Much later, I would think about this moment, and whether I should have known to take it for the sign it was, whether I should have read the portent in their toes edging toward the ledge, in the panicked look on Laurel’s face, in the unforgiving black of rock and air. But how can you blame me? Back then, I feared nothing. I didn’t even believe it was possible for girls like us to die, cliff ’s edge or no. Death was for goldfish and grandmothers, disappearance was for fathers and fortunes. Girls like us would only go on forever.

The first time we all bled together, we pretended we were wolves. It was the hottest part of the summer; the midpoint was past. We were restless, reckless. Our bellies were already sore, but this was a new soreness, and a new lightness, too. We ached—wombs, hearts, backs, thighs, bitten fingernails, our bodies unsolvable proofs wanting impossible things—and so we spent one night on the rock palm not trying to levitate at all, but lying on our backs, hands on our empty stomachs, howling at the moon. We’d heard the wolves singing on the mountain all summer, their voices faroff and hollow, like men lost at sea. So we sang too, to show the wolf-men that all hope was not lost: we could be a port, a sleeve, a mirror. What could our bodies do? They could do anything. We felt only moments away from truly sprouting claws and fur, our fangs growing to enormous proportions. What big eyes you have, etc. Why not? We were above the things that other girls did for fun. Did they even have fun, or plans, or teeth like ours?

At the end of that night, Serena presented us all with thin glass vials, the kind that might have come with a kiddie chemistry set. The most powerful kind of magic, she told us, was blood magic. The most powerful kind of blood was menstrual blood.

“Well, sure,” Janet said, but she examined her vial with interest.

“Collect some of your own,” Serena instructed us. “Keep it somewhere safe.”

“Are we goths now,” Laurel said, but she took her vial too.

The moon was impossibly bright that night. It looked enormous, closer to the earth than I had ever seen it, and for the first time in my life I had the impression of it as a real celestial body, a curved gargantuan rock shackled to us by an invisible tether.

Serena did not look at the moon. She was inspecting her own legs, drawing her hem up and down like a curtain. “Apparently I’m not being alluring enough,” she said. If she’d been another girl, I would have expected a whine, an edge of self-pity. But Serena sounded almost clinical, as if noting which element in a complex recipe or mathematical equation had gone wrong. My stomach turned with guilt, and also a deep pleasure.