“We went inside the house. It was vacant and rancid-smelling and pretty much trashed, with beer cans and bottles and Lord knows what else all over the place. Kids running around everywhere, no band, just loud tapes—a bunch of different stereos set up all over the place, really cacophonous, but no one seemed to care. Everyone was blasted, kids were walking around looking dazed, bumping into each other, girls were on their knees, going down on guys right in the middle of the dance floor, there’d be couples dancing and right next to them, other couples would be screwing, getting kicked, stepped on. Burns seemed to know a lot of people, got plenty of high fives as we walked through the crowd. Then this funny-looking, kind of dumpy girl showed up out of nowhere and latched on to him.”

“Funny-looking, how?”

“Short, fat, zits. Odd—spaced-out. But he immediately got all kissy-kissy with her, and I could see Janie didn’t like that.” Waters shook her head. “She’d known the guy all of fifteen minutes, and she was jealous.”

“Janie do anything about that?”

“No, she just got this ticked-off look on her face. I could read it because I knew Janie. Burns didn’t see it—or he didn’t care. Threw one arm around the dumpy girl, the other around Janie, and led both of them off. That little purse of his bouncing on his shoulder.”

“And you?”

“I stayed behind. Someone handed me a beer and hands started groping me. Not delicately. It was dark, and whoever was doing it started to get rough, yanking at my clothes. I broke away, started walking around, looked for a quiet room to mellow out in, but there was none. Every inch of that place was party-time. Guys kept putting their hands all over me, once in a while someone would pull me hard onto the dance floor and rather than fight it, I’d just dance for a while, then make my escape. Then the lights went out and the house got even darker and I could barely see where I was stepping. The Southern Comfort in my system wasn’t helping, either. I felt nauseous, dizzy, wanted to get out of there, looked some more for Janie, couldn’t find her, and got angry at her for bailing on me. Finally, I told myself forget her and the next time someone pulled me onto a dance floor, I danced for a while. And when someone offered me a pill, I swallowed it. The next thing I remember is waking up on the floor of an upstairs bathroom, hearing shouts that the cops were going to roust the party and running out of there along with everyone else—it was like a stampede. Somehow I ended up in the back of someone’s truck, bouncing along Sunset.”

“Whose truck?”