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not possibly have understood, she thought later that night as she climbed under the covers of her bed. Even Naomi and Laura did not really understand, although they certainly came closer.
    There had been a split between the three death girls lately. “It’s because of that Julian person you spend all your time with,” Laura said one day. “He’s responsible for the way you’ve been drifting away from us. You never come to our late-night meetings anymore.”
    “We miss you,” Naomi chimed in.
    “I know, and I’m sorry,” she said to them. “Things will change soon; don’t worry.”
    Claire missed the frenzy of their nighttime meetings. She had not been thoroughly honest when she told Julian about them. It was surely a lot more than just candles and notebooksand conversations about poetry. It was not a literary salon, the way she had made it out to be. It was, she decided, nearly a spiritual experience. She had seen documentary films of Southern Baptist revival meetings and had been awed by the passion of the people—the way they shook, trembled, could barely contain their love for Jesus. That was exactly how she felt when she thought about Lucy Ascher.
    She would close her eyes, sitting cross-legged on the hard floor of Naomi’s room, and think,
Lucy, Lucy
, blotting out all else. Soon there would come an odd lifting feeling in her stomach, and she would begin to recite the lines of one of Ascher’s poems. Claire’s favorite was “Of Gravity and Light,” which was from Ascher’s first collection. Naomi and Laura would respectfully wait for her to finish, and then they would each take a turn.
    Claire barely listened when the other poetry was being read. She had no real affinity for the works of either Sexton or Plath. They were too common, she felt, too accessible, too whiny. Ascher was more complex, more difficult to take, because her pain was up front. She emphasized the fact that simple existence was filled with nightmare, as if this were already generally understood. When she could no longer stand the pain of it, she took her life.
    A year after Lucy Ascher died, her notebook was published under the title
Sleepwalking
, from the name of one of her early poems. The book received much attention; critics called it deadly and devastating and apocalyptic. Claire thought it was merely realistic. It chronicled a life far more truthfully and painfully than anything else Claire had read. It graduallybecame a cult book, as Plath’s
Letters Home
had been. Unlike Plath, Lucy Ascher never planned to have her words read by anyone, and that, Claire thought, gave them a stark, exposed quality. The notebook had been fished up from the very back of the poet’s dresser drawer, underneath piles of underwear and little sachet pillows. The original notebook had, her mother wrote in the introduction to the book, smelled of gardenias.
    Claire often pictured Lucy sitting curled up in a corner of her room, scribbling in her notebook until the early hours of the morning. She wished she could have been there with her, peering over her shoulder, fetching her a brand-new pencil when the old one wore down into a tiny yellow wood chip from overuse.
    She could not voice her feelings to Julian; he would not be able to follow them. He was so simple—it seemed that he required almost nothing to sate him. “What do you need in life?” she asked him once when they were together in her bed.
    “Just you,” he replied, cupping her breast for emphasis. She was not amused.
    Julian stopped by her room every day for two weeks after the time she saw him from the window and invited him up. In the beginning they studied together, sitting close and not talking for long stretches. Sometimes they played endless rounds of Botticelli, a game in which one player has to guess the famous person the other player is thinking of. Julian gave her difficult ones: Judge Crater, Mrs. O’Leary, and once, to be witty, Roy G. Biv.
    In the middle of studying one