The first thing I get is the smell of clove cigarette, so instead of a hello I offer her some of my drink.

Angel rewards me with a small smile, mouth a mean line around her cigarette, a perfect painted O when she blows out the smoke. Angel’s smoking is a performance, but then everything Angel does is a performance. The languid eye-rolling at authority figures, the lazy but cutting remarks at the boys who fall in love with her, the way she bends her head over my body so that her long black braids fall like a curtain across my stage, how she arches her back like a cat when we’re kissing, the careful way she ignores me the next day.

She takes a swig of my drink and coughs at the taste and we both laugh and that’s when I see the words appear on the wall behind her, shaky at first, then solidifying into their usual white block capitals. They say KISS HER NOW.

I look away before she can follow my gaze.

“The fuck is this?” she says, and it takes a second before I realize she means the drink.

“Ribena vodka. It’s all Matthew had at home to mix with it. Radha’s bringing Coke or something.”

“It’s vile.”

“Yep.” My insides are a small rose on fire. “But it does the trick.”

I swear the words are getting bigger. KISS HER NOW!

Angel looks at me for a second before asking, “Have you talked to your dad yet?”

My fingers stall at the rose in my belt. Before I can answer, my phone rings. It’s Radha. She’s drunk and on her way. Melody giggles something about her mum’s wine in the background. When I hang up, Angel’s back at the wall, Sharpie shushing new paint over old tags.

“The rest of the Queer Teen Poets Social Club on their way?” she says without looking around. I thunk my back against the wall.

“You could come some time, you know,” I say, knowing full well that Angel’s dislike of my friends stems mostly from her absolute hatred of group activities and community involvement.

“Thanks but no thanks,” she says lazily. “I’ve zero interest in going door to door begging straight adults to vote to give me the right to screw up my life in the same way they do theirs.”

The rose in my belt buckle feels like fire under my fingers. “Harsh,” I say. “But fair.”

Angel juts her chin out towards the park, where two shadowy figures materialize into my best friend and her girlfriend. “Don’t let them hear you say that,” she says.

The words on the wall behind her pulse brightly in the moonlight.

KISS HER NOW. NOW!

I unhook the rose I saved from my mother out of the belt buckle of my jeans and hold it out to Angel. The look she gives me is unreadable.

“I’d really like to kiss you right now,” I say softly, but I haven’t got the last word out when a loud, slurred voice stops me in my tracks.