Bee, is that you? Jane’s voice again, desperate and pleading, but Bee doesn’t look at her. She looks at me instead.

“What should I do?” she asks, and this catches me off guard. I stare back at her, terrified I’ll say the wrong thing.

“Do whatever you feel is best.”

That must be the right answer, because in an instant, her door flicks open, and she’s rushing to Jane. Across the sidewalk and up the hill, past hundreds of people, their faces blurred in the night. Her figure collapses in on itself, smaller and smaller, until I lose sight of her altogether.

Now here I am, alone in a crowd, wilted in the passenger seat like a hothouse flower. Music rises in the air like honied elegies, and figures push all around me, brushing against my door, their pulses quickening in the heat, their bodies smelling of sweat and smoke and the first promise of summer.

Everything in me crawls with want as I watch them. All these jubilant kids, their faces smeared with tempera paint, the outlines of stars and moons and sunshine on their cheeks. Somebody’s brought a giant inflatable globe, and the crowd punts it back and forth, as though the whole world is theirs for the taking. You always believe that when you’re young. If only the feeling could last.

I search again for Bee, but she’s long gone now, vanished into the mass of bodies. She and Jane must have found each other. After a whole night of searching, Jane ended up being so close to us. Maybe she heard Bee singing to me today. Maybe that led her right to us.

And I’ve led someone else right to us too. Michael, wandering through the throng, like a phantom in chains. Of course he’s here. I’ve been drawing him to me ever since we left L.A.

He’s at the edge of the park, so close I can breathe him in, his scent like pine, like home. Bright-eyed girls with flowers in their hair are watching him, their eager gazes sliding over his body, but he never sees them. He’s only searching for me. With a whisper, I could make him look right at me. I could lure him into the back seat, our bodies tangled together as I devour him by the mouthful. In the gathering dark, nobody would even notice. We’d be just another amorous couple in the middle of a lovefest.

I turn away, sinking deeper into the passenger seat, letting him drift past on the sidewalk.

“Go away,” I whisper, and hope he’ll listen.