He let my hand drop, the brute. “Listen,” he said. “I know levitation pays the bills around here. The Levitation Center, right? That’s what the tourists call it. Dominique encourages it. But levitation is a trap. It’s what we call relative siddhi, as opposed to absolute siddhi. It’s only a side effect, a marker on the path to liberation.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s bad,” I said.

“It’s not bad,” he said. “It just doesn’t mean what you think it does.”

It was then that Serena appeared yet again, this time wearing a bright red dress. I saw that she had let Laurel do her makeup. Her eyebrows were dark, her eyes lined. She looked as though she were wearing a mask of her own face. The ends of her hair, usually lank and long, were curled, as if curious. How much had she heard? How had she known he would be there today? But she smiled at me.

“Stay back from the fence,” Luke said.

She took a step forward. “I’ve missed you,” she said.

“I’m serious,” he said. “Don’t come any closer.”

Serena laughed. She blew a kiss at Luke and rested both her hands on the fence, but then immediately shrieked and pulled them back into her chest. The sharp electric snap made the whole fence shudder.

“I told you,” Luke said. He was smiling, and I thought of a boy I’d known, one of the neighborhood scrum, who in the height of one dissolute summer caught a fat, lazy bumblebee and tied her to a string. He patrolled the sidewalks, whistling and swinging the bee in circles around his head. You could hear a faint buzzing when he came close, the complaint of hot air forced through those cellophane wings. You could hear the girls screaming as he lassoed them with his bee-tipped lariat, layering one small torture on another. When no one was around, he let the bee walk dizzily over his knee, and told her jokes, and petted her fur with a finger. He didn’t untie her until she had been dead for days.

I shook away the memory. Serena was no tethered insect, no screaming girl. If anything, she was the boy. Wasn’t she? I waited to see what she would do, how she would turn it back on him, but she just stood there for a moment more, her hands over her heart, before collecting herself, throwing back her shoulders, and marching away.

“Why did you do that?” I said. But this repudiation of Serena had, I admit, thrilled me. I thought he might take me in his arms now, as though we were forbidden lovers left alone for the first time. (Now, of course, I see it for the goad it was, the invitation: Try harder, little girl.)

“Electric fences don’t work unless they’re electric,” he said. He did not move any closer to me.