Now, with many men behind me, I can recognize this for what it was: an intimacy too easy to be real. The flower he gave me on the very first day, the probing questions, all those gentle, innocent touches. He knew what he was doing. I did not. This is the way plenty of stories go, of course. But this one will end a little differently.

That night, the four of us returned to the rock palm. We had decided to start with the basics. Light as a feather, stiff as a board, that kind of thing. Ten million slumber partiers couldn’t be wrong, or at least not completely, Janet said. But Serena was distracted that night, dissociated even. She was often distant. You could map her by this prefix pattern, from the Latin, meaning apart, asunder, away, or even utterly, or signifying reversal, negation, lack, release, or, sometimes, intense force. She often looked as though the world weren’t real to her, as though she had to swim through it like salt water.

So: Light as a feather. Stiff as a board. Serena’s kimono slipping. My fingers on her hot skin. Her body in the air between us.

“This isn’t enough,” she said.

Serena stood in the center of the thick wool blanket, and Laurel and Janet and I each took a corner, and then we backed away until it pulled taut under her feet.

“More,” she said. We refastened our grips. I took half the blanket under my arm and leaned back, my toes lifting. Laurel was panting, she was pulling so hard, and for a few seconds, Serena rose up—the blanket, with enough force applied, had become as stiff as floor. She raised her arms. She jumped. The blanket jolted and we all fell in a confused jumble on the ground. My cheek landed against a soft patch of moss, my knee bruised against the rock. Twigs cracked like bird bones beneath our bodies. I laughed.

But Serena had fallen hard. She rubbed at her hip with a palm. “This is serious,” she said. “Every year, thousands of people come up here, to the Levitation Center, hoping to do this. But everybody, everybody fails.”

“Almost everybody,” Laurel said.

“Exactly,” Serena said. “Let’s try again.” We tried again, pulling and pulling until the blanket burned our fingers.

The magic carpet: a dream almost as old as the dream of human flight. That you might find an old, everyday object and use it to elevate your old, everyday self. Except that old, everyday objects tend to do old, everyday things.

“This is kid stuff,” Serena said at last. “We’re better than this.”

We were, as it turned out. But not that night.

4