The girl’s eyes went wide. She glanced down at the now unrecognizable lumps of disco art in her hands.

“TOSS IT!” the boy with spiky hair hollered back. “GILLY! TOSS THEM!”

The redheaded girl with the pigtails cupped her hands over her mouth. “COME ON, GILLY!”

The tall blond looked at me again with watery blue eyes, and then she heaved my disco balls into the fountain and sprinted off.

“YOU ASSHOLES!” I hollered.

And then suddenly everyone in the square stopped and looked at me. Possibly because I screamed assholes. My face had its own pulse as I slunk down, slamming my butt on the fountain’s edge, producing a flash of pain that ripped through my lower half as I unstrung my laces.

“Hey.”

This is the moment when I first met Berry. Or right before.

“WHAT?” I roared.

Like yeah, I kind of instantly reacted with yelling, because I was trying not to break my lace with my rage fingers and listening to the gurgling of the fountain.

But then I looked up.

The first thing I noticed, which calmed me in a way that I cannot explain, was that the person who was standing in front of me, who was probably my age, had hair that was all different colors of green. Like moss and fluorescent and forest and pine green. They had more hair than most people I had ever met. It was curly, like spiral-curls curly, its mass only barely tamed by a white headband that matched their white coveralls.

They were holding a skateboard in one hand, looking down at their paint-splattered work boots; their cheeks were blushing hard, maybe because I had just yelled at them. Also because they were super pale, and pale people, in my experience, blush like nobody else. I think it’s cool, but I get that some of the pale do not think it’s cool.

I dropped my skate. “UGH. Sorry.” I looked back into the fountain. “I just— It just— I thought you were— Sorry.”

“I saw what happened.” The person I didn’t know yet as Berry looked up with hazel eyes. “I’m sorry. But, uh, I did manage to save this one.”

In their hand was the only disco ball that hadn’t been shredded or destroyed, my one glittering paper child that had survived Greenville’s apparent disco hatred. They placed the ball in my hands like a fragile egg. “Sorry about, you know, them.”

“RIGHT? What was THAT?! Who does that?” I fumed, suddenly re-enraged. I gestured at the water fountain. “Do they even know what glitter does to a water fountain?”

“They probably don’t care.”

“Well, THAT sucks,” I seethed, carefully placing my last disco ball next to my skates and rolling up my pant legs.