Because Bonnie was good. Her plan for dealing with Eddie’s collection was better than anything Catwoman would have come up with on her own. And her photography—
Catwoman paused to look at the Lucite-mounted photograph dominating the corner where she did her exercises: a sleek black panther drinking warily from an autumn forest stream. The panther reminded Selina of Catwoman. The forest reminded her of the woods not far from her parents’ house where she’d hide when things got unbearable. Of course, black panthers weren’t native to North American forests. Bonnie described—at great length—how she’d photographed the stream while hiking in Canada and the panther at a zoo, and then combined the two.
“It’s not real,” Bonnie had explained when she noticed Selina staring at it that first night while they sat on the floor eating take-out food. “The camera can’t lie. It’s not like your eye or your brain. It sees exactly what’s there. Bars on the cages, garbage on the banks of the stream, telephone poles growing out of your grandmother’s head. I think like a camera when I’m holding the camera, then I go behind closed doors and mess around with reality.”
Selina wanted the picture. She was trying to think how Catwoman could get it, when Bonnie yanked it off the wall.
“Here, take it—it’s yours.”
Selina had held her hands tightly against her sides. Accepting a gift was not her style. Gifts made debts and obligations. She preferred to live without debts or obligations. But life did not always go the way one preferred. In costume, poised on the windowsill and looking back at the picture, Catwoman recalled how her hands had tingled. “It’s just a photograph,” she’d said, working herself up to take the gift. “I bet you made a lot of them.”