She frowned, wiped her thumb on her dress, and then looked at it, as if there were some possibility it was faulty.

“Did you do it wrong?” Janet asked.

“No,” Serena said.

They tried again: nothing.

“Maybe it just doesn’t work for you,” Janet said. She looked over at Luke for the first time all night. I couldn’t read her expression.

Laurel, who had dropped to the ground in exhaustion, her hair and legs spread, drew a lazy circle in the fallen pine needles with a finger. “It wouldn’t mean anything,” she said. “If you couldn’t do it.”

Janet cleared her throat.

“Come here, Olivia,” Serena said. I stood in front of her and she took my hands. “You’re going to help me.” She placed my hands around her neck and reached around to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. She stroked my cheek with a finger. Then she lowered her hand again to touch my thumbs where they now rested against her windpipe, like an old woman absentmindedly fingering a brooch. I was old enough then, perhaps, to think of Plath: If the moon smiled, she would resemble you / You leave the same impression / Of something beautiful, but annihilating.

If I wasn’t, I’m thinking of her now.

“You’re going to choke me,” she said. I tried to move my hands away, but she gripped my wrists. Then she lifted one arm in front of my eyes to remind me of her countless protection cords, which I thought looked in danger of disintegrating at any moment. “I’ll be safe,” she said. “Just press down until I start to fall.”

“Girls,” said Luke, but he didn’t move to stop us. He’d taken his hands out of his pockets and was watching us with interest.

“I can’t,” I said. So she waited, and we stood like that, staring at each other, her skin sweating slightly beneath my fingertips, until after a while I did begin to choke her, a little at first, my thumbs exploring the ridges of her throat, and then harder, squeezing, thinking of that swirling, sexy, plump little goldfish, its eyelashes not unlike Serena’s, so long and so dark, begging to be touched, to be handled with rough, unyielding hands, to be undone, unmade, until suddenly she was falling backward away from me.

She missed the futon. Her body jerked and twisted and she hit her head hard on the rock and then I saw it: a thin gyre of bright red blood that spooled upward from her temple and hung suspended and shining in the air above her face, hung there for a moment, like a smoke ring, before dissolving back down into the blackness.