By then, we hadn’t eaten real food in weeks, only sugar and nettles. When we walked back up to the rock palm the following night, I thought I could see spots in the dark, green and watery blobs with empty centers, and then the spots clarified into faces, leering out from the woods with swollen tongues. I tried to keep my head down, but that made me dizzy, and so I put my hands around my waist again to comfort myself. Was this what all beautiful girls saw when they looked out into the night?

“Tonight,” Serena said, once we had settled around her on the blanket, “is the night.” She kept flexing her fingers, pulling her hands into fists and then loosening them again. She passed around a bottle of whiskey. “I finally figured it out,” she said as we drank. She looked at each of us, one by one, meeting our eyes, taking her time. “I mean I really did it,” she said. “I levitated.”

Laurel sucked in her breath. Janet only raised her eyebrows.

“How?” I asked.

“It was an accident,” she said. “I was on the ledge, alone, and the ground was wet, and I slipped and fell. I thought I was going to die. But then I just—stopped. Floated.” Her voice sounded sweet again.

“What did it feel like?” Laurel whispered.

“Like there was a hook inside me, right here.” Serena held her palm against Laurel’s solar plexus, the same place we pressed to make each other faint. “I felt it lift.”

Janet frowned.

“I think you can only really levitate when you need to,” Serena said. “And then only if you’ve practiced. Everything we’ve been doing, the fasting, the fainting, the Feeling, everything else—” She cut her eyes toward me for the briefest moment. “That’s why I could do it. Otherwise I would have fallen.” She was twisting a lock of hair around and around one finger; when she’d pinned her hand to her scalp, she let it unravel and started again.

“What about when you saw Luke?” Janet said. “When you were a kid? He wasn’t in danger, was he?”