“I don’t,” Laurel said. But then Colin clapped his hands once to call us to attention and she turned her face immediately toward his.

Janet caught my eye. See, she mouthed. It was hard to tell how she meant it, since she never smiled. Everything could have been a joke. Everything could have been serious.

“Girls, girls, girls,” Colin said. “Let’s, like, get started?” He produced a coil of bright ropes from somewhere, and swiftly hooked Nisha and Harriet together, looping one end around each girl’s waist and then clipping it to itself, like a snake eating its tail, and also its head.

“The ropes are to remind you that we are all connected,” Colin said. “You are like, simply not possible without anyone else?” He clipped Samantha, a pretty petty thief and the only person I had ever met with a tongue ring, to Jamie, who that day looked nearly translucent, like a raw shrimp. Double-headed Evie was clipped to Paola, a girl who suffered from eternal baby voice, but was never mocked for it, on account of her cache of desirable pills and powders. Colin approached Janet and Laurel with a rope—then at the last second, he clipped Janet to me instead. Laurel he attached to Margaret, a broad-shouldered girl whose septum piercing made her look downright bovine.

“Gross,” said Laurel.

“Tell me about it,” said Margaret. She jiggled the rope. “There’s a reason I never had a Barbie.” But what that reason was, we were not to discover, because Colin clapped his hands again and we started up the trail.

The mountain, Shastri Dominique had warned us, was full of cracks. Big cracks, smaller ones. Gorges, craters, chasms, crevasses, fissures, abysses both literal and figurative. A girl could easily fall down. A girl could easily be lost. Some cracks had water at their bottoms, some rock. There were cliffsides too, and holes, and ghastly animals with gnashing teeth, ready to pull you into their hidden caves, suck you into their jagged mouths. This in addition to the many twisting, interlocking trails that were thrown over the mountain like a knotted net, a skullcap sewn by a madman, enough to busy any wanderer for years. The mountain had a thousand ways to keep you, Shastri Dominique had said. This was why we were only to be in the woods when accompanied by a staff member. The staff members knew the mountain. They would protect us.

What a ridiculous idea. Girls like us cannot be protected, we swore into one another’s palms and shoulder blades. Girls like us cannot be saved. It’s the mistake everyone makes.