She steps outside Bright Day for a cigarette. Wind and sunlight tear at the fog. A tingle of underground cables permeates downtown, faintly audible in the morning hush. Gray-white seagulls stalk the sidewalk for debris from last night’s party （every night is a party on these streets）， lofting away potato chips and pizza rinds in their long yellow beaks.
With forty-five minutes to kill before meeting her drug counselor at ten, Roxy heads for Betty’s lunch counter. She hears trotting footsteps behind her but doesn’t turn, suspecting it’s Molly. Sure enough, she hears “Are you going to get coffee?” and nods, exasperated. Her resistance to Molly isn’t just because she replaced Colin, whom Roxy loved. With her frizzy hair and guileless smile, Molly Cooke is a misfit at Bright Day and in this neighborhood. She has no shell, no cool—is the sort of girl Roxy would have spurned or possibly tormented as a teenager. Molly knows instinctively where she isn’t wanted and goes there anyway. Roxy dislikes her, above all, for awakening her mean side.
They sit side by side at the counter drinking cups of sour, watery coffee that would tip off anyone with a modicum of Sense Subterfuge that Betty’s customers are here to buy something else. Externalizing your consciousness to a Mandala Cube takes four hours, and Roxy has persuaded herself that she might not be able to hold still that long without chemical assistance （Righteous Rationalization） in the form of a few bags that she absolutely will not use unless she has no choice （Self-Duping）。 Molly Cooke sips the wretched coffee, oblivious. Her Sense Subterfuge score must be close to zero.
“What was Chris like as a kid?” Roxy asks. She likes to talk about Chris—imagines sometimes that he’s her son, not Bennie’s.
“Oh, I was in love with him,” Molly says. “He’s a year older, which added to his grandeur.”
“Did you play D and D with him?”
“We played with Chris’s uncle,” Molly says. “And another girl, Lulu. She came to Colin’s memorial.”
“I know Lulu!” Roxy says with excitement. “She works for Bennie.”
“Lulu was the exotic outsider who lived upstate and was only around occasionally. We were all in love with her.”
“You were in love with everyone,” Roxy says slyly. “Was anyone in love with you?”
“No,” Molly says. For a moment she seems far away.
“I’ll bet you were a good girl.”
“Well, we were all pretty good, even Colin—and he was a ‘bad boy.’ There wasn’t a whole lot of trouble you could get into at the Crandale Country Club.”
“You hung out at a country club?” Roxy is disdainful.
“We did,” Molly says. “We lived whole lives there.”
“I would have found some trouble.”
Molly laughs—a real laugh, full of wicked delight. “You would’ve ruled that place, Roxy.”
Roxy smiles, satisfied. She is starting to like Molly better. “I was a good dancer,” she says.
She scores from one of the busboys on her way to the restroom. There is no betrayal in transacting this business while Molly waits just a few feet away. The Junkie Grid is like a separate sheet of graph paper from the one where Molly is sitting, just as Mondrian’s secret work is a separate sheet, and the life of Terrence the veterinarian, whose hair has now gone white and who recently welcomed his first grandchild （Roxy has tracked his life online all these years, though she never went to see him）。 And yet these many irreconcilable worlds occupy one physical space—like the D&D maps stacked inside a single envelope. How is it possible? Philosophy!
After Roxy’s meeting with her counselor, Chris walks her home. Her apartment building is two blocks from Bright Day, up a steep hill. She has to stop halfway and catch her breath. “Smoking,” she pants.