The room's slightly faded yellow floral wallpaper was bright in morning sun, and the polished wood of the table was covered with cereal boxes, empty plates and bowls, various cutlery, the morning paper, and several girl– teen magazines of a kind that Nita had sworn off as too pink and clueless a couple of years ago. At the head of the table, poring over the international-news section of the newspaper, was a slender young man with the most unnervingly handsome face and the most perfect waist– length blond hair Nita had ever seen. He was dressed in floppy golden-colored pants and high boots of something like glittering bronze-colored leather, unusually ornate-but over it all he was wearing an oversized gray T-shirt that said fermilab muon collider slo-pitch Softball, and he was sucking on a lollipop. Sitting at the right side of the table, turning the pages of one of the too-pink magazines and eyeing it with many, many red eyes like little berries, was what appeared to be a small Christmas tree, though one without any ornaments except a New York Mets baseball cap. Across the table from the tree was Nita's sister, Dairine, in T-shirt and jeans, her red hair hanging down and half concealing her freckled face as she paged through the paper's entertainment and comics section from last weekend. And at the end of the table opposite the blond guy was a giant metallic-purple centipede, reading several different columns' worth of classified ads with several stalked eyes. "You're too late," Dairine said. "All the French toast is history." "Knew I could count on you," Nita said. At the table, the centipede pointed a couple of spare eyes at the Christmas tree. "You done with that?" the centipede said. "Yes," the tree said, and pushed the pink magazine over to the centipede. "Thanks," said the centipede. It tore the cover off the magazine, examined it with a connoisseur's eye, and started to eat it. "Morning, everybody," Nita said as she headed through the dining room and around the corner into the kitchen, where her father was.