Aaron sits on the bathroom counter, next to the jar of Hawaiian Silky — and the bugged bracelet that Bird has decided is safest left alone. He looks critical as Bird pirouettes in front of the cloudy mirror.

“Your hair looks weird,” Aaron says, swinging his legs.

Marella raises recently plucked eyebrows. “That doesn’t sound like a compliment.”

Bird stops and squints at her hair, tight sable curls unevenly frosted with drugstore silver spray.

“Should I rinse it out?”

“You look great. Aaron, tell your cousin she looks great.”

“She looks kind of funky.”

Bird turns around and points. “Like, Chuck Brown funky or Thriller funky?”

“You look —” Marella stops. “Wait, what?”

Aaron grins. “Chuck Brown funky, for sure.”

She puts her arm around him and squeezes. “Then tell me I look hot, kiddo, ’cause we’re going to a go-go.”

“Em,” he says, laughing and squirming, “no way, Em, that’s just gross.”

Marella looks between the two of them. “Okay, Chuck Brown, godfather of go-go, I get that, but Thriller?”

“The funk of forty thousand years,” Bird and Aaron quote at the same time, their best Vincent Price imitations, and bust out laughing.

After a minute Marella takes charge again and tells Aaron to move so she can do Bird’s makeup.

“Dad says that you guys shouldn’t go. Didn’t you read that email?”

Marella twirls the eyeliner pencil like Coffee twirls his pens. “Close your left eye,” she says.

“Everyone read that email,” Bird says, “but it doesn’t matter, because we all have the vaccine.”

The email was addressed from the administrations of no fewer than five private institutions, most prominently Bradley and Devonshire, declaring that the go-go had been “organized against strenuous public health objections from every school administration” and that in their opinion, the local fitness center had displayed “egregious negligence” in allowing their gym to be rented for the purpose. They neglected to mention that the Beltway quarantine ends officially at midnight, and current curfew regulations allow weekend gatherings. So they threatened disciplinary action for any student attending, and the attending students made fun of them in text messages. Charlotte’s go-go is turning into the biggest party of the year.

“Do you honestly think they expect us to stay inside for the next year?”

“I know my mother does,” Marella says. “Luckily, I’m at school, not home. And hey, at least we know we’re safe.”

Bird grimaces, thinking of how they know. And yet, her life has begun to feel unexpectedly, suspiciously good. Her mother called this morning, after she and Coffee returned to school with wide smiles and no answers for frustrated proctors.

“Donovan understood the situation quite well, dear,” Carol Bird said in tones suffused with self-satisfaction. “He’s taken care of that man. He won’t bother you again. And I hope that as things get back to normal, we can make solid plans about your future.”

Bird doesn’t trust Donovan like her mother does, but she’s willing to hope. “I just need to figure out how to avoid Mom’s new plan to send me to Georgetown. Ugh.”

“One thing at a time, babe.” Marella squeezes her shoulders. “On a scale of hot to nuclear, how do I look?”

Bird takes in Marella’s teased beehive, starlet makeup, and ski-slope curves. If Sarah doesn’t fall down at her feet, Bird will push her. “Panty-melting,” Bird says.

Marella’s lips spread wide and red. “Thought so.”

*  *  *

The guerilla go-go has a line spilling onto the sidewalk of Wisconsin Avenue by the time Marella and Bird arrive. The old dive of a fitness and community center has hosted its share of Devonshire Bat Mitzvahs, but this might be its first go-go. She’s not surprised to see familiar faces selling tickets behind the card table: Gina, Denise, Trevor, Paul. No Coffee yet, though he texted that he would meet her here. Trevor holds a roll of tickets in his hand, but he’s not making any effort to give them out; he tilts back in his chair and watches the half dozen soldiers stationed in the vestibule and on the sidewalk.

Marella follows Trevor’s gaze. One soldier jumps at the squawk of his walkie-talkie and adjusts his hold on his semiautomatic. “What the hell kind of go-go needs all this heat?” Marella says softly.

Bird hasn’t seen this many soldiers since the phosgene attack. By the entrance to the dance floor, Felice argues with Mrs. Early and a police officer. Felice is furious, red-faced and sweating. As her former friend gesticulates with the energy of a silent-film actress, Bird indulges in the schadenfreude of seeing usually immaculate Felice with smeared lipstick and humidity-frizzed hair. She wonders what Mrs. Early could want that has Felice so agitated, but she can’t hear them over the vibrating bass from the speaker towers inside.

Not my problem, Bird thinks, as they approach the ticket table and Paul turns his head. He freezes at the sight of her, a sylvan vision in gold and red and silver. She can’t help it; she kicks out her hip and stares right back, affecting amused indifference and keeping his frustrated desire like a trophy.

“Emily,” he says, “you, I mean, uh …”

He casts a floundering glance at Trevor, who smiles lazily and leans forward.

“Paul wants to say you look hot. Don’t tell me you both came here stag?”

Marella looks politely amused. “My hot date’s on her way, thank you for your concern.”

Trevor just shrugs. “Three tickets, then?” he asks.

Bird looks around the vestibule again for the dirty-blond curls, the tapping fingers, the half smile she wants to turn full and real at the sight of her. But he’s not here, and her phone sits still and message-free in her hand.

Marella glances at her, sees the answer in Bird’s face, and shrugs at Trevor. “Two, please,” she says sweetly. “Our dates can pay when they get here.”

Trevor meets Bird’s eyes for a long, considering moment. “Got that, Gina?” he says without taking his eyes from her.

Bird breaks the unsettling contact and hunts through her clutch for a twenty. She hears, but doesn’t see, Paul’s mumbled excuse about asking Felice for the latest with the cops. Her chest contracts for a sharp, painful beat — she doesn’t want him, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to see him chase another girl. Especially Felice.

They take their tickets and move to the end of the table with several Costco-sized bottles of hand sanitizer. Marella’s phone buzzes.

“Sarah. She’s inside already.” She bites her bottom lip. “How do I look?”

“Gorgeous,” Bird says. “Go ahead. I’ll text you when I find Coffee.”

Marella kisses her lightly on the cheek and hurries inside. Bird hesitates by the ticket table until a group of sophomore boys pushes her out of the way. She waits a full minute, ignoring Paul and Felice’s whispered conversation in a corner, hoping to see Coffee and wishing he would reply to one of her texts.

“Sure he’s coming?”

Bird freezes, startled by Trevor’s voice beside her. He regards her with all his typical distant amusement, but she wonders if she sees an atypical concern beneath the mask. “Why wouldn’t he?” she asks.

“Well,” Trevor drawls, “there is that whole criminal trial on Monday.”

Bird feels clammy. “Monday,” she repeats, and realizes too late the weakness she’s exposed. Trevor, like Felice, feels no pity. And yet it flashes across his face. It occurs to her that she left Trevor’s oldest and socially accepted best friend for his mysterious new one. Poor Paul was always competing with Coffee, one way or another. And loving Coffee doesn’t mean she understands this friendship, or a dozen other things about him. Of course Trevor knows his court date. Of course he’s holding it over her. But he just raises his hand, like he would touch her arm before he recalls himself and rubs his forehead instead.

“He’s had a hard time, Emily. Don’t … well, that’s up to you. I wanted to tell you sorry for my part in it. Paul is my friend, but he did a shitty thing that night. And so did I, but hey, you know what it’s like to have a mom you can’t say no to. I’m not testifying, if that means anything. Coffee is … you know, I guess. He sort of gets under your skin. I’m even starting to get what he sees in you. You and Marella look good together.”

“Better than you and Felice.”

Trevor smiles all the time, but this is the first she’s seen him laugh. He laughs like he means it, with a hint of self-mockery; a flash of what he and Coffee like in each other. “See you around, Emily. Bird. Go dance before the cops stop us.”

She would ask him more, but he heads back to the ticket table and Bird is left staring at her silent phone and an open door. Coffee promised her that he’d be here. She’s worried, but the knowledge that he hid something as huge as his court date from her makes her feel sick and angry.

In the gym, the lurching, funky rhythm churns like her gut. Whatever, she thinks, I can dance without him. She tucks the phone in the band of her bra and stalks into the heart of the human mass.

She doesn’t look for anyone she knows, just feels the slither of silk leaves over her hips as she pops her back. A boy gets behind her to grind, and she lets him, going down until her thighs burn and then coming back up slow, her hips gyrating enough to give her mother a heart attack. You know what it’s like to have a mom you can’t say no to.

“Not anymore,” Bird mutters. “Hell no.”

The boy gets the wrong idea and backs off. Bird doesn’t mind. She dances alone. Eventually she spots Marella and her leggy blond making out against one of the speaker towers. Bird hopes they will avoid permanent hearing loss and glares at a few ogling guys nearby. She looks for Coffee, but has no real hope of finding him. Something has happened, he’s facing twenty-five years in two days, and no matter what he gave her last night, he clearly doesn’t want her now.

She’s surprised by how many people dancing look far too old for high school. Go-gos always attract some of the regular fans, but this room feels packed and feverish, a city finally releasing steam after months of quarantine. Who would have thought a prep school go-go would become the big party of quarantine eve? She looks for Charlotte, hoping to congratulate her on a brilliant job, even if the cops do shut it down. She finds her near the stage, clinging to a freshman boy the same height as Aaron. She’s laughing and patting his arms while he holds her up, nostrils flaring like a spooked horse.

Bird pushes her way toward them. “Charlotte!” she shouts over the music. Charlotte turns to her and giggles.

“Emily! I mean, what, it’s Bird now, right? Bird, like a birdie.”

Bird pulls Charlotte off the freshman, much to his relief. “Is she drunk?” Bird asks him.

He shakes his head. “I don’t know! I don’t think so. At least … there’s some E going around.”

“Charlotte,” Bird shouts in her ear, “did you take E?”

“Don’t be a mud stick, Birdie,” Charlotte shouts, and laughs so hard Bird has to hold her up by the waist. The hard ends of Charlotte’s braids sting where they whip her hands.

“Charlotte,” Bird says, “let’s get some fresh air.”

Charlotte stands straight up and pulls her arm free. “Why are you so mean to me? Emily, didn’t you know I always liked you better?”

Bird stares. Charlotte’s high, but she looks perfectly serious, almost pleading. “No you didn’t,” Bird says. “You and Felice —”

“You and Felice,” she mocks. “You know what she’s like! You were just as afraid of her. Before, I mean. And then you go crazy and cut your hair, but do you expect me to cut my hair too? Am I supposed to let Felice destroy me because you only care about that drug dealer? You chose him. And Marella. But you could have chosen me.”

“Felice likes you better,” Bird tries, desperate. “You’re the only person she really cares about.”

Charlotte’s smile is small and sad. “Felice understands me better. But I could have used you these last few days. I never thought you’d be the one to hurt me.”

Bird can’t speak. Her ears are clogged with ocean, her heart with silt. Did she give up too soon, too afraid of Felice to try with Charlotte? She closes her eyes, sick with the empty space where a friendship used to be, and so she does not see what’s happening until there’s nothing she can do.

It starts with a sudden silence, louder than any beat. And then a cleared throat and a deep male voice saying, “Due to a terrorist threat, we’re going to have to shut this down. Please head to the exits in an orderly manner and —”

“Hells no, right?” Charlotte’s voice, breathless and giggling. “We want our motherfucking go-go!”

Confused shouts and loud conversation fill the silence left by the band. The crowd around her surges forward. Bird stumbles and nearly falls, but pulls herself up on the arm of a man nearby. She vomits in her mouth and swallows it painfully. They would have trampled her to death and not even noticed. Just a few feet away from the stage, she can hardly see anything but sweaty backs and reaching hands. She wants to see what’s happening onstage to foolhardy, grieving Charlotte, but she only glimpses shoulder-length braids swinging sharply and the boots of at least four soldiers and two police. Something buzzes against her ribs, and she yelps, terrified of Taser-happy cops before she remembers her phone. Coffee, she thinks, and struggles to move her hand enough to reach down the neckline of her dress. It’s hopeless; the little room for maneuvering Bird has in this mob she has to use to keep herself upright and alive.

“No,” Charlotte screams from the stage, “everyone was having fun! This isn’t fair!” Someone must pull her away from the microphone, because next Bird hears the voice from before, repeating his instructions to clear the building. A blast of frigid outside air, a faint whiff of woodsmoke and pine needles and the damp of impending snow, cuts through the humid stink of the mob. Soldiers and police stand near the open fire doors, encouraging everyone to exit the building.

For the space of a breath, Bird thinks that this will turn out okay; no one will blame Charlotte for losing it five days after her mother died, the mob won’t trample anyone, the police won’t arrest anyone, and she’ll find Coffee as soon as she can reach her phone.

Then she sees Felice pushing her way to the stage steps with the force of a battering ram, screaming something that Bird can’t hear but knows is Charlotte’s name. And as the crowd bows outward, diffusing like a pressured gas toward the fire exits, Bird stands sentinel. Charlotte smiles and closes her eyes. She twirls, a laughing, demented dervish who eludes all the cops’ grasping hands until she fetches up against the one by the microphone. And that cop, clearly exhausted and pissed off, pulls his gun from the holster, levels it at Charlotte, and tells her to get on the floor. Felice leaps onstage and hurtles toward Charlotte. What’s left of the crowd surges backward, pushing Bird to her knees when the gunshot cracks through the speakers.

Boots trample her hands, a knee snaps her jaw. Get up now, she tells herself, get up or you’ll die. But she doesn’t want to — if she stands she’ll know who’s screaming, and who the soldier shot. She’ll know how it ended, the story of three girls who were sometimes friends. So she stays on her knees, panting and trembling to match the steady buzz against her ribs.

Someone pulls her up, hard, by the elbow.

“Come on!” Paul shouts, pushing her forward when she sways. “We have to get out!”

He’s furious, his handsome face twisted with fear and frustration. His eyes dart behind her, but Bird doesn’t turn around, and she doesn’t ask what he sees. He drags her through an unguarded fire door on the other side of the dance hall, away from the stampede. It lets out in a parking lot adjacent to an alley. He tries to go farther from the door, but she yanks her arm away and glares.

“What are you doing?”

“Saving your ass. Not like you deserve it. What the hell did —”

Her phone buzzes again and she jumps. The screen is shiny with her sweat; she wipes it on her dress before looking at the missed calls. Marella and Aaron. The most recent texts are from Marella, asking if she’s okay, but when she scrolls down she sees two that rip through her like a bullet.

I need some help. Meet me on George Walk?

And then:

Bird, please. Come find me.

He’d sent that last fifteen minutes ago.

She starts to run and Paul follows her with a shouted curse.

“Emily! Wait! I’ve got to talk to you! I got this crazy message from Roosevelt. He —”

Bird stops at the edge of the street and whirls around to face him. The ground is slippery with an inch of wet snow, but she just manages to keep her balance. “I don’t give the slightest fuck about you and Roosevelt, Paul. News flash: Neither of you are my problem anymore.”

“He says you made him lose his job! That I don’t have any internship, any summer job. Shit, Emily, you’ve ruined my career before it even started!”

There’s noise from sirens and helicopters and barked orders inside the community center, but the space between her and Paul feels quiet as death. She blinks away the flakes that have settled on her eyelashes and wonders when he changed. Paul was always self-interested, but the years have honed all his worst traits and discarded the best.

She shakes her head. “This has nothing to do with you.”

He looks desperate, utterly convinced that he can pin his problems with Roosevelt on a fight with his ex. On any other night, she would feel sorry for him. “Then who? Alonso?”

Bird bites back a panicked sob. “Don’t you get it? Me, Paul. It was always, ever, about me.”

*  *  *

Bird runs. A crowd has gathered to watch paramedics load a gurney into the back of an ambulance. She doesn’t look, she doesn’t stop, she just prays for Charlotte and keeps running. She can’t imagine the trouble Coffee must be in to send her a text like that. She remembers his exhaustion of the last few days, and the heat of his skin last night, and runs so fast she slides over the slick, icy ground. The school is a fifteen-minute walk from the community center. A ten-minute run. Her phone rings and she picks it up without checking.

“Bird! Are you okay?”

Bird glances over her shoulder, but she can’t pick Marella out of the crowd behind her. “Yeah, I’m fine. I have to go, I think something’s happened to Coffee.”

“Holy shit. Where is he? Sarah has her mother’s car if it would help. But we have to wait for the emergency stuff to clear before we can get it out of the lot.”

Bird sees a cab across the street and runs across four lanes to reach it. “I’m taking a cab. Meet me at school as soon as you can.”

“Okay, will do. First Felice, now Coffee … listen, find him, figure out what’s going on, and call me back, okay?”

Felice.

Bird stutters out the name of her school to the cab driver, but she’s thinking about those last moments of the go-go. Not Charlotte on the gurney, not Charlotte going to the hospital with a bullet in her, but Felice. She wipes the tears from her cheeks, overcome with a wave of relief and then self-loathing.

She calls Coffee a dozen times, but he doesn’t answer. When the cab pulls in front of Bradley, she throws her remaining twenty at the driver and runs. A mulch path leads to the stretch of woods behind the boy’s upper school called George Walk, well-known to hopeful student smokers (well-known to the administration as well, which always made Bird wonder why people kept trying). When she gets to the woods, she slows, shivering despite the punishing pace of her run. She left the go-go without her jacket, and the leaf dress has more holes than fabric.

“Coffee?” she calls. She uses the flashlight on her phone to illuminate the path ahead. Nothing but tall, bare trees, mulch, and the brief shine of a fox’s reflected eyes.

“Coffee?” Her voice breaks on the last syllable. After yesterday she can’t believe that she spent all night feeling pissed instead of worried. Did she think he changed his mind? That because he didn’t tell her his trial date he didn’t really love her?

She calls his name again, loud enough to startle a rat from the underbrush. Then she hears the sound of something much larger crunching on twigs and fallen leaves and she spins around. Someone waits in the shadows of the trees.

“Not Coffee,” she whispers, and turns off the flashlight.

Roosevelt flicks on his own. “I figured you wouldn’t come just for me,” he says, stepping onto the path. “So I picked this up.” He flips Coffee’s phone with one hand.

“Did you hurt him?” She backs up with each step he takes, and fumbles in the dark for the call button. “Where is he?”

“I didn’t hurt him, no,” Roosevelt says with a grim smile, “but he wasn’t looking very good when I left. It took you a long time to get here, Birdie. I don’t think you’ll be happy if you leave him much longer.”

Please pick up. Bird angles the screen of her phone away from him. Marella, please, help.

“There was a riot at the go-go,” Bird says, struggling to keep her voice as flat as his. “Took a while to get out. Where is he?”

He shakes his head. “Tedious. You know how this goes. I tell you once you give me what I want.”

“And what do you want?”

He moves so quickly she doesn’t have any time to react. His hand closes around her arm and shakes. Her phone drops to the ground behind her. This close, his face looks haggard and strangely dull, like he’s just woken up after a night of heavy drinking. But he smells more like menthol cigarettes than liquor.

“I want you to admit you’re lying. You knew about the bug, and so did your mother, and that’s why she sent you back to the house. You just put on a little play to convince my boss that I’m off my nut, but I’m right, and he’s wrong. The writing on the wall? Do you think I’m stupid? I know you, Bird. I know that you wrote that years ago, not that night. Your clue was something else. You wrote it and hid it somewhere. So where? Tell me where, tell me what you really know, and I’ll tell you where to find your boyfriend before he dies of exposure. Or v-flu. He was pretty sick when I left him.”

She starts to giggle. She can’t believe that she’s finally beaten Roosevelt only to lose Coffee. The cruelty of it, after everything else she has seen tonight, threatens to break her. They took the pen. They have her clue, whatever it is, but he doesn’t know what it means any more than she does. Roosevelt has never mattered less to her, and he has never seemed like more of a threat.

“Are you high, you hypocritical cokehead?” He flinches. “Your career is over. Whether I know anything or not. But for the record, I don’t. You’ve been chasing windmills this whole time.”

“Coke, huh? I’d say you know plenty. You’re much smarter than they give you credit for. And after all the good we’ve done, never mind that one mistake — I won’t let you ruin everything. This country is worth more than your games.”

Her exposed flesh burns where his fingers grip, but she pretends that she can’t feel him. She pretends that her body is a fortress, and her words are flaming arrows.

“I only know what you told me, Roosevelt David,” she says, slow and loud. “If underestimating me is a mistake, then you were the first to make it.”

He tries to push her, but she uses the momentum to spin away from him and scoop up her phone.

“Tell me,” she says, panting, a few feet away. “Please, Roosevelt, please. Coffee has nothing to do with this. You can’t just let him die because you lost your job.”

His shoulders twitch. He stares at her, hollow-eyed and hungry, but he doesn’t approach. “I think I could,” he says softly. “It might make me feel better.”

“There has to be a human somewhere underneath all that.”

“Fuck you,” he says, and turns his back.

*  *  *

She finds him behind the chapel, curled on the flagstones. A dust of snow covers him like a faerie blanket. For a hard moment, she thinks that she found him too late.

Then he shivers and coughs.

She calls Marella. “The chapel,” she says, kneeling down in her wet tights and pulling his head onto her lap.

“We’re driving there now. Sarah, turn up the heat —”

“No.” Coffee’s eyes open and close. “An ambulance.” His skin feels hot where it isn’t cold as the snow. It took her twelve minutes after leaving Roosevelt to find him. She can’t think, right now, about what that means.

She hears Marella swallow her questions. “I’m calling. Right now. We’ll be there in a minute. Hang on, babe.”

Bird drops her phone in the snow and wraps her arms around him. At least he’s wearing a jacket and gloves.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, holding her head close to his frozen cheek. She is almost sure he can’t hear her. “I love you so much. And I’m sorry.”

His eyelids flutter, his hand twitches, and for a moment she imagines that he’ll come alive in her arms and tell her everything will be okay.

But he only sighs; he doesn’t wake. He leaves her alone in the silence of the snow and her misery and their love until the flashing red lights tell her that it’s time to let go.

*  *  *

This is the story of a girl who knew something, and understood nothing at all.

This is the story of a girl who found something, and lost everything else.

This is the story of a girl who remembered something, and forgot why it mattered.

But this isn’t a tragedy.

This is the story of a girl who loved someone, and told herself the truth.