“I’d like you to explain the nature of Luke and Serena’s relationship,” she said when I had closed the door. I sat down in the chair in front of her desk; it offered a weak plastic protest. I am so heavy now, I thought. I stretched out my legs and pulled them in again. “You were there every day, in the garden. Serena was your friend,” she said. “They’re both missing. Explain it to me.”

“She is my friend,” I said. “Currently.”

“And what kind of a friend is she?”

I didn’t answer. There was a large chip in the wood on the side of her desk. I squinted at it. I imagined putting my tongue there: the sharp ridged feeling, the danger of splinters.

“Were they sleeping together?” she asked.

“No.” Janet had fooled everyone, even Dominique.

“Then what?”

The chair was growing more uncomfortable, as though the plastic itself were trying to punish me, to push me off. Did it matter what I told her now? “Serena wanted Luke to teach us to levitate,” I said.

She remained impassive. “And did he?”

“No,” I said. Whatever else, it wasn’t Luke after all. I knew that much. Whatever else, she did it on her own.

“It’s important that you tell me the truth,” Dominique said. “You won’t get in trouble. I know it isn’t your fault.”

“The truth about what?” I said.

She shifted slightly. “What were you doing in Luke’s cabin that day?”

“What day,” I said.

She picked up a pencil and pressed one soft finger pad against the lead. She sat back in her chair. “He has a history,” she said at last. “You should know that. For a long time, I thought it was innocent, that he just liked the attention. It would be understandable.” She gestured helplessly at the walls. “But it turned out to be more than that.”

“You were going to marry him,” I said.

“Ironically, he’s much too young for me.”

“Why didn’t you do anything?” I said.

“It’s complicated,” she said.

I stood, because even at my tender age I knew that this answer was a bad one. She didn’t protest. She thanked me and asked me to please shut the door—yes, all the way.

Well, she loved him, I expect. Can we blame her?

(Oh, yes.)

What else? I started dreaming the blackness. I won’t tell you about that.