Then Serena turned and looked at me. “What about you?” she said. She was relaxed now. She already knew she had won. “Your dear old daddy will be so proud.”

Thrall is an almost perfect word. Old Norse for “slave.” Shades of Dracula, and that persistent, tiresome Anglo-Saxon bleat about evil and sex being inextricable. In thrall. The word is like the sound a sudden change makes, or like a spell resolving. Say it out loud and listen: thrall. That guttural glissando. Like all real magic words, it’s a little hard to get out. Mechanically, I mean. The tongue, asked to roll two ways at once, revolts. Don’t worry; she gets there in the end.

What I mean to say is: no one ever tells you how good it feels.

What I mean to say is: I stepped toward the edge.

“Imagine yourself standing on a ledge above a canyon,” Serena recited. “Imagine yourself stepping off. You don’t fall, you hang there. The earth’s energy holds you up. Imagine yourself as a feather, floating upward. Imagine yourself as a bird, hollow-boned and small. Imagine the distance between yourself and the ground growing, growing, growing.” Serena reached out her hand, and I took it, slotting in beside her, my toes toward the edge. I couldn’t see the bottom.

Her hand was cold and dry in mine. The wind had begun to blow. It was unusual for summer, wind like that. I thought of the sand twister from the first day, and wondered if it was spinning now in the empty driveway. If a twister spins on a mountain, and no one is there to see it, etc. A few strands of Serena’s hair flew into my face. She began to lead us through the tummo visualization we’d been doing with Luke. If they were surprised by this, Janet and Laurel did not react. They both had their eyes closed. I tried to conjure the ball of light whirling in my pelvis, but the wind distracted me. Serena distracted me. She was more like herself than I was like anybody. She could lead three girls up a mountain and make them fly. I knew then that if I stepped off this cliff, at this moment, my body would become perfect and holy at last. All my charmed particles would light up and rise.

“We are what we think,” Serena said. “Are we ready?” She seemed to be faceless, there on the ledge, her features darkened by the shadow of the drop.

“Yes,” I said quietly. This is what it meant, belief. I saw Laurel nod. We were four figureheads on the prow of a ship, all holding hands, all facing outward, our chests raised, our hair whipping and writhing in the freakish wind.