.

Em and I did a lot of thinking about our writer genes; Em wanted to be a writer, too, and she had no idea where her writing came from. Nora thought we did too much thinking about this. “Why worry about it?” Nora had asked us. “There’s nothing you can do about where your writing comes from!”

But Nora and Em and I agreed about the little English teacher’s expeditions as a woman—it worried us. Nora and Em believed that the snowshoer would have a somewhat easier time living as a woman in a city like New York.

“Holy shit, anywhere but Exeter!” was the way Nora put it. As a girl who’d grown up in a faculty apartment in an all-boys’ dorm, Nora knew how sexual minorities were treated at Exeter.