Serena and I began meeting Luke every few nights for tummo. Each time I let the ball of light go, I felt closer to flight, but each time I opened my eyes, I found myself still on the ground. Luke talked more about himself at the rock palm than I had ever been able to coerce him to do in the garden—another of Serena’s small sorceries. He told us about his own dharma teacher, a woman who had changed everything for him. He told us, finally, about his sister, Eleanor. He described the color of her hair, and the way she had died, in an accident that he might have prevented, only he was out drinking, only he couldn’t be reached. She was supposed to be with him, but he left her at home. He thought she could take care of herself, but it turned out that she could not. She thought he could do no wrong, but it turned out that he could. He played the guitar at her funeral, a pretty song, his favorite, theirs—I’m in love with the world through the eyes of a girl—but the rest of his family only narrowed their eyes and waited for him to stop. “I don’t blame them,” he said. “But I don’t blame myself either.”

I was confident that the tummo would work eventually. It was working. During yoga, I closed my eyes and imagined the comet, the channel, and found that I could raise my legs into the air with no assistance. This, on its own, was a miracle. Shastri Dominique clapped and cooed. Even Janet was impressed. And when the four of us met to faint and fall and give ourselves the Feeling, to play our lightness games, I felt we were all getting closer, lighter, smaller, that the tummo had spread to them too, somehow. Janet’s jaw set, her muscles straining. Laurel’s fingertips moving through the air. Serena was wrong. They believed. They wanted this, each in her own way, each desperately. They both wanted more power for themselves, more control of the imperfect lives they lived outside of this. Who wouldn’t? But as far as I knew, they still had no idea about the tummo, a fact that made me want to touch their hair and cheeks whenever we were together, and also made me want to slap them and laugh at the mark I had made.

One night we climbed into a tree, all four of us, and lay with our spines pressed to its thick branches, our limbs dangling, heads spinning from the nettle tea and the whiskey Serena had let us drink and the number of times we’d fainted and awoken, fainted and awoken, the world becoming more hypothetical every time we looked at it.

“Admit it, Janet,” Laurel said. “You feel it now. You feel it.”