She laughs out loud, not in a nice way but in a way that suddenly I recognise and I realise that I was wrong. She wasn’t looking at me in that way because she adores me. The emotion in her face is not soft at all. Her eyes are open because she wants to see me suffer, or she wants to—what? To own me, the way you might own a beef cow. She is shaking because she hates me. On some fundamental level that even she is not entirely aware of, Not Stella thinks I am the ugliest thing she has ever seen, the worst person in the world. She loathes me and wants to hurt me in a very personal way. And then someone slaps me on the back and I stumble into the bedroom, and when I fall partway down and I stretch out towards her for support, she steps to one side and puts a sack over my head and some sort of chemical pad over the sack that smells of trombone solos and broken bagpipes, and I can see a ring of shadows like the entrance to a very irritating nightclub.