She smiled and tucked her legs beneath her on the bench, buzzing like a five-year-old at Christmas. “I can’t begin to tell you how thrilled we were to see your résumé, especially your experience with kids—that’s the hardest part, and you’ve already got it. We’ll get you trained for the wilderness ethics curriculum on the job. Starting with: hiking in jeans might not be the best idea.”

My face flushed.

“Shorts are good, hiking pants if you have them. Have I said I’m jealous of your name? Your parents are brilliant. Speaking of, we’ll need a signed parental consent and proof of school credit, and you’ll be all set—you’re at the high school in the fall, right?”

I nodded and silently worked out ways to put off the consent form signing as long as possible.

A school bus pulled into the circular drive over a thick carpet of pine needles.

“Here we go,” she said.

She led me outside to a field of grass encircled by dorm-style cabins and, beyond, the forest. Two guys filled hiking bottles at a water spigot near a wooden picnic table.

“Men, introduce yourselves; this is Muiriel. I’ll be back with the wildlings.”

And she left me there with them. One looked my age, the other older, both white guys who stopped their conversation and stood looking at me.

“I’m Muiriel,” I said, and raised my hand in greeting to their general direction. The older one was unreasonably tall, over six feet, and he grabbed my hand.

“Excellent,” he said. “Finally some new female energy. Thank you, Mother Gaia!”

He put his palms together and tipped his head down, revealing long, stringy dirty-blond hair tied in a bun. “Welcome, sister. I’m Natan.”

Good God. The other guy winced and stayed real interested in his water bottle. I side-eye noticed he was lean, he had well-defined arm muscles in a blue T-shirt, and he wore what were definitely actual hiking pants—lots of zippered pockets. I turned back to Man Bun. “Nathan?”

He closed watery blue eyes and exhaled out his nose. “Natan,” he said, in a way that he probably intended to show great patience and restraint over my admittedly failed pronunciation of his name but was instead super condescending, delivered through his overwrought beard and complicated waxed mustache.

The other guy smiled into his water bottle.

A lifetime of people deciding they know all about me after two seconds of introduction and the words foster care has taught me to try not to prejudge anyone else, because it’s total bullshit—but oh my God there still is such a thing as instinct, and Natan was making it difficult to stay neutral about him.

“Are you replacing Jason?” Natan asked, rocking on his heels, arms folded.

“I guess,” I said, edging away from him and toward the table. “Was Jason the intern?”