I walked back to the dormitory, the bowl under my arm. The heat was suffocating that day, but inside it was cool and empty, everyone else still at rota. I lay on my bed. I held the bowl over my face. I could still smell the chili, and maybe even the blood, a faint metallic brightness. I moved the bowl to the pillow beside my head. I turned onto my stomach and let the bowl kiss my forehead. I reached down and pressed my hand between my legs, and felt an electric current run through my body, all my muscles turning toward that spot. I could see it so clearly: the shape their bodies would make together, now or soon, skin on skin, their long hair mixing. Serena had said she wouldn’t really do anything, that it was all a trick, but what if she did? I would, if I were her. I would let him touch me. I would let him lift me into the air. I could see how her chin might fit into his neck, how his rough fingers might encircle her corded wrists. The muscles of his arms, her smooth shoulder, the slope of her small breast. Exposed, exposed, everything shown and touched and used, and I made it happen. I pressed harder. I thought of him, but I also thought of her. Right at the end, I thought of myself, leaving him there on the bench, wanting more of me. Yes, yes, I thought, yes: this feeling would build, and then I would rise.

11

The last time I saw my father, he took me to the movies. It was the thing we did together most often after he and my mother separated: sitting in silence in the dark. I’m not complaining. I wish we had done it more. I’ve forgotten what we saw that day, though I remember not liking it very much. I remember not buying into the tragedy, whatever it was meant to be.

On the way back, I began talking about nothing, complaining: there’d been a small slight at school, a fight with my mother. “Can’t I live with you?” I asked him for the thousandth time.

“Your mother wouldn’t like that,” he said.

“I want to be a Buddhist,” I said.

“I’m going to tell you a story,” he said.

The story goes like this: there was once a young monk who traveled from monastery to monastery, hoping for enlightenment. Geshé Tenpa, a great old teacher, met him and said, “It is nice to tour holy places, but it is much better to practice the sublime Dharma.”