The man who drove me up the mountain in the first month of my sixteenth summer looked nothing like my father. He had thick black hair, a thick red neck, and a rosary wrapped around his rearview mirror, but instead of a cross, a miniature naked woman, whose breasts seemed not quite to scale, dangled from the coil of synthetic beads. She bobbed in the flow of the air vents, twisted and slapped two-dimensionally against the cheap black cab plastic, and I was reminded, again, of the shapes of women, the impossible geometry into which I was meant to fold myself. I couldn’t look at her for long. Not because of my own monstrous reflection, which I kept catching in the rearview—also not quite to scale, I thought—but because my stomach was weak in those days. Whenever the car hit a quick dip or banked a long curve, it felt as though parts of my body (throat, liver, one thick thigh) were left hovering, separated, while the rest plummeted, or swerved, or bumped, or whatever.

It was a long drive, our trajectory relentless. Even approaching the Levitation Center is an exercise in antigravity, people used to say, and it’s true: the Center was high enough in the mountains that I felt the air thin out long before I even saw the main building, with its paper-white stucco walls, its red-tipped roof, its enormous golden seal. The atmosphere loosened steadily as we drove; I could feel all that nice, thick sea-level air pooling at my ankles and then abandoning me, even through the churn of the air-conditioning.

In the end, I spent most of the ride staring at an amoebic mole on the back of the cabdriver’s neck. That was my mother’s wisdom: to combat motion sickness, look unwaveringly at something inside the car, something small and still. If it’s decidedly cancerous, dark purple, spreading out at the edges, no matter. Say nothing. Try not to move your eyes.

I know a lot of people who can’t remember themselves as teenagers. They look back and see only smoother, pinker versions of themselves, the actual feeling of those frantic years replaced by anecdote and snapshot. Oh, look, weren’t we babies, weren’t we thin, remember the time we, etc. We were so bad! We weren’t so bad. Who can say? Me, I can’t forget. I remember the girl from that summer as though she were sitting beside me: a fearful girl, but insatiable too, possessed of a fundamental savagery. Well. Can we blame her? It had only been a year since her father had disappeared.