I thought of how we must look from the outside: four girls sunning themselves on a ledge high above the earth. I imagined the photograph we would have made, had someone been there to take it—Laurel’s head tilted back in laughter; Janet scowling and strict, her purple hair like a glare on the film; Serena staring down the camera, her face inscrutable; Olivia at her feet, still unsure, probably caught blinking. We were so young. We weren’t so young. I wanted to collect it, that hour, that day, and stuff it still breathing beneath my bed with everything else I’d loved and thought I’d never forget the shape of. Even while it was happening, I knew I wanted it to last forever. I couldn’t have known it would last almost no time at all. I couldn’t have known that by the end of that summer, one of us would be erased completely, blacked out, as though something had spilled over the photograph, was already spilling that sunny, lazy day, already creeping, thick and dark, up to the developed edge.

“I’m going to tell you a story,” Serena said. She pressed her fingertips into my scalp and I wanted to cry out for how good it felt. (Not many girls had ever touched me either, unless you count my mother, and you shouldn’t.) In Serena’s story, she was eleven. It was her third summer at the Center and she had wandered away from her parents to pick flowers in her favorite flower-picking place. Clouds passed overhead, changing the light so quickly it disoriented her, sent her careening dizzily across the grounds. She found herself near the garden. The new assistant gardener was there, and warmth came off his body in waves, so clearly and forcefully it made her take a step back. He looked at her as she approached, and then, with no ceremony at all, he began to float up, like a balloon. She didn’t scream. She didn’t run. She watched him rise to look over the top of the electric fence and then float back down. He didn’t say anything to her after. She watched him tend the garden until her father came, took her hand, and brought her in to dinner.

“But how did he do it?” I asked. Oh, that, he had said, the liar.

“If we knew, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Laurel said.

“I’ve been trying to do it on my own ever since. And there are a few more things I’ve read about that we can try together, to get closer,” said Serena. “But all the books say that once you do get close, you need a teacher.”

“I seriously doubt he’ll agree to teach us,” Janet said. “Even if he does know how.”

“He does,” Serena said. “And he will.”

“He never has before,” Janet said.

“You’ve asked him?” I said.