“Eat up, girls,” a passing staffer chirped, eyeing the fork still digging into Janet’s skin, the leaf Laurel was waving like a flag. “You know what they say: Kale is life!”

“Sure,” Janet said. “You chew and you chew and you chew and there’s no reward.”

“I think our Luke would beg to differ,” the staffer said brightly. “It’s organic.”

They both seemed to straighten at the sound of his name. Laurel folded the leaf into her mouth and smiled sweetly at the staffer. Janet put down her fork, as if suddenly disgusted. “I doubt it,” she said, but so far under her breath I wasn’t sure I’d really heard.

A few days went by. I can’t say how many; time bled uncontrollably at the Center, even that early in the summer. The Garudas had contemplative oil painting, calligraphy, more ikebana. We went on nature walks, where we learned and forgot the names of trees. We practiced oryoki, a mindful eating technique we did not manage to apply to our regular meals, and Kyūdō, a kind of Zen archery at which Janet alone excelled. We meditated for long periods. My dizziness slowly drained away, but I didn’t sleep much better. Instead, I listened to Janet and Laurel sneak out at night. Tap, tap. Not every night, but often enough. I didn’t sit at their table again—my nerve proving temporary—but I continued to watch them. Sometimes I got close enough to hear something of their constant whispers, each fragment unbearable: glimpse, gagged, gouge, that kind of girl. It wasn’t enough. Sometimes I couldn’t find them at all—they would disappear for hours, with no explanation—and while other girls were punished for breaking rules (within a week Harriet, who could never manage to hide her cigarette butts from Magda, became quite adept at hand-buffing the shrine room floor), when it was the two of them the staffers seemed not to notice, or at least not to mind. I always noticed. I always minded. Serena herself appeared only rarely, and then usually at a distance—I would see her traipsing away across the grounds in a thin white dress, like a will-o’-the-wisp, while the rest of us filed into dinner, or into bed. She was almost never at meals. She was almost never at activities. She was almost never at anything, unless she was, and when she was, she spoke to no one but her friends, the chosen two.