“We are what we think,” we echoed. I had never had any hard liquor before this. I took a deep swallow and then nearly gagged and spat it out.

“You’re going to have to work on that,” Serena said.

“What’s that toast,” I managed. She reached into her bag and tossed me her copy of the Dhammapada. I opened it. We are what we think. It was the very first line in the book, the very first saying of the Buddha that someone thought they should write down.

“The Buddha wrote thousands of sutras,” Serena said. “They say any one of them can take you all the way.” She held up the bottle. “But there are also … other strategies. Alcohol is one way to access a different plane of experience. Maybe it’s not the purest ecstatic state, but I’m willing to try. There’s a reason lots of famous Buddhists died of cirrhosis. It does something.”

I took another sip and grimaced.

“Don’t you have anything for her to mix it with?” Laurel said. She had already drunk half of her pour.

“Mixers are the girl’s way out,” Serena said.

“We actually are girls, you know,” Janet said.

“Which is better than the alternative,” I said.

Serena bent down to grab my chin with her free hand. “No,” she said. “Don’t be stupid.” She shifted her hand and drove her fingers into my cheeks, and suddenly I became aware of my jaw as a system of bone and teeth. I thought of skulls I had seen, not human ones, but canine: enormous eye sockets above jawlines populated by sharp, ill-fitting molars. Just as it began to hurt, she let go and patted me on the head.

I’ve said Serena was beautiful, but actually, that’s not quite right. Laurel was the real—or at least the conventional—beauty among the three: she looked like the women on magazine covers, the ones that the rest of us periodically reassure one another do not exist without Photoshop. No, there was something about Serena that kept her from being truly beautiful—something too arch about her mouth, too sharp about her eyes, maybe. Something cold or flat. Too narrow or too wide. Those teeth. I can’t quite explain it. Sometimes, like now, she looked hard, frighteningly hard. But still: her face was coercive, compulsory. It was hard to look away from her. And what else is beauty, after all?

I took another sip. “Luke showed me something,” I said.

“Was it something hot?”Laurel asked. “Or long?”Janet pushed her over, and Laurel fell expertly, without spilling her drink.

I repeated the bird visualization for them, leaving out the part about the embrace. “It’s probably nothing,” I said. “But at least it’s a start.”

“You know,” Serena said, watching me, “we’ve tried new girls before. But you’re the only one we’ve kept.”

“How come?” I said.