Serena leaned back onto the ground. “It’s sort of a Brutalist solution to levitation, but she got what she wanted, I guess. Her teacher always said that the last things she would see before her enlightenment were her own feet lifted above the earth.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, too late and too lame.

“It was a long time ago,” she said. “It gets longer all the time. I wasn’t even the one to find her, though I do have this image in my mind: blue ankles, knocking together. They’re probably not even hers, though. They’re probably from TV. Someone else’s ankles are all I have of her.” She looked down at her lap. “That and all these dresses, which aren’t exactly my style. But otherwise they’d just be in a box somewhere.” The one she wore that night was a saturated ocher, like a late-September leaf.

“They suit you,” I said.

“They don’t,” she said.

I wondered what she wore the rest of the year. I found that I couldn’t imagine her in winter, or in school. “The very worst part,” she said after a few moments, “is what my father said. I wasn’t supposed to hear, of course. He was on the phone. He thought I was in my room. She was a sucker, that’s what he said. It was her own stupidity that killed her.” She blew out a stream of smoke.

“What an asshole,” I said, finding my voice again. But secretly, I thought: Serena’s father and my mother would almost certainly get along. I thought: Maybe they could meet. I thought: Maybe they could meet and fall in love over their devotion to nothing, their refusal to be suckers, and then they could get married after a whirlwind romance, and Serena could move into my house, no, my room, my bed, and be mine forever, tangled in my sheets, blowing smoke at the ceiling. Unless of course my mother rejected him, and wouldn’t that be just like her, to ruin this for me.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “He’s gone too. I live with my grandmother now, in this old defunct creamery she inherited and won’t leave. She fixed up one of the milk barrels with a little bed and a light, and that’s where I sleep.”

“You’re joking,” I said. “You sleep in a barrel?”