“I’m not,” Katie said. She was lying on her back with her arms and legs spread as if she were making a snow angel.

She could see Tyler burying Katie’s feet, piling sand in mounds and then packing it forcefully down.

“Don’t move,” he said.

“I’m not.”

“You moved your hand.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes you did,” he said and topped first her left and then her right hand with sand. He pressed down on each with both his palms, and she giggled.

“I’m stuck,” she said.

Tyler looked at her.

“I can’t move,” she said.

He didn’t say anything, and Josie could see his brain working like a movie projector, each frame skimming quickly past his eyes. He could pull Katie’s hair, tickle her tummy, bury her completely. She saw his mind spin in on itself, and she waited, but instead he started digging, and Josie realized that she had been holding her breath.

“I’m digging a hole,” Tyler said.

“Let’s dig a tunnel,” Katie said, and unearthed herself. “You dig on the other side and we’ll make our hands meet.”

Josie leaned her head against the warm concrete. She looked at Tyler and Katie on their knees, collecting sand between their thighs, and realized she had wanted to see what Tyler would do but, more so, wanted to see Katie’s reaction.

That night, she cuddled into Devesh’s chest and told him about Tyler and Katie.

“It was … scary,” she said. “I could see what he was thinking.”

“You could see what you were thinking.”

She thought about this. When she was six, maybe seven, she had gone to a Fourth of July party at a beach house. She couldn’t remember the house or the hosts, but she did remember the little boy who dug a hole big enough to lie down in. She had crawled in and asked him to bury her, and when he said no, she closed her eyes and refused to move until he got bored and went in for ice cream. She lay in the bottom of the cool pit and wished the sand would spill around her. Of course, it hadn’t, and she eventually called for her father, who laughed and packed her in. She could feel his hands, the sand a buffer between the two of them, and with each scoop she felt more and more compressed and more and more weightless. It had been blissful, and she had closed her eyes until she heard her mother’s laugh, saw her red toenails, and then shot instantly up and out of the hole. Her mother pulled Josie to her, called her her little mummy, and kissed the top of her sandy head, but Josie knew she had been caught doing something very wrong.