After what felt like hours, Dominique coaxed a long, final note from the bowl. I felt it settle in my stomach, as if swallowed. “Get some sleep,” she said as girls stomped past her. “Doing all this nothing is going to be hard work.”

I was the last one to leave the shrine room, except for Dominique, who continued to sit, her eyes soft and unfocused. I bowed again in the doorway and followed the frantic sounds back to the dormitory. The dark-haired girl was nowhere to be seen, but her friends had claimed a bunk bed only two away from mine. The others seemed to give them a wide berth. Needless to say, this only made me curiouser.

The blonde was tacking photographs of her friends to the green supports around her pillow, positioning one over another and then changing her mind, matching a red tack to a boy’s red sweater, then putting a yellow tack where the red one had been. The other girl had climbed to the bunk above and lay motionless on the thin mattress, her sneakers dangling. I was sitting still on my own bottom bunk, thinking about what I could say to them, how I might start, when a head swung down and introduced itself as Harriet.

“I hope you don’t snore,” Harriet said. “Because I’ve been known to smother people in my sleep.” She grinned at what must have been my look of horror and reached out to pinch my cheek. How easy these things are for some; I still have not learned how to be so bold with strangers. This was Harriet’s third year at the Center, she told me. “It’s this or summer school. Math being much worse than meditation, in my opinion.” She rattled off the names of everyone else in the room, and I listened politely, though of course I only cared about two of them. The girl with the purple hair was named Janet and the one with the photos was Laurel. The other one, Harriet told me unprompted, maybe seeing the look on my face, was called Serena. None of them were to be approached.

When I asked, as casually as I could, why not, Harriet yawned and flipped back up onto her bed. “You’ll wind up regretting it,” she said. “That’s all I can say.”