I reached out to touch the girl on the dance floor. My finger left a smudge on her dress. The girls in these photographs were the kind that people wrote songs about. This was the kind of life that American teenagers were meant to live. Park that car. Drop that phone. Sleep on the floor. Dream about me. No part of my life was so photogenic. Even if it were, no one would have been there to capture it.

Now I know, of course, how easily photographs can lie. Or maybe that’s not quite right. It’s not that they lie, exactly: it’s that they invent their own realities.

There was one more photograph of Laurel, lying on her side on a canopied bed in a pink silk nightgown, the same one I saw her wear most nights at the Center. Soft-bodied, long-legged Laurel, always sleeping in until the last possible moment. When I think of her now, so many years later, this is the image to which I return—the photograph, not the girl. Just looking at it you could tell how smooth she would be, how amenable to your touch. Just looking at it you could see how cozy her flesh, how easily punctured.

In those early days, Harriet and Nisha pestered me about Luke, but I didn’t have much to tell them. All he did was point out my tasks when I arrived, then work beside me until rota was over. When I asked him why there had never been rota in the garden before, he opened his palms to the sky. “I’ve never needed help before,” he said. “I must be getting old.” When I reported this to Harriet and Nisha, a thrown bone, they shrieked with displeasure. Old? Old? Old? Not hardly. Not a little. Old?

Of course, I told them nothing about how good he smelled, like wood and sweat and burnt sugar, and something else familiar I couldn’t name but that tugged at the back of my throat like a swallowed lure. I told them nothing about his soft inner-elbow skin, or how intensely I wanted to touch him, to climb onto his back, to have him swing me through his legs the way my father had when I was small. He could have managed it: he was almost exactly as tall as my father. I had measured this by standing very close to him and noting where my nose hit his shoulder. This measurement was not at all related to the shape of his mouth, except in the ways that it was.