And then, Jane was on the dance floor, and she seemed to only know how to dance by mostly staying still and doing handwork, sometimes moving all the way to doing hot-girl-in-a-music-video where she moved her torso and butt slowly and waved her hands over her head. Ayanna was bobbing, drinking from her friend’s cup, and more and more people were gathering on the floor again, some graciously setting up their phones so that the flashlights made it a dance floor and not a potential comic swamp of people bumping into one another. Felix was there, and unfortunately for Ayanna’s tender heart, he was a good dancer, someone who could look happy and confident, and he spun Ayanna and a laugh burbled out of her mouth, so relaxed and happy, when had she ever sounded like that before, and the party grew wings again and became one where you could feel people’s desire to only care about pleasure and to get it from moving, from laughing, from playing together.

First, the orange string lights flickered on around the dance floor, and only a few people noticed, then the kitchen, and then for a moment they all turned on so bright everyone winced before settling back into their ordinary lumens. Some noticed the return and applauded, but most continued on dancing.

On the walk home—Felix’s arm a warm weight across her shoulders, Jane click-clacking on the uneven sidewalk while laughing and swaying with two girls from the soccer team—Ayanna shut her eyes and let herself be guided for a few moments by Felix’s warmth and certainty. She knew these streets; she didn’t know the last time she had felt loose like this or cared for like this. Ayanna’s eyes watered. Blinking away tears, she opened her eyes, and moving down the street was a great current of spirits. Bright pink and weaving together, pouring from the older buildings, leaking from the tree branches and bark, slithering out of grates. The streetlamps dim in comparison, the night’s black sharper. Even the moon’s remaining slivers of this cycle were shadowed pink. The moon, too, was filled with its own dead. The way the spirits shifted from light and cloud- and human-shaped to so many other things that they once had been or, maybe, would someday be. Later, Ayanna would wonder if this was the first time she saw a spirit and didn’t feel her heart aching for it to be Olivia.

“Can you see them?” she whispered to Felix.

“I can never see them without the board,” he said. “But there’s a feeling in the air. Often when they’re around, I think the air feels a little warmer, a little thicker.”

“There’s so many. And the way they’re moving—” She paused and moved in even closer. “It’s like a dance.”

“Do you ever wish you couldn’t see them?”