“I dream of milk,” she said. “My grandmother says one day I’ll grow too much in my sleep and be trapped in my room forever. High levels of calcium in the air, or something. But I’ll be gone long before that happens.” She laid a hand on my leg. “I never told my mother about seeing Luke, you know,” she said. “I hoarded it. Sometimes I think that if she had known levitation was possible even without her teacher, or that Luke could teach her too, she wouldn’t have done it. Sometimes I think it’s my fault.”

“No,” I said.

“It was the same summer,” she said. “I saw him. She died.” I couldn’t find anything to say to that. She shifted a little on the rock. “But I want you to know up front that I would personally never kill myself,” she said. “I’m telling you that now. No matter what. I wouldn’t want to have to start everything over.”

“Okay,” I said.

She took a deep breath. “Good,” she said. “Tell me your secret now.”

“What secret?” I said, but she only looked at me and waited, and so in the end I did tell her: about my missing father, at least, and about the year of nothing, but not about my mother, and what I had done to her, and not about Luke.

Unlike Luke, Serena did not touch me. Unlike Dominique, she looked thoughtful. “No daddies allowed at Buddhist camp,” she said.

“I know.”

“It’s part of the charm, really.”

I said nothing. There was something feral about her, I decided, underneath that still-lake exterior.

“What’s his name?” she said after a minute, and I told her. “I’ll make some inquiries,” she said. “Dominique is full of shit. I’m sure I can find out where he’s gone.” She stroked my cheek. “Just wait until he finds out you can levitate,” she said. “That’s obviously how you’re going to win him back. That’ll show him what kind of girl he abandoned.” She looked so fierce then, so sure, and I believed her, and it was like something breaking open. Yes, of course: if I learned this, my father would realize he’d made a mistake. It would be the ultimate proof of my worth, of my belonging to him and not to my mother: I would surpass him at his own obsession. I imagined myself floating in his living room, and his gasp of awe, his rush to wrap me in his arms.

“Don’t tell the others,” I said.