Barrette

Growing sleepy, Rabbit stops before midnight at a roadside café for coffee. Somehow, though he can't put his finger on the difference, he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men sitting in zippered jackets in booths three to a girl, the girls with orange hair hanging like wiggly seaweed or loosely bound with gold barrettes like pirate treasure.

The standing woman is overweight, with scraped-back and barretted bleach- blond hair and a jowly face of detonated capillaries.

With her barretted white hair, blue eyes, and deep green sweater, Victoria is as perfectly put together as ever.

She pulled her long hair up and barretted it so that her long exotic earrings put the finishing touch to her exquisite appearance.