Molly Notkin's party: Joelle's overdose (p. 236)
She undoes the four pins and removes the veil from her head and places it on the counter with the rest of the Material. […] When the tube gets too hot to hold she takes and folds her veil and uses it as a kind of oven-mitt over the fingers of her left hand, careful (from habit and experience) not to let the bottom corners get close enough to the flame to brown.
Context
In Notkin's bathroom the U.H.I.D. sacrament is unpinned and laid "on the counter with the rest of the Material" — demoted to drug paraphernalia, then to oven-mitt. "From habit and experience" is the quiet horror: this use of the veil is longstanding practice. Two pages on, the chopped hits "form a little quarry on the soft cloth of her folded veil" — the veil as the altar the Substance sits on.