The route to Sarah was easy, or should have been, because she spent a lot of time at Beth’s house, and Beth had a spooky older brother named Greg who was into serial killers and chokeholds and shit, so he had a lot of contact and had laid a lot of groundwork without knowing it, well before our arrival. Like he’d drift by Beth’s bedroom where she and Sarah were hanging out and linger in the doorway, and when Beth wasn’t looking he’d blink and show Sarah he’d painted a set of eyes on his eyelids, or he would pull up his sleeve to reveal the patterns he’d cut into his arm, or would be mumbling what sounded like occult prayers when the three of them got into his car in the morning on the way to school. There was no consistency to it whatsoever; the idea was basically to project that there was some secret regimen of behaviors that Greg adhered to out of spiritual or small-group obligation (the nature of the obligation wasn’t as important as the strength of his dedication to it), and for a kid who mostly just hid in his room consuming fringy internet-era media and coming up with ways to alienate people/himself, this was a pretty easy thing to do. Greg didn’t have the context for this at the time, of course—he was just being himself, and his behavior was just that, teen routine—but in retrospect, after the fact, these were the shapes it had, that we gave it.

Sarah took note: it was practically ingrained in her. She was carefree with her attention and love, and only had to hear about someone’s misfortune or depression before she hurled herself wholeheartedly into it—her passion and talent was for Being There—until whatever problem became hers as well, impressively hers, so bone-deep ran this empathy. She was the sort of person to whom, no matter how well you knew her, you could express the slightest sadness or upset and she would commit hours to talking it through with you, her time and warmth and attention would pool up around you until the problem had disintegrated within it. To those who liked her, Sarah was a girl of boundless enthusiasm and an open heart, a book that wanted to be read. To those who didn’t, she was a dilettante, a passionate fool. She had brown hair that curled more the longer it got, and was a beautiful soul. She seemed like the kind of girl who could be convinced to join a cult. She fell for it, of course.