The chosen two: well, they made a strange pair. Most days, Janet woke before the rest of us to go running, coming back to the dormitory drenched and red. She often did push-ups in the grass, sometimes with Laurel sitting on her back, legs crossed, looking performatively at her nails. But she was nothing like the jocks I had known in my former life. For one thing, unless you count the hair, I never saw her wear any other color than black. For another, she never, ever smiled.

“Teeth are for digestion,” she said one morning to Shastri Dominique, who had told her that if she’d just smile, even if she had to force her muscles to comply, her body would respond with positive feelings, a Pavlovian response to the performance of happiness. “Why would I want to show my digestive organs in public?” Janet said. “Why would you even want to see them? Don’t be disgusting.”

Dominique only exhaled through her nose, rolled her eyes, and moved toward Nisha, who had managed to fall asleep again, sitting up and dreaming.

On the other hand: one particularly hot day, the Garudas were gathered for some outdoor activity, waiting for the relevant staffer to appear, and skinny little Jamie—a fragile, friendless girl whose fingers and toes were always blue from lack of circulation—raised one arm above her head, turned white, and crumpled to the ground. Everyone stared. Someone laughed. No one moved to help her except Janet, who in a single motion scooped her up and carried her off to the infirmary, whispering into her ear the whole time. Everyone else had merely puffed out her lips or pursed them, rolled her eyes or narrowed them, and edged away from the girl on the ground. Yes, even me. You should not, under any circumstances, expect me to be the hero of this story.

Once, when no one else was in the dormitory, I snuck over to Laurel’s bed to get a closer look at the photographs she’d tacked up around her pillow. They were mostly dreamy, half-cast in sepia, or else oversaturated and hypnotic. In one, she reclined on the floor of a walk-in closet, fabric hanging down around her, a faded t-shirt stretched violently across her breasts—it read BETTY’S HOT VINYL—and bit her lip at whoever was holding the camera. In another, she and a dark-haired boy shared a single cone of pink ice cream in front of a yellow brick wall. Two pretty girls wearing sequins in the forest. Three boys holding up beers that had been duct-taped to their soft, tanned hands. One photograph had clearly been taken on the dance floor: someone in a red and blue dress blurred her way toward someone in a green jacket, a halo of watery light emanating from her head like she was the second coming, a girl Christ on the ascendant, her vodka-soda-lime raised triumphant and ready above the crowd.