She looks in my eyes and I know that she knows. That she can read me, because we’ve always had each other’s back.

“What’s going on with you?” she says in a low voice.

“Nothing! Nothing,” I say, wiping my upper lip. “I don’t know.” Someone bumps me, and Lottie and I stumble and sway together, jarred out of any moment we might have been having.

Lottie eyes me, her voice hardening. “You’ve been so different,” she says. “I—I feel like I don’t know you anymore.”

I look over my shoulder and see Dee checking in from across the room. You okay? she mouths. I ignore her and return to Lottie.

“I know. I just—” I start to say, but she hasn’t heard me. Some guy is talking to her. She smiles shyly at him and looks back at me to say, “Look, I’ll talk to you later.” And she’s gone, moving through the party like a small lost thing on a wave, lost to me. Her friends exchange looks and shrug at me, sipping their drinks innocently as people have been doing since the dawn of the awkward conversation. I drop my hands at my side and put my head back, letting out a sigh of mounting frustration that could probably have been heard over the music if anyone was listening.

And then it hits me that I’ve been here before. A birthday party, maybe? Or for Brownies? A childhood memory washes over me, something familiar but also maybe embarrassing, and just out of reach. I move into the kitchen, sideways-dancing between people; the memory slips away. Someone grabs me, but when I turn around, the crowd has closed again, and Dee puts her arm around me and steers me through the people in front of us.

The house is thumping. The pictures on the shelves are swaying gently, and the fake flowers in the vases are bending forward and back, to and fro, and the couches are just asking to be squeezed onto. It’s a friendly house. People are loud, laughing in our ears as we go by. Dee’s energy is contagious, and I start to loosen up. People we don’t know say hi to us, and we fist-bump and side-hug and high-five them.

In the kitchen, the fluorescent light makes everyone just a little uglier. There are a bunch of dude-bros near the sink, laughing loudly and pushing into each other because God knows they don’t know how to touch each other otherwise.

One of them turns around and I see that it’s Aidan, and he raises his arms wide when he sees us and yells out, “Oh, look who’s here! Don’t you have some social justice warrior bullshit crimes to fight?”