“Well, well, well,” he sang. “Look who’s a painted goddess this morning.”

I rest my case. Who says three wells like that?

And what kind of jerk feels the need to comment, unbidden, on a woman’s physical appearance every single time he sees her?

I filled my water bottle and wished Sean would show up. My habit of arriving everywhere early was great for my foster care punctuality reputation, but not great for avoiding Natan, who seemed to never not be at Salishwood.

“Muiriel, you are a natural beauty,” he said. “There’s no need to conform to society’s patriarchal norms for the world to see you. Because we already do. We see you—the true you.”

I turned and walked to the lodge to get the day’s lessons lowdown from Jane and put some space between me and Mr. Anti-Sephora. The schedule was posted on the corkboard near the office. Leave No Trace Ethics 10:00 a.m. Natan

“Oh, dear God, no,” Sean said behind me.

I turned. “You need to tell me when you’re getting here from now on,” I said. “I can’t deal with him alone; he is horrifying.”

“Done,” he said. “From now on we’ll walk together.”

“In the interest of Natan avoidance.”

“Yes.”

Then we stood and smiled dopily at each other so that I had the actual thought, Who the crap am I? Eyeliner aside, those girls—all of them, any of them—were so beautiful. Delicate, glossy hair, makeup always pretty. What could he possibly see in me? And what was I doing worrying about it? Disregarding a lifetime of careful avoidance of just this sort of distraction from my goal of aging out independent and unencumbered? Where was my backbone of unwavering self-esteem?

Alone in the lodge Sean kissed me, two days in a row kissing a guy, praying I was doing it right and thinking, Seriously, who the hell am I? His strong hands, that dark, shorn hair, those dark eyes—to be fair I could have resisted all that. Beautiful boys have always adorned the halls of Seattle’s high schools. But his beauty combined with his wilderness prowess and his admiration and respect for the forest and for my encyclopedic knowledge of the wild and Muir’s place in it, which everyone else my age I’ve met thinks is ridiculous but he thinks is enviable and somehow means I’m really smart, which then only seems to make him like me more?

That’s where my backbone went.

We hiked with a wily group of fifth graders, and then everyone gathered on the lawn around Natan, who was sitting like a benevolent overlord on a tree stump and soaking in the attention of all the eleven- and twelve-year-olds required to listen to him. “So,” he said, rubbing his long bony hands together, “Leave No Trace Ethics. Who knows what we should leave behind in the forest when we hike or camp?”