We knew we were doing the right thing the first time we went up to the rock palm after beginning our fast. Our new emptiness elevated everything. The lack of food made us faint quicker, stay out longer, though I still had to choke Serena to make her fall. It unmoored our meditations, intensified the lightness games. It even made the Feeling more intense—or at least it did for me. Serena had been looking for her comb for days. “Nothing else works,” she said. “And I need to dream. The blackness is driving me mad.” I helped her turn over her tent, shake out her blankets. I raked my fingers through the grass around places we’d been, the back of my neck growing hotter and hotter. I felt guilty, of course, when the rest of us threw back our heads and Serena only stared, but I told myself it was simply too late. I couldn’t say anything now, even if I had been willing to surrender my prize.

Once during this time, I stood next to Laurel in the bathroom, both of us squeezing our stomachs between our hands, turning to the side, then back again. “Smaller,” she said. When she spoke, I could smell something clean and high and corrosive.

“Smaller,” I agreed. It occurred to me that my body was beginning to look ever so slightly more like my mother’s. I wasn’t terribly disappointed about this.

“Lighter, you mean.” Janet had come in behind us.

“It’s the same thing,” Laurel said.

“Not always,” Janet said. She walked out of the bathroom and, as she passed through the doorway, paused and flicked off the light. Girls squealed in the stalls.

Listen, I know what you’re thinking, but the Buddha was never fat. He was first a handsome prince, and later an ascetic—well, you’ve heard the story. For six years, he lived on a single grain of rice a day. He gave up his fast only when he realized that if he didn’t, he would die before reaching enlightenment. I’m saying he was pretty trim. That fat, laughing man whose belly you rub for good luck and whom Westerners call the Buddha is not the Buddha at all, but a Chinese folk deity whose name—Budai—means “Cloth Sack.” Some traditions do identify Budai as an incarnation of Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, who will only appear on earth when the dharma has been utterly forgotten, but I don’t know about that. It has always seemed to me that Budai is only Maitreya in the sense that any of us might be.