“I don’t need to say it.”

“I swear to fucking God, Janet.”

“This has happened before, and I was fine then, and I’m fine now,” Janet said.

“Good. Let’s walk,” Laurel said. She put her arm around Janet and steered her back toward the main building. I followed behind them uselessly for a while and then stopped. They didn’t notice. They kept on walking. I stood on the lawn, where I had started, and watched Jamie step carefully through the small forest of girls, weaving around their bodies. She looked more substantial than she ever had before, her skin sun-kissed, unbroken. When she was finished, they all smiled and hugged one another.

They fit together, Janet and Laurel. Not only physically, although that too—Janet slipping neatly under Laurel’s arm. I hadn’t understood it at first. They were so different; they made no sense together. But Laurel already knew what was happening to Janet. She didn’t have to ask. She already knew what to do, what to say. They were a pair. I was extra. I could have come here or not come here, and they would have been the same. Complete. I realized this with a sort of dull ache; after all, I’d always known it. I was necessary to no one. Look: not even my parents needed me.

Later, Janet would apologize and tell me she’d been having a panic attack. She’d been getting them for a couple of years, she said, and when she did, she had to walk, sometimes for hours, it didn’t matter where. Nothing else helped, except sometimes remembering that it wasn’t the first time. I wanted to tell her then about the naming, the counting, and the way it kept me from falling apart at night, though I knew instinctually that her problem was not understanding her body too little, but rather the opposite.

“Is that where you are,” I asked instead, “when you go off on your own?”

She nodded.

It finally made sense: all her disappearances, her refusal to explain. Or almost. “What about Laurel?” I asked. “Does she go with you?”

She looked at her hands. “No,” she said.

I didn’t ask her, then or ever, exactly what it was I didn’t understand. Of course, in the end, I didn’t have to ask. I found out soon enough.

When I got back to the dormitory, I found a note on my pillow:

Dearest O,

Come tonight, please. Let L & J sleep, we won’t need them.

Instead of her name, she’d scribbled at the bottom: Where there is a sign, there is deception.