I felt a little dizzy again. I had no idea how high up we were. I took a few exploratory steps toward the dark perimeter, but Serena caught my arm. “Stay away from the edge,” she said. “Trust me, you wouldn’t want to fall from here.” I stopped and searched the striated darkness, but it was impossible to see the place where rock became air. The edge could have been anywhere. She pulled me toward what I hoped was the center of the platform and we sat.

Janet called it sounds that feel good. Laurel called it a brain-gasm. We are what we think, Serena said, and the other girls closed their eyes. I pretended to close mine too, but really I watched as Janet drummed her fingers softly along the edge of a wooden box. Laurel rubbed a small piece of fabric between her fingers. Serena dragged her thumbnail along an old wooden comb, creating a neutral xylophonic clicking. I sat. I listened. For a while I felt nothing. But when I closed my eyes at last and focused hard on the sound coming from Serena’s comb, something started climbing up my back.

How can I explain this? It will never make sense to you unless you’ve felt it. But here: it was as though there were strings connecting my ears to my tailbone in a giant V, strings that had always been there but that I had never noticed before, and then the strings lit up, ting, ting, ting, and grew denser, then brighter, and sour somehow, and then something was knitting itself between the strings like a web, snick, snick, something feathery, sneaky, warm. It wasn’t sexual, nor was it wholly unsexual. It felt like the shiver you get when someone massages your scalp with too light a touch and you’re both enjoying it and desperately reaching out with your very skin and hair for more—except distended and stretched, filling your head with the feeling of an itch being scratched, or almost scratched, an itch you didn’t even know you had there, there on the hot red underside of your scalp.