But here I am, surrounded by concrete. I told the warden how ugly this place is and it was the one time he laughed. “Why would we want to pretend you’re somewhere pleasant?” he asked me. “This isn’t a boarding school, Isabella. This isn’t a hotel. Or some storybook palace. You need to grow up and take responsibility for yourself.”

I would have liked to shove chopsticks in his temples, nice and slow, right into his brain.

“Whatever,” I said.

My father finally stands up and his chair shrieks as it rubs against the floor. It’s such an ugly sound and I put my hands over my ears. My father pats me on the head and he leaves the room. He probably wants me to ask him for help but I won’t be brought down to that level. I already told him what happened.

Sergei and I were standing by the pond and Lulu was lying there, dead. I was hyperventilating. Then Sergei came over to me and started to kiss me. He was crazy, all pumped up on drugs and from the adrenaline. It surges through your body. I was still really stoned and I felt dizzy. When we first got there and parked, he took out this joint and we smoked it. It made my lungs burn. I don’t know what he had in it, but there was a funny taste in my mouth, and I could feel my heart go faster, like every hair on my body was standing up a bit, like my skin could feel every single bit of the wind, the warmth of the sun, like it was all magnified and it was like I was ten feet tall except my head felt like a balloon that was going to float up and away any second. And then it was like I was floating outside of myself, darting all around, a dragonfly, watching myself as we walked to the pond.

And then it all happened and we were there with her at our feet. My heart was pounding and I was dripping sweat. I pushed him away and we stood there looking at each other. A frog croaked from the water and we both looked at the pond. And then she started moaning. She wasn’t dead. I couldn’t believe it, with all those kicks, being strangled like that, and still alive. I told Sergei he had to stop, how he couldn’t cross that final line. Just a kick to her head, he said. That’s all it will take.” She sort of crawled, but she went the wrong way, toward the pond. She got up and was wobbling. And then Sergei walked over and gave her a push with his foot and she fell in. That’s all it took, a little tap. I would have jumped in to save her but the pond looked really deep. She didn’t struggle much, just floated there, face down among the water lilies with the sun setting on her long hair.