I could feel my heart in my throat, as if it too had levitated, up out of my chest cavity, straining to sacrifice itself against my teeth. Laurel reached out and took my hand, her eyes fixed on Serena’s temple. I laced my fingers with hers, a little miracle in that.

“You saw it?” Janet whispered.

“What?” Serena said. “Saw what?”

“Your blood,” Laurel said quietly. “Just a little bit of blood.”

“Blood from your head,” Janet said.

“What?” Serena said. She was looking at me, and so I had to answer.

“It floated,” I told her. And then she wasn’t looking at me anymore. Then she only had eyes for Luke.

7

The four of us played the fainting game every night for a week, but we couldn’t re-create the results we’d had with Luke. Even when Serena cut open her own hand with a knife before we started, she only ruined her dress. We fell and fell and fell: that was all. We tried new things, whatever we could dredge up, hoping something would catch: I thought the most promising of these was yogic flying, sworn levitation tactic of Transcendental Meditators, though Serena called this practice “idiot hopping” and so it was. Luke refused to return to the rock palm, no matter how much I begged him during rota, no matter how many times Serena came to stand outside the fence. It was too dangerous, he said. He should never have come at all. He should never have encouraged it. In the garden, I settled into long silences. Luke told me I needed more sleep, and fed me berries out of his palm, but he wouldn’t talk about what had happened. He wouldn’t even admit that anything had.

I began to question myself. Had Serena’s blood really floated? I had seen it so clearly; then again, the strawberries.

(What would my mother have said? But no, I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about her anymore.)

Still, we must have been accomplishing something in all those hours at the rock palm, because Dominique helped me into my first handstand during yoga at the end of that week, holding my heavy legs while my face turned red.

“Closer,” she murmured, and moved on to press her palms into the small of Nisha’s bent back, coax some warmth into Jamie’s thin limbs. I had noticed by then that she never touched Serena.

One night during this time, Laurel pulled a small bag of white powder out of her pocket. You must have known this was coming; I admit that I did not.

“I asked Paola,” she said by way of explanation.

Serena eyed the bag. “What did you tell her?”