“You don’t move. Then they slit open your arm.” Suddenly, Serena slid her finger from my shoulder to my wrist, hard and fast enough that I released a little breath. “And they start filling it with black sand.” She drummed her fingers along the length of my arm. “More sand, more, more,” she said. She switched to the other arm and opened and filled that one before running her finger lengthwise across my collarbone. “Pounds and pounds of it.” She slid one perfect nail between my breasts and I had to bite my own tongue to keep from crying out. “They pour and pour until all the blood and muscles in your body are replaced with black sand. The men say: You’re a beautiful girl, Olivia. That’s why we have to do this. You say nothing, because your mouth is filled with black sand.”

Then she rolled up my shirt and cut my stomach open in a cross, slice, slice, before filling it with her fingertips. Her hair brushed over my body as she leaned to fill my legs, her fingers finding my hip points under my cotton shorts and tracing downward, then upward again. By the time she reached my head, I was void of anything but the drumming of her fingertips and the tingling of my skin and the vague image of the men in blue, pouring burlap sack after burlap sack of coarse black crystals into my body.

“Now that you’re full,” she said, “they stitch you back up.” She ran her nails over all the open wounds as if closing a zipper, and then skimmed the pads of her fingers across the same places as a salve. “They take you out into their boat. You’re so heavy that the boat hangs low in the glassy water. There are no boats anywhere else on the water, or anywhere else in the world. They take you to the middle of the ocean, and then they drop you overboard.” She was rubbing my temples again. Her voice seemed deeper than before. “And then you go down, down, down, down, down. You go down forever. Your body rests at the bottom of the ocean, in the dark.” She pressed her hand against my forehead, hard. Then she leaned her forearms into my chest, and my stomach, legs, feet, pressing down. “It’s heavy down there, so heavy. There’s nothing but the dark dark dark, and the sand, and the heaviness.” She got up and lay on top of me, nestled her forehead against my own. I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. Her pubic bone bore into mine.

“But one day, you wake up, and you’re back on the beach.” She rolled off. “And you open your eyes.”

I opened my eyes.