When they stomp out of sight, Julia counts twenty to let them get around the corner of the nuns’ wing, ten more in case they stopped to look at something, ten more just in case. Then she shoves up the window, braces her back against the frame, swings her feet around and slides out to drop on the grass: one move, smooth enough that if Finn’s mind hadn’t been occupied he would have copped this wasn’t her first time. As she hears him land behind her she takes off, running fast and easy for the cover of the trees, her ears still ringing from the music, stars jingling overhead to the beat of her footsteps.

Red lights, pink, white, spinning strange crisscrossing patterns like coded signals gone too fast to catch. The beat in the floor and the walls and in all of their bones, pulsing through them like electric current, leaping from one lifting hand to the next all along the hall, never letting up for a second, go go go.

Selena’s been dancing too long. The weaving lights are starting to look like living things, giddy and desperately lost. Selena’s going watery at the edges, starting to lose hold of the boundary line where she leaves off and other things start. Over by the punch table Chris Harper tilts back his head to drink and Selena can taste it, someone bashes into her hip and she can’t tell whether the pain belongs to her or them, Becca’s arms rise and they feel like hers. She knows to stop dancing.

‘You OK?’ Holly yells, without breaking the beat.

‘Drink,’ Selena yells back, pointing at the punch table. Holly nods and goes back to trying out some complicated hip-and-footwork. Becca is jumping up and down. Julia’s gone, sneaked out somehow; Selena can feel the gap in the room where she should be. It throws things even more off balance. She puts her feet down carefully, trying to feel them. Reminds herself: Valentine’s dance.

The punch tastes all wrong, grassy-cool long-ago summer afternoons running barefoot in and out of open doors, not right for this sweaty thumping dark tangle. Selena leans back against the wall and thinks about things with lots of weight and no give. The periodic table. Irish verb conjugations. The music has gone a notch quieter, but it’s still getting in her way. She wishes she could put her fingers in her ears for a second, but her hands don’t feel like hers and getting them to her ears seems too complicated.

‘Hi,’ someone says, next to her.