This definition, like the pressure cooker, dates back to the 1670s. It was only some two hundred years later that we began using the word to refer to the mystical ability of humans to lift themselves or one another off the ground. Now, levitation is practiced by charlatans with staffs on Prague street corners and young YouTube mountebanks and scientists with mice and magnets, and perhaps (perhaps, perhaps), also in some secret places by the genuine, by the truly light. No, you say, you’re thinking. No. No. After everything, no. You’re probably right.

Not so long ago, on a night when I was sure that no amount of bristling or therapy or little white pills would ever shake that summer from me, I tried to give myself the Feeling. I was in the back seat of a car—whose, I can’t remember, but the leather seats were gray and tattered and I was alone. I pulled the seat belt toward my face and ran my fingernails along it: scritch scritch scritch. I felt nothing. Desperate, I made long scratches, then short, staccato ones, taps. I tensed my fingers, making the sound as small as possible. Then I felt it, what I hadn’t felt in so long: that tingle walking its way up my spine. I focused both on it and away from it; the Feeling had always been something like a Magic Eye image, only legible in the middle distance. The tingling grew stronger as I scratched faster, but as soon as it hit the base of my skull, it exploded into blinding pain, as though something hot and pointed had been driven into that spot. I let go of the seat belt. It hit the car door with a cold thwack, and I curled into myself again.

Sometimes I think: Well, at least he didn’t get me.

Sometimes I think: In my heart of hearts, I wish he had.

Sometimes I think: He did, of course. Look around, girl.

There is a map of the Center, creased and left over, pinned up next to the definition of levitation. I study it often, though it hasn’t offered me anything new in years. I trace my finger from our dormitory to the garden, from Luke’s cabin to Serena’s tent, from the rock palm to the place where they found him, trying to square the paths, to find something new in the pattern. It looks like a tangram, only without the puzzle pieces. And there’s no solving a puzzle without the pieces. It will only ever be empty, unfillable space.

Does this constant tracing and retracing make me less the witness, or more? I mean, I have to do something, even after all this time.