“No,” Serena said. “We’re going up.” Then she grabbed Laurel by the shoulders and pushed her hard, out into the empty air. Laurel screamed, but at the last moment, Serena seized her by the back of her shirt. The wind caught in Serena’s hair, and it streamed outward across the void, mixing with Laurel’s.

Janet lunged, and I held on to her wrist.

“You know what worked, that first time we fainted?” Serena said, her voice cold. “Spilling a little blood.” Laurel was crying, her tears dripping into the emptiness, her arms held tight to her body. Serena was holding on with one hand. I was shocked at her strength.

Then, all of a sudden, she laughed, and this time it sounded sweet, so sweet, bluebells and coffee cake. “Oh, you babies,” she said. “I’m only kidding.” She hauled Laurel back up onto solid ground, wrapped her arms around her and kissed her wet cheek, and then pushed her toward us. “You’re all so gullible,” Serena said, as Janet stroked Laurel’s head. She looked right into my eyes. “Come on. I was never going to let you jump.” I would think of the look on her face in this moment later, as the police scoured the Center grounds, looking for bodies: it was open, girlish. There was nothing to distrust here. There was nothing to question. She looked utterly, completely believable.

But for once in my life, I didn’t believe her.

Because yes: beauty, in the end, it hurts us.

13

For the record, here are a few ways in which levitation can be reliably achieved:

There’s the classic Asrah trick, in which the magician drapes a sheet over a prone assistant, whom he then appears to levitate and, after a moment, instantly disappear. This relies on a precise plastic mold of the assistant, which is snuck under the sheet, then raised up by wires, while the real girl disappears through a trap door. Trap doors, which may seem like the opposite of levitation, are often essential to its practice.

On the other hand, the Balducci method is essentially advanced tiptoeing.

David Copperfield, I’m sorry to tell you—for all his grand old speeches about the age-old human desire for flight—is also invariably raised up by wires, though they are very sophisticated, as wires go.

There’s always mirrors, smoke.

Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void is a beautiful hoax, an early example of photo-manipulation. But despite the lie, Klein’s heart was in the right place: in the air above Fontenay-aux-Roses. “We shall thus become aerial men,” he wrote before his jump. “We shall know the forces that pull us upwards to the heavens, to space, to what is both nowhere and everywhere. The terrestrial force of attraction thus mastered, we shall literally escape into a complete physical and spiritual freedom!”