“Is it just luck, or did I earn it?” I said.

He looked me up and down. I held my breath. “Beryl,” he said. “No, if you stay, your name will be Harmony.”

He left and closed the door. I turned the lock behind him though I knew he had the key.

The water tugged in circles around my knees and chest. Below its line I was gravityless. I scrubbed myself and the tub filled with grit. The soap was white and loamy and peppermint scented: cow-fat soap. My ribs were bruised—I remembered my fall into the mine, and then remembered it was imaginary, part of the guided meditation. I poked the dark spots in confusion. I realized I hadn’t asked him what happens to people who break the rules.

Isaac would laugh at this Harmony, a soaring name for a girl who was known to be a problem. Maybe things were different here, I thought. I lay back in the steam and felt my body was pouring upward with it, diffusing into the air.

I must have been seven or eight the last time I’d had a bath. At that age, I remembered, I once collected magnolia seed cones, hairy pods with hot-red seeds spilling out of them. I carried them indoors, dirtying the table, and my mother hurled them out the window, one by one, into the black air of a thunderstorm, as if she could wound it.

CHAPTER 5

When I emerged from Dice’s bathroom, wearing my new clothes with the lavender water dripping off the ends of my hair, Sara, not Dice, was waiting for me on the couch. I felt the quick heat of disappointment. She led me across the dark courtyard. I had missed dinner. I was trying hard to accept everything and didn’t tell her how hungry I was.

Sara showed me to the barn with a flashlight and we climbed up into the hayloft cathedral. When the flashlight’s blue-white beam hit the columns, monstrous dark shapes flowed over the walls. Sara kissed me good night on the corner of my mouth. “If you ever have any problems,” she said, “Dice will be there for you, all right?” I lay down on a bare mattress under a blanket that warmed me like fire. My ribs ached. All night I could hear the animals sighing. And screech owls, who sometimes sounded just like human babies.

I must have fallen asleep because I woke with ice on my eyelashes, ice in my nostrils. My injured palm felt slick and oily. The sky began to lighten and I examined my hand—the splinter was gone. The narrow verticals of sky turned cobalt, then mauve, then white.