"What are you looking at?" she said. She didn't seem to expect an answer so I didn't bother with one. She flopped down on an unmade king-sized bed, staring at me as she took up a cigarette and lit it. Her nails were bitten to the quick. The room had been painted black and looked like a parody of an adolescent girl's room. There were lots of posters and stuffed animals but all of them had a nightmare quality. The posters were of rock groups in tartish makeup, sinister and sneering, depicted in vignettes largely hostile toward women. The stuffed animals ran more to satyrs than Winnie-the-Pooh. The air was scented with eau de dope and my guess was she'd smoked so much grass in there, you could bury your nose in the bedcovers and get high.

Bobby apparently enjoyed her antagonism. He pulled a chair over for me, dumping clothes on the floor unceremoniously. I sat down and he stretched out on the foot of the bed, circling her left ankle with one hand. His fingers overlapped as if he were holding her wrist instead. It reminded me of Hansel and Gretel. Maybe Kitty was worried that if she got fat, they'd put her in the cooking pot. I thought they'd put her in a grave long before that point and it was frightening. She leaned back on both elbows, smiling at me faintly down the length of her long, frail legs. All the veins were visible, like an anatomical diagram with a celluloid overlay. I could see how the bones were strung together in her feet, her toes looking almost prehensile.

"So what's going on downstairs?" she said to Bobby, her gaze still pinned on me. Her speech was ever so slightly slurred and her eyes seemed to swim in and out of focus. I wondered if she was drunk or had just popped some pills.

"They're standing around sucking up booze as usual. Speaking of which, I brought us wine," he said. "Got a glass?"