“It is a little like polishing a mirror, only the mirror is your mind,” Sarah said. “Make sense?” Everyone laughed, except Janet, who was stretching her shoulders, staring down the range as though it had done something to her. Sarah lined us all up facing the targets, and handed us each a handful of arrows and a special leather glove with only three fingers. She stood in front of us, demonstrating how to put it on. We’d done this before, of course, but something about the glove resisted learning; we had to be shown every time. “You must be like a tree,” she said. “Strong and flexible at once.”

“You know what else is like a tree,” Laurel whispered. “Long and brown and with a bush at one end.” I concentrated again on things that weren’t Luke: knife, thermostat, packing peanuts.

“So what you’re saying,” Janet whispered, “is that when a man and a woman truly love each other, his penis grows a canopy of thick roots into her body and spreads out and feeds on her nutrients and stays there until it dies of disease or old age or gets chopped down and sliced into pieces and turned into lumber?”

“Exactly,” Laurel said.

“Can’t wait.”

Laurel rolled her eyes and started to say something else, but Janet turned crisply away from us, lifting her bow to her hip, and Laurel, for once, decided to shut up and follow her lead.

It was only here, at the Kyūdō range, that I thought I finally understood Janet. She was a natural with the bow. As she pulled back the string, she seemed to relax rather than tense, and I could see how much she lived in her body—how she thought with it, almost, as if the color in her cheeks were pure mind, hovering there, red and ready underneath her skin. I saw the way the guided steps created space for that connection. And if Kyūdō could do so much, I thought, imagine what levitation could do. The ultimate physical control. The body to heel at last. No wonder she wanted it.

Plus, she was really good. All of our arrows fell like ripe apples from our bows, or if we were lucky, glanced off the sand a few feet ahead of us. Jamie couldn’t even really get the glove on. It was too big for her delicate hand. Harriet and Nisha kept collapsing into laughter halfway through the steps. Even the arrow Margaret got off on sheer strength only skidded a few yards. But when I looked up, Janet’s was humming in her target’s golden pupil.

“Our little toy soldier,” Laurel whispered as Janet made the long solitary walk to retrieve her arrow. She pulled her bowstring tight and then let it go, arrowless.

“She went out again last night,” I said.