So I lay there, staring at the planks above my head, the shallow impression Harriet’s body made in the mattress, concentrating on continuing to breathe. I tested my limbs, raising first my arms and then my legs, slowly, quietly, inches above my mattress so no one would see. But everyone else was snoring, knocked out by the thinned air.

Or nearly everyone else. After the lights had been out for hours, I heard a soft tap, fingertips on wood, and then another. Slowly, I turned my head. I could barely see Janet—she climbed down her ladder and landed silently on the floor. Laurel was already standing, holding her shoes. They crept to the dormitory door and, after a moment’s fumbling, let themselves out. I tried to watch them go, but I saw only the briefest bright slice of hallway light, and then its opposite, a bruise lingering on the backs of my eyelids. I forgot about my breath entirely as I wondered where they had gone, and why, and if they had been swallowed by the night, or if they were out there somewhere doing the swallowing. I waited up for them as long as I could, but I fell asleep before they returned.

I dreamed of nothing, or of falling.

2

I am a person of binges. I have never understood the phrase “too much of a good thing.” Look: it’s irrational, impossible. See fig. 1: when I was a child, I became obsessed with horses. I know, I know, all little girls are obsessed with horses. But I lived for them. I gorged on them. I begged for them in any incarnation: films, toys, patterns, photographs, posters. Once, I cut the hair off a Barbie and superglued it to the base of my spine. I thrilled to wear my pony tail under my clothes, in secret, my parents knowing nothing, thinking me merely human, but it rubbed off after two days, leaving long blond doll hairs clotting in the corners of the house. My birthday came, and my parents, who were still together then, splurged on an afternoon of horseback riding lessons. When it was time to leave, they found that I had knotted my hair into the horse’s mane so elaborately that they had to cut me away from it with a pair of rusted barn shears. I still have the clump of matted girl-and-horse hair hidden in a drawer, though after all the times I put it in my mouth, I admit that it is somewhat the worse for wear.

This is all just to say that in retrospect, I’m not so surprised by what happened that summer. Like everything, it was my own fault.