“I don’t want that suit to get mildewy,” Ruth said. “I’ll be right back, and then I’ll do your hair.”

Mickey listened to her friend’s footsteps down the stairs as she looked in the bathroom mirror. She looked different, and she had yet to attempt the look promised by Cosmo to make all the boys stare. I thought about the cut on her arm, the bandage that she played with constantly. Opting to keep it on longer than the cut warranted, even as it grayed at the corners and became ratty. She was growing up.

As far as I can tell from my observations, growing up seems to involve a lot of false starts, a lot of broken promises. The realization of the world as something neither for you nor against you, but rather uninterested in you entirely. No matter how special you are, how many gold stars you receive, the world itself is incapable of loving you. When you’re a kid, you don’t care. You love what you love: your parents, your neighbor’s angry cat, your favorite TV characters and their plastic replicas on your shelf, regardless of what you get in return. But growing up seems to be a lesson in loving only those who will love you back, and forsaking the rest.

Mickey’s hands were deep in Ruth’s makeup bag before I realized what she sought. I could almost feel the pulse in her arm, itching under the bandage. I could see it glowing on her skin like a heat target. It was all hers, this minor disturbance of her surface. And she wanted to do it again.

Mickey spent more time outside of her body than the average teenager. Nothing certifiable—she didn’t need an institution or the guiding hand of an underground superhero academy. She wasn’t even traumatized, at least not more so than anyone else who realizes the part of life they’re rushing through to get to the good part is, in fact, the whole thing. She was simply, on the inside, less sticky than the average person. She didn’t cling to the trappings of her daily existence with the same kind of fervor, and therefore she could become more easily dislodged from herself.

I had seen the same thing in Silas all his life. As if by loosening from himself, he became one with the world. Not with other people—no, quite the opposite. The world itself: the cold, hard rock of it. To her credit, Mickey was better at recovering than Silas was. She bounced back faster, found her footing among the living once again. I’ve wondered how, if Silas could find the right words, he would talk to her about it. But the nature of the thing is cruel in its design: it can be described only when it’s happening, during which time one loses all interest in deepening the bonds with the fiction around them.