A group of girls calling my name asks for a selfie, thrusting wiggling hands toward me, each fingernail painted a different neon. A groan escapes the impromptu mosh pit. As I’m leaning in, I smell bubble gum and sweat, and just then, a rosy flash fills my left peripheral vision, but it’s no brain-blasting flashbulb. Noni gasps just as I catch the object flying toward my left cheek: a slip of hot pink fabric. I open it: skimpy girl’s hotpants.

Ew. What?

I burst out with a laugh.

“Not my size,” I say, tossing it back into the crowd, roaring in my ears.

A schoolgirl screams with barely contained joy beyond the fence, setting off a second flurry of technological lightning.

“The fuck,” I whisper to Noni, squeezing her hand. I can feel how all of this nourishes me and how it compromises her.

“Mama wore hotpants just like those in one of her first movies,” she whispers into my ear, her heartbeat in my hand. “Remember? Not Another Girl of Ice?”

And then I remember. She was just sixteen. She played a young and feisty prostitute with waist-length icy-white hair who wields a tire iron in her quest for revenge. Sort of your typical pre–Me Too, I’m-an-old-white-guy-director stuff.

“Remember when we saw the poster?” Manon asks, as we continue on. I let her talk even though it’s not the time or place, because I can feel it steadying her. “She said she felt free during filming, for the first time in her life. As if she could fight for anything she wanted, anything at all. Unstoppable, uncapturable.”

I don’t say this, but I don’t remember that. It sounds like bullshit, and my own memory cuts through the champagne fuzz.

I’m only a year younger than my sister, but all I remember is being fourteen and coming across sleazy merch from that movie on the internet. It was cool, that year, to dress up as the dead version of that character, bloodied and spent and very much not free.

That character reminds me of White Fox.

I give a final wave to the crowd, desperate for my heart to swell as much as it can, before letting Noni tug me inside.

Inside the institute, they wrapped the stark walls in more silk of Mama’s signature lavender (robbed from, like, at least three dozen bridesmaids). Expensive lilacs everywhere, too. It’s like suffocating in an old lady’s powdered bosom. Old beauty campaign stills creepily pout above the crowd.

“Portals to petulant gods,” Noni whispers in my ear, and I know she’s euphoric from the relief of being done with the red carpet and tipsy from the champagne in the car.