There were only five or six kids there when I descended into the dark and shrank into one of the corners. Although I knew everyone at the party by name, I did not have what is commonly known as “friends” during those late high school years. I had a nervous habit of pushing the hair out of my eyes so that I could keep reading whatever it was I was reading. Books were my friends. Who needed people?

The basement was not pleasant. The ceiling was nothing more than naked floor joists and wires running alongside pipes, although it was difficult to see. The only light came down the steps from the upstairs hallway. The air was musty, even in the cool of autumn, and hovering all around was a sort of dampness mixed in with the more pleasant scents of hot apple cider and pumpkin pie.

The only thing about the party that I enjoyed was being hidden in my sheet. It was marvelous being among the kids I was always with and them not knowing it was me. I wedged myself into the corner and sank down in the darkness. I thought I had managed to disappear.

That’s when I heard whispers about the drowning. Gillian Hudson, who we all knew through the years mostly for her dedication to saying the Pledge of Allegiance with particular vigor, had drowned in the lake only that morning. I hadn’t heard about it. I didn’t know Gillian well, but it was a strange and mysterious thing to think that one of my classmates, someone who had been among us earlier that day, was suddenly most decidedly not among us anymore. I sat in the darkness and thought about death, about what had happened to Gillian when she sank to the bottom. Had she blinked and found herself on streets of gold, or had everything she’d ever known, even the universe she’d been born into, winked out like a light turned off?

Upstairs, the knocking began. The constant clang of the doorbell. The pounding of feet down the stairs and the squealing of girls and the back-pounding of boys. Soon there were so many teenagers that I couldn’t see through their legs. I was still sitting, and I imagined that I was staring into a moving forest.

Someone turned on a strobe light, and the basement boomed with music. The sounds and the lights were hypnotic. I planned on biding my time until the end and, once it was reasonably appropriate, going outside to wait for my parents. If they took too long to come back, I even considered walking the five lonely miles back to my house, although that would take some working up to, since it was a dark road lined mostly by cornfields full of high, dried-out, whispering stalks.

A loud shout came from the other side of the basement, followed by cheering, and the whole crowd moved back. Someone nearly sat on me, then cursed. I started to panic, breathing hard. What if I couldn’t get up? No one would hear me. What if someone else had already fallen on the ground and was in the process of being trampled? I peered down at the dark floor to see if someone needed help but saw only the strange, gangly legs of monsters and witches.