The guffaw I let out surprised me. I didn’t recognize it as my own right away—it’d been so long since I’d really laughed. Emily shrugged. “Just trying to tell you what I’ve learned the hard way.”

AS EMILY went over the phone system I watched as a girl hanging on a man’s arm left the Swim Club and walked toward the main lobby, her limbs loose. She leaned her head on his shoulder like it was too heavy to hold up. When the police questioned me about Steffanie’s attacker, I tried to remember his face and his clothes through the haze of rum, the darkness of the club, and the fog that rolled out of machines, the buzz in my ears from the throb of the bass, but I couldn’t say anything definitive. Had his shirt been gray or blue? His eyes brown or green? I remembered him as an outline: broad shoulders, muscular arms, a paper cutout of a man. I wasn’t surprised that they never found him. I never mentioned to anyone that I had watched her leave the dance floor with him, and when I saw her stumble, I told myself it was only because of her heels. Or that she swayed into his shoulder on purpose. One of those girlish tricks we were always reading about in Cosmo: make him feel needed. I let myself believe that she was in control, that she wanted him to put his arm around her, so that she could have an excuse to get close to him and press against his side.

Steffanie quit the field hockey team after that night, and whenever we passed one another in the halls at school she gave me a look that I could only call pity—like there was something plain and obvious between us that I didn’t understand.

All of it felt tied together—the spa and its rules about how we were allowed to act and look, Steffanie, Ramona. I thought back to the night Ramona showed me her first large-scale paintings, when I was trying to woo her to sign with me as my first client. The one I liked the most was of a woman reclined on a divan. In the background there were bouquets of flowers laced with razor blades, wolves or dogs baring their teeth. The woman’s skin, pale with a blue cast to it, seemed to glow. Her nipples were midnight blue, her belly button cobalt, her pubic hair navy. We talked about what it meant to be a woman, to be looked at all the time, judged and measured and punished in a thousand different ways every day, to feel both undermined and empowered by your body. I thought we had agreed on something. I’d been wrong.

EMILY WAS teaching me how to process gift certificate sales when I looked up and saw two women making their way toward the spa.