“You and your girl were super tight, that’s all. Best friends can be like that.” And like a photo in a chemical bath, his best friend blooms behind my eyes, a Filipina with a cute New Wave bob and rhinestone cat-eye glasses.

“Your best friend is Rosa?” I ask, worried that I got it wrong.

“She’s actually my cousin. She’s grounded tonight,” Marco says. “She’s so pissed she can’t be here.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you,” I say.

“I look pretty different at school.” He grins. “But then, so do you!” He looks at me with such obvious appreciation, I start to blush. Silly, of course, because now that I think of it, I remember people way back in middle school saying Marco was gay. I remember because someone was shitty about it and Kelly told them off.

I’m rescued from the Kelly vortex my brain is heading down when the second band starts playing. Marco shoves me into the pit, and we are all feet and elbows and sweat and swagger until they stop. A short pause for breath, and then the moment the crowd is waiting for: a skinny dark-haired girl in a twirly skirt and shit-kicking combat boots yelling, “Girls to the front!”

I swarm the stage with the other girls and here is Lourdes, jumping up and down like a circus girl on a pogo stick. She grabs my hand and I jump with her, the mess of our kiss less important than this moment when a tiny, powerful woman stands, feet spread wide, and the crowd of boys parts for the shining, raging mass of girls.

“GIRLS TO THE FRONT!” she yells again, and she is pure magic.

After the show, Lourdes leans in to kiss my cheek. Her eyes say something I know I’ll be trying to decode for the next hundred years, but she doesn’t speak, just turns away and pushes through the crowd to catch up with her band.

I file outside, the high of the show still stronger than my anxiety about getting home. I have no idea what time it is—minutes or hours could have passed while I transformed in the cauldron of the pit, a different girl, surely, than I was before tonight.

Outside, Marco is talking to a gangly boy in a leather jacket. I walk past, but he stops me. “Tam!”

My hearing is fuzzy, my name slightly distorted. It’s odd somehow that it still belongs to me.

“Want a ride?”

I laugh and nod and get in his car and talk about Lourdes and the cute boy whose number he has written on Marco’s hand in Sharpie. We talk about his parents, about Rosa. About how he’s going to move to New York after high school because he needs the entire continent between him and his huge, nosy, judgmental family.

“What about your mom?” he asks.