I hope you washed it first, I say. Some of that stuff comes in looking pretty grungy. I don’t ask about the earrings.

When we meet up with James after school, he tells me I need to let Connor pick out my clothes next week when I go back to The Echo. Becky tells him to shut up and that I can do fine on my own. He stops talking. She’s the only one who can get away with it.

My parents are fighting again. Something about Connor and health insurance and why doesn’t he get a real job so he can pay for his own benefits and food and not just his tiny squatter’s apartment that he’s only living in until his friend or coworker or whatever gets back to town wheneverthehell that is.

I put the pillow over my head and shut my eyes tight until all I can see are blue lights dancing against my lids. Gabriel, I think. Gabriel.

I’ve never gone to the club two weeks in a row. It’s too hard arguing with my parents about curfews, too hard coming up with the money for cover and drinks and transport, too easy to give myself over to the lights and the smoke and the boys. Well, watching them anyway.

Then again, no one has ever asked if I was coming back before, so there’s that.

April 1983

James comes over on Friday and reminds me that this week is The Echo’s half-year Halloween party. I need to dress up, only I have nothing to wear, and Gabriel will be there, and I think I’m going to be sick.

Wait, he says, I have just the thing. He pulls black jeans and a black shirt from my closet and starts sticking on pieces of a broken mirror that he found in the alley and shoved into his bag somehow knowing, in his James way, that he’d need it at some point.

He says, You’ll be a disco ball. Then he shrugs and says, It’s the best I can do on short notice.

I’m at the club at nine when the only people there are the bartenders, a couple making out in the corner, and Martin and Pedro. Pedro is a parrot and Martin is a bar regular who likes to wear impossibly high gold-glittered platforms. They make the rounds every weekend because people like to give Pedro beer, but he’ll only drink the Mexican stuff. Martin taught him to say “give me another,” and so they do. At least until Martin has to take the bird home to sober up.

Sipping a Coke, I dance alone to Yaz.

What are you supposed to be? Brian calls from behind the bar. Seven years of bad luck?

I choke on a piece of ice and a sense of foreboding.

I see Gabriel across the now-crowded room, only I’ve had too much caffeine and I’m not even sweating it out because the music sucks so I’m not really dancing and I just want to bolt. Maybe he won’t see me.