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to eat food they dislike—that it violates a basic human principle. It’s the worst thing, in my opinion, that you can do to another person.
    As I chased each grain of rice around my plate, Devon told me about yet another house rule. Each girl, she told me, was required to stay in the dining room until everyone else has finished her meal. I stared at her when she told me this, unable to imagine the consequences of the injunction. What if one girl refused to eat? What if
I
refused to eat? To prohibit us from leaving the room was unthinkable—it was as though we were a group of hostages roped together. I made a mental note to write the rule down in my journal.
    After dinner Devon brought out a couple of containers of Tahitian vanilla ice cream and a basket of fruit from the garden. One girl disemboweled an apricot, but nobody touched the ice cream except for Devon, who conspicuously enjoyed a heaping bowlful. The candles on each table, I noticed, extinguished themselves after exactly one hour. By the time everyone finished eating, none of them remained lit. We sat in the near dark, digesting our unwanted food.
    The atmosphere of the room made me think of school, where I first saw girls linger over sparse plates of lettuce dressed in vinegar. Girls clutching cups of hot tea and avoiding the bread basket as though its contents were sprinkled with arsenic. Only girls notice these things, not boys. Boys never see it. After a certain point of thinness, a girl simply disappears from their sightlines.
    What followed dinner is almost too gruesome to put in writing. Despite the fact that nobody is reading this, I feel shaky about recording it on paper. If I don’t rid myself of the thought, however, I am sure that I will have bad dreams about it, and I do not want bad dreams tonight.
    As I brought the last frill of broccoli to my mouth, I became aware of a sound underpinning the scrape of forks and tinkling of ice in the dining room. The sound was low at first, barely perceptible, as though it were emanating from beneath a blanket. When Devon brought out the dessert, she mentioned nothing about the noise, although it was loud enough at that point for everyone to hear it. I swept my eyes from one end of the room to the other, but the noise, it seemed, was directionless. What was it? Where was it coming from? Some inner censor prevented me from asking any questions.
    Devon passed around the basket of fruit, which sagged with apricots, plums, and peaches. An overripe scent trailed the basket as I passed it quickly along to Victoria, who took nothing.
    The noise grew louder. It was the sound of crabs scuttling along a rocky beach. A dry, hurried sound of tiny claws skittering over tide-washed pebbles.
    After the unused dessert plates had been cleared, Devon stood and did her hand-clap again.
    “Time to warm up,” she announced. Even in the room’s obscurity, her skin shone with a reflective layer of oil.
    Warm up?
I thought. She must be kidding. A vision of the five skinny girls (and me) doing calisthenics and light aerobics made me pinch my fingers together. I knew that I, for one, would not be able to move a muscle after ingesting such a great quantity of food. The idea was dangerous. It had to be a joke, I decided—but Devon had not thus far shown herself to be a joker.
    We were, at least, allowed to leave the dining room at last. Despite the absence of dinner plates, the smell of food still hungthickly in the air. Devon blew out the two remaining candles, and we got up to follow her, Girl Scout–style, through a pair of French doors that opened into a den abutting the dining area. The candlelight was replaced with art deco lamps that revealed a handful of couches arranged around a hearth, where Devon swiftly began preparations for a fire. She crumpled newspapers, stacked kindling, and positioned a log over the grate, while I watched, baffled by the idea that we would sit before a roaring fire during the middle of summer.