“Well,” Claude said, fastidiously drying his hands with a checkered dishtowel. “I still say she’s better than Keith.”

Daria exhaled smoke through her nostrils, stared through the window at the fiery place in the sky where the sun had gone down.

“Just shut up, Claude.”

She sat there until the sky was almost black, the deep indigo before true night, her cigarette smoked down to the filter and Niki still in the shower; trying not to think about Keith Barry or her father or the delicate itch of spider legs on naked skin. Unable to think of anything else.

T he girl with absinthe hair, algae hair, slipped into her fishnets and fastened her garters to the elastic band around the top of the hose. Her doppelgänger in the big gilt-framed mirror followed her every move, looking-glass girl who mocked her style and the nurtured pallor of her white skin. Sometimes Robin tried to outsmart her, misdirection, sleight of hand or foot or the slimmest parting of her lips. Nothing personal, but if the poor girl can’t be more original, she has to expect a little flack, and Robin slid into the velvet skirt, mini-short, and her twin did the same, never missed a beat.

There was no hurry. She didn’t have to meet Spyder and Byron at Dr. Jekyll’s for two hours yet, and she was still horny, even after an hour in bed, masturbating and watching the pictures on her ceiling, the ones she painted there last summer, making this place safe: two ladders and plywood stretched between them, just like Michelangelo.

The hurricane swirl of clouds, black-and-blue as the swollen belly of a thunderhead near the walls and the poppy-red of Nagasaki at the eye, every shade of conflagration in between. Heaven spilling its fire and guts, and the broken angels plunging, wings back and trailing starlight and feathers. And something terrible that she’d only suggested, watching from the still heart of the storm. The angels had skin like statues, eyes like sapphire and dusk, and between their legs, the perfect alloy of man and woman. Not sexless, but genitals that had not yet been forced to take a side.

Ritual in pretended fresco, something against the shadows.

The girl inside the mirror ran one pinkie through the silver ring in Robin’s navel-fresh piercing and the wound still red at the edges-tugging gently, playfully. Robin removed the blouse from its wire hanger, black lace and no sleeves, crimson buttons like drops of stage blood. The gloves were black, too, and lace, and they hid the nubs of her fingernails, the cuticles chewed raw and ragged.

Two knocks at her bedroom door, soft and hesitant, and her mother speaking through the wood.

“Robin? Are you going out tonight, dear?”

“Yes, Mother,” and the girl in the mirror stuck out her tongue, bright and wet against lips the color of ash. Robin’s teeth caught it, held it, supplicant flesh squeezed helpless between her incisors.

“Your father’s working late, and I’m having dinner with Marjorie and Quentin. Don’t forget to lock up, and set the alarm when you leave.”

Robin’s teeth parted, and her tongue slipped gratefully back inside her mouth.

“Promise?”

“Yes,” Robin said.

“Good girl,” her mother said. “Have fun and drive safe,” like some fucking public service blurb, and Robin turned her back on the mirror. Concentrated on buttoning each sanguine button, on the retreating tattoo of her mother’s footsteps. Her mother played pretend, pretend that Robin was still a child, pretend that her father was held up late over his blueprints and drafting tools instead of his latest whore girlfriend. That her life wasn’t as hellish as everything else in the world, and Robin didn’t really give a shit as long they paid the bills on her charge cards and didn’t bitch about where she spent her nights. Who she spent them with.

Robin sat down on one rumpled corner of the bed and laced her feet tight into tall vinyl boots, icicle heels and toes like fresh slices of midnight. The calm she’d felt only a minute before had dissolved completely, whatever dim sanctuary her room conferred violated by her mother’s voice and brittle delusions, and now all she wanted was to escape. Put all the miles she could between herself and the neat suburban rows of brick and aluminum siding, pretty mortgaged cancers, and follow the interstate over the mountains, to Spyder and the honest desolation of the city.

But she’d wait a few more minutes, give her mother plenty of time to clear out. Robin lay back on the bed, the sheets that smelled like jasmine incense and clove cigarettes and her musty sex, and stared at the walls.

Walls her painstaking alchemy of acrylics and sponge dabbings had transformed into some impossible marble, simple Sheetrock into ebony stone shot through with scarlet quartz veins. Four stark slabs supporting, framing, the tragic tableau overhead, the pillars of the world, and the walls were almost bare: only a giant Siouxsie and the Banshees poster above the headboard and a raccoon skull hanging snout down in the narrow space between her cluttered bookshelf and the new stereo her parents had given her for her last birthday.

“Nineteen,” her mother had said. “Robin’s so mature for just nineteen. Don’t you think so, Bill?” And her father had smiled, his eyes a hundred miles away.

She’d painted the door a single bottomless shade of glistening black, like hot tar or spilled oil, clinging absence of anything like light.

Robin listened, as patient as anything cornered, and when she finally heard the faint growl and clank of the automatic garage door, the softer purr of her mother’s car backing out of the drive, she got up and opened the black door.

This is where it started.

On an April night when thunderstorms had swept out of Mississippi, raking the world with lightning and the promise of tornadoes, and the city’s civil defense sirens had howled shrill apocalypse. And Walter, who said he wanted to be a sailor and only pretended to be queer so nobody would think he was strange, had brought them a tiny bit of opium, black tar in Spyder’s antique hookah, just like Gomez and Morticia. There was almost nothing that Walter could not secure, given time and the cash, no pill or herb or intoxicating powder too exotic that he didn’t seem to have a source, somewhere.

Gawky Walter Ayers, rawboned and hair like a handful of dead mice, so hard in love with Robin that she always got to laughing if she looked at his eyes too long. He bought her company, Spyder’s, Byron’s, with drugs and clumsy, helpless charm.

And that night the storm and Bauhaus turned down low so they could still hear the thunder and the sizzling rain and sirens, and she’d nestled content and almost naked in Spyder’s tattooed arms; waiting for her turn at the water pipe’s brass mouthpiece. Listening to whatever Walter was saying, gathering his words inside her head: the book he was reading on the Holy Grail, having exhausted Jessie Weston and Roger Sherman Loomis, a book by Carl Jung’s wife and the grail as vessel, the sword and the lance, grail as stone. She’d watched their candle-oranged faces: Walter’s too excited; Byron, bored, but watching Spyder to see what she thought before he agreed or disagreed.

“And these angels, the zwivelaere, had wanted to preserve the original God-image,” he said, “the unity, the divine inner opposites that were being torn apart by the war in Heaven.”

“Zwivelaere,” the German had rolled easy and slow from Spyder’s tongue. “What does that mean?” And then she’d taken the mouthpiece from him and filled her cheeks with the faintly sweet, acrid smoke, had leaned down, and Robin parted her lips and accepted the kiss, taking Spyder’s breath and the opium inside her, had closed her eyes and only exhaled when her lungs had finally begun to ache and the distant thrum in her ears, like the empty space between radio stations.