“Well, I think we should say pocketing,” Laurel said. “With pocketing, we get the power.” She reached an arm into the air, made her hand into a cup, and tapped her fingers together at the top, like ma che vuoi? or a cartoon Italian after a bite of his mother’s pasta e fagioli. She sucked her teeth. “So you say, ‘I totally pocketed that guy,’ or ‘I’m going to pocket the shit out of you.’”

“You do want a penis for your very own,” I said.

“I want to start a new vocabulary,” Laurel said.

“I’ll suffocate you,” Janet said.

“I’ll drown you,” Laurel said.

“I’ll swallow you whole,” Serena said.

It was at that moment that the lights turned on. Tenzin stood in the doorway, her hand on the switch. She was not disheveled. Her hair was not in curlers. She looked as though she had been expecting us. It would have been just like her to wait for us to clean up after ourselves, Laurel told us later.

“This is a severe infraction,” Tenzin said. Soap leaked slowly from the sponge I was holding, dripping down my forearm. Tenzin looked like a drafter’s study in concentric circles. Two round eyes in an almost perfectly round face, a neat round bun perched on top of her head like a scoop of salt-and-pepper ice cream. Below the neck, too, she was round, but somehow not fat—it was as though she’d somehow possessed a large, taut ball of blue silk and was now walking around impersonating it. Even with the gray hair, her age was impossible to discern.

“We couldn’t sleep,” Serena said. She wiped the scraps of nettle off the counter and into her hand, and casually deposited them in the trash.

“I’m going to have to wake up Shastri Dominique,” Tenzin said. “You girls may have a long tether here, for reasons beyond my understanding, but this is my kitchen.”

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Serena said. Tenzin raised her eyebrows and Serena pushed past her out into the hall. Tenzin sighed and followed. When they returned a few minutes later, Serena looked intensely smug.

“All right, girls,” Tenzin said, her face tight. “Go to bed. But don’t let me find you here again.”

Serena, of course, refused to answer any questions about this. “Don’t worry” was all she would say. “I know how to talk to people.” Janet and Laurel didn’t even bother asking. Either they knew something I didn’t, or they knew they didn’t want to.

When we got back to the dormitory that night, I fell asleep immediately. I woke only once before the conch shell: in the very early morning, as the light was beginning to line the windows, when I heard Janet climb up into her bunk, returning once again from wherever she’d been.

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