‘I love that dress.’

‘I love yours!’

Some stand in huddled circles, boys and girls.

‘What are you drinking?’

‘How much have you had?’

Eyes catch. Jokes fall. Drinks spill. And something sparks, and fires, and they laugh in hysterical wonder.

‘Oh my god!’

‘That’s fucking disgusting!’

‘I can’t believe that!’

Alisha’s looking for Dillon. She has her armour on. She needs to apply makeup in thicker layers these days. Her skin is red and pimpled, with dents and divots where she’s squeezed a spot too hard. It doesn’t feel like magic anymore, it just feels necessary. She hates the first look in the mirror, but by the end knows it’s fine. There’s nothing to see anymore.

Last night, in her dream, Oni was there again. It’s been six months, but she was as vivid as ever. When Alisha woke, the sense of her friend lingered with the warmth of sleep. She lay still, mouth sticky, eyes closed. When she threw off the covers, the cold air was like growing up.

Once, three years ago, with Oni, she laughed so hard she wet herself. She remembers the giddiness, the heat and pressure at her temples, the swirl of cramp behind her jaw and the deep deep joy that didn’t even stop as the hot piss spread through her jeans. She tried to tell Oni, but she just laughed harder, and Oni laughed too, and even when she realised, they lay back on the bed and laughed.

It’s not that everything is shit, now. It’s that it used to be so good.

When she sees Dillon, he’s kissing someone.

Dillon is drunk, and stoned, and as he kisses the girl, her lips are like wet rubber, and he holds and grips at her, and then he stops, because she’s so drunk her eyes are rolling in her head. He wonders what her name is. He wonders if he should have just kept going.

She sits down heavily. Her eyelids droop.

‘Slag,’ says Alisha.

He turns. Grins.

‘Who’s the new girlfriend, then?’

He blushes. Or would have if his face wasn’t so red already.

‘I need some air,’ he says.

Alisha watches him go then turns back to the kitchen.

In the back garden, smoke curling above the decking lights shimmers and drifts.

The stars are out, and Dillon steps beyond the decking circle onto the freezing mud of the churned-up lawn. The noise of the party is behind him. The cold nips at his neck, at his ankle, and as he draws deep on a joint he feels the old echo of nights on the lawn as a child, when night was strange and scary, glimpsed only on long car journeys and cold Halloweens.

He can see Orion.