I smiled weakly back; I felt the urge to run, or at least to slink off to a corner where no one would catch me fingering cute plates in my spare time. But I wasn’t here to be the same person I was at home, I reminded myself. I was here for a reason. So, still feeling a tingling in my back where I’d been prodded, I took my dumb little plate over to Janet and Laurel’s otherwise empty table, right in the center of the room. I sat down, leaving a few chairs between us for the sake of plausible deniability; they ignored me without effort. Above us, the rafters were wound with hundreds of prayer flags in faded primary colors that looked as though they’d hung there for decades.
There was a basket of fruit on the table. I reached out and palmed a plum, but no—it was plastic. I went to put it back, but stopped when I saw two curved wounds, thin creases in the fake purple skin. Someone else had tried to bite into it. Which meant that someone, weeks or years or minutes ago, had known even less than I did. I turned the plum over in my hand. I rubbed my thumb along the creases. As comforts go, it was a mild one, but still. I placed the plum back in its basket, tooth marks turned in for privacy.
“Always kale,” I heard Janet mutter, pressing her bamboo fork aimlessly into the back of her hand. She turned her head, and for the first time I got a good look at her left cheek. It wasn’t paint that I’d seen the day before; it was a birthmark, in the shape of a crown tipped on its side. It was a deep eggplant color, the same exact shade as her hair. She must have spent considerable time searching for the dye to match it.
“It’s like they think we’re rabbits,” Laurel said, holding up a big green leaf, drawing out the a: raaaabbits.
“Eat up, girls,” a passing staffer chirped, eyeing the fork still digging into Janet’s skin, the leaf Laurel was waving like a flag. “You know what they say: Kale is life!”
“Sure,” Janet said. “You chew and you chew and you chew and there’s no reward.”
“I think our Luke would beg to differ,” the staffer said brightly. “It’s organic.”
They both seemed to straighten at the sound of his name. Laurel folded the leaf into her mouth and smiled sweetly at the staffer. Janet put down her fork, as if suddenly disgusted. “I doubt it,” she said, but so far under her breath I wasn’t sure I’d really heard.
A few days went by. I can’t say how many; time bled uncontrollably at the Center, even that early in the summer. The Garudas had contemplative oil painting, calligraphy, more ikebana. We went on nature walks, where we learned and forgot the names of trees. We practiced oryoki, a mindful eating technique we did not manage to apply to our regular meals, and Kyūdō, a kind of Zen archery at which Janet alone excelled. We meditated for long periods. My dizziness slowly drained away, but I didn’t sleep much better. Instead, I listened to Janet and Laurel sneak out at night. Tap, tap. Not every night, but often enough. I didn’t sit at their table again—my nerve proving temporary—but I continued to watch them. Sometimes I got close enough to hear something of their constant whispers, each fragment unbearable: glimpse, gagged, gouge, that kind of girl. It wasn’t enough. Sometimes I couldn’t find them at all—they would disappear for hours, with no explanation—and while other girls were punished for breaking rules (within a week Harriet, who could never manage to hide her cigarette butts from Magda, became quite adept at hand-buffing the shrine room floor), when it was the two of them the staffers seemed not to notice, or at least not to mind. I always noticed. I always minded. Serena herself appeared only rarely, and then usually at a distance—I would see her traipsing away across the grounds in a thin white dress, like a will-o’-the-wisp, while the rest of us filed into dinner, or into bed. She was almost never at meals. She was almost never at activities. She was almost never at anything, unless she was, and when she was, she spoke to no one but her friends, the chosen two.
The chosen two: well, they made a strange pair. Most days, Janet woke before the rest of us to go running, coming back to the dormitory drenched and red. She often did push-ups in the grass, sometimes with Laurel sitting on her back, legs crossed, looking performatively at her nails. But she was nothing like the jocks I had known in my former life. For one thing, unless you count the hair, I never saw her wear any other color than black. For another, she never, ever smiled.
“Teeth are for digestion,” she said one morning to Shastri Dominique, who had told her that if she’d just smile, even if she had to force her muscles to comply, her body would respond with positive feelings, a Pavlovian response to the performance of happiness. “Why would I want to show my digestive organs in public?” Janet said. “Why would you even want to see them? Don’t be disgusting.”
Dominique only exhaled through her nose, rolled her eyes, and moved toward Nisha, who had managed to fall asleep again, sitting up and dreaming.
On the other hand: one particularly hot day, the Garudas were gathered for some outdoor activity, waiting for the relevant staffer to appear, and skinny little Jamie—a fragile, friendless girl whose fingers and toes were always blue from lack of circulation—raised one arm above her head, turned white, and crumpled to the ground. Everyone stared. Someone laughed. No one moved to help her except Janet, who in a single motion scooped her up and carried her off to the infirmary, whispering into her ear the whole time. Everyone else had merely puffed out her lips or pursed them, rolled her eyes or narrowed them, and edged away from the girl on the ground. Yes, even me. You should not, under any circumstances, expect me to be the hero of this story.
Once, when no one else was in the dormitory, I snuck over to Laurel’s bed to get a closer look at the photographs she’d tacked up around her pillow. They were mostly dreamy, half-cast in sepia, or else oversaturated and hypnotic. In one, she reclined on the floor of a walk-in closet, fabric hanging down around her, a faded t-shirt stretched violently across her breasts—it read BETTY’S HOT VINYL—and bit her lip at whoever was holding the camera. In another, she and a dark-haired boy shared a single cone of pink ice cream in front of a yellow brick wall. Two pretty girls wearing sequins in the forest. Three boys holding up beers that had been duct-taped to their soft, tanned hands. One photograph had clearly been taken on the dance floor: someone in a red and blue dress blurred her way toward someone in a green jacket, a halo of watery light emanating from her head like she was the second coming, a girl Christ on the ascendant, her vodka-soda-lime raised triumphant and ready above the crowd.
I reached out to touch the girl on the dance floor. My finger left a smudge on her dress. The girls in these photographs were the kind that people wrote songs about. This was the kind of life that American teenagers were meant to live. Park that car. Drop that phone. Sleep on the floor. Dream about me. No part of my life was so photogenic. Even if it were, no one would have been there to capture it.
Now I know, of course, how easily photographs can lie. Or maybe that’s not quite right. It’s not that they lie, exactly: it’s that they invent their own realities.
There was one more photograph of Laurel, lying on her side on a canopied bed in a pink silk nightgown, the same one I saw her wear most nights at the Center. Soft-bodied, long-legged Laurel, always sleeping in until the last possible moment. When I think of her now, so many years later, this is the image to which I return—the photograph, not the girl. Just looking at it you could tell how smooth she would be, how amenable to your touch. Just looking at it you could see how cozy her flesh, how easily punctured.