Free Die a Little by Megan Abbott

isn't talking, mostly about the shopping she needs to do and how late she is going to be for dinner guests but that fortunately she has prepared everything in advance, from the cold potato soup to the slow-cooking roast.
    "What a horrible name for a place to live," I murmur as I notice a thickly painted apartment complex to our right. Its targe, red-lettered sign darts out from behind a heavy blur of swaying pepper trees, "Locust Arms Apartments."
    Alice laughs loudly and suddenly, like a bark. Covering her mouth, she says, "That's where Lois lives." I feel my face redden but say nothing as Alice pulls the car into the small lot. We step out and begin walking toward the courtyard.
    Watching Alice three steps ahead of me, gliding serenely past each blistered door while I find myself sneaking only furtive glances, I wonder about the places she's lived. Places even worse than the Bunker Hill rooming house.
    The place is rundown, but it isn't that. It's something else.
    Something I can't quite name. The paper-thin doors, heavily Die a Little -- 49 --
    curtained windows, the faint sound of someone chipping ice, relentlessly, the winding drone of a radio playing music without rises or falls, just a sporadic beat, the vague murmur of a neglected cat.
    Behind all these doors there is something finishing. Dead ends.
    Alice knocks pertly on the door marked 7.
    "Lucky seven," she says to me unreadably.
    There is the sound of feet running anxiously, and the door flings open so quickly that Alice and I both jump back with a start.
    Lois's white face pokes out of the dark interior with an energy I've never seen in her.
    "Get in, get in." She half-stumbles backward, waving at us furiously.
    It is hardly larger than a hotel room: a small seating area with a chair and settee, both covered in thick, lime-colored bark cloth, a tiny kitchenette with a counter and two stools, a sagging bed. My eyes keep shifting from one detail to the next: the chipped, brown-ringed porcelain sink, the upturned liquor bottles in the corner, the two chalky glasses that seem, as far as I can tell, to be stuck to the shelf paper adhered to the counter.
    Alice, as if to shake me out of it, grabs my arms and sits me down beside her on the unforgiving couch.
    "How are you feeling?" she asks as Lois, wearing an expensive-looking appliqued kimono, paces before us anxiously.
    "How do I look?" She turns to us, sweat streaked on her face and neck, raccoon eyes. I can hear the ice chipping again. And a long, low drip tapping from Lois's bathroom.
    She turns to Alice. "Why did you bring her here?"

I look at Alice embarrassedly
    "You called and said you were running a hundred-and-four-degree fever. I thought she could help." Alice seems eerily calm, even opening her purse and tapping out a cigarette.
    Lois's eyes narrow. "I know why you brought her."
    Alice lights her cigarette and shakes the match out, tossing it on the coffee table.
    Standing on the balls of her bright white feet, Lois waits for a response.
    Alice merely smiles and exhales a long curl of smoke.
    The silence becomes unbearable, and I venture, "Alice was worried about you." Lois looks at me for a second, then fixes her gaze back on Alice, cool, implacable Alice.
    "That's not why she brought you, Sis," Lois says, as if turning something over in her mind. "She's just calling a bluff." She rubs the side of her face with the back of her hand, then adds, "You think you can leave us alone for a minute?"
    Die a Little -- 50 --
    Although she doesn't look away from Alice as she speaks, she seems still to be talking to me.
    Alice's and Lois's eyes are locked, Lois's are working, Alice's possessed of an unreachable calm.
    "Okay," I say, dreading the thought of waiting in that courtyard. I rise and walk to the flimsy front door, shutting it behind me.
    I take a few cautious steps to the old concrete fountain in the courtyard's center, bone dry. I have the vague sense that I'll never approach an understanding of what I've