Everything was blurry. When she moved everything trailed behind her like a caterpillar, and her feet moved on clouds since she kicked off her electric blue heels about twenty minutes ago. The music and loud, shouting, laughing voices from upstairs were trailing down the stairs like ivy, curling around the banister and tumbling down the stairs.

"I think Jessie got the button," Angela giggled, her mouth still on the rim of her half-empty seventh beer. Kristie was lying on her back on the floor beside, her bare feet kicked up in the air, skirt falling around her hips and showing off her underwear. It didn't matter. They were the only three in the basement. Angela had made sure of that, shutting and locking the door at the top of the stairs. It didn't matter. The sound was sneaking in anyway and they couldn't stop it.

Tim would kill his little sister if he knew what she was playing, but a little sister out of his sight at a party was better than a little sister he had to watch every second to make sure his boys – or someone else's boys – weren't making moves on her. Thirteen didn't mean a thing when you had curves like that.

"No," Kristie said, scissoring her legs as if she were swimming. "I think I got it." Her voice was slow and thick, like liquid honey.

Angela laughed again. She'd put tabs in four out of the twenty beers she'd sneaked from upstairs before the party even started, and it looked like she was only one who hadn't gotten one yet. Jessie had hers by her third drink, and Kristie's was on her fifth. Nobody knew who was going to get a double-dose, or even a triple-dose, but no one had thought about it when they'd started playing. It was a party after all.

The music from the record upstairs was in Jessie's head now, mixing up with her brain in a big purple mush behind her eyes. She began to laugh along with Angela, and soon all three of them were howling, lying on the floor on their sides and backs and tummies, tears pooling at the corners of their eyes and threatening to smudge their eyeliner. Their voices were so loud, swirling in each others ears and stomachs and chests, that they didn't notice the record skip off upstairs. They couldn't hear the voices shift, from glee to anger, and it wasn't until the gunshot that they stiffened.

First up was Angela, up the stairs so fast that the dizzy-headed Jessie and Kristie were left scrambling in her wake to catch up. Shaking drunken hands took long enough to flip the latch that the three teenagers tumbled through the door at the same time, directly into the crowd surrounding a war zone. They shoved through bodies, losing sight of each other; people wiggled and wormed, turned colour and size in front of Jessie's eyes, but she tried hard to focus. Somewhere in her head she knew that this was serious, that this was wrong, and a pit of terror began to grow in her stomach like a fetus.

Somehow she pushed her way to the front of the circle, and just about puked. On the floor was a body, someone's body, two bullet holes through the chest. Eyes open. Mouth gaping. Lying in a puddle of his own blood. Beside him, Tim Shepard was laying into a kid with dark gold hair so hard Jessie thought his head ought to burst like a pimple from the pressure.

"Jesus Christ, Tim!"

Somehow Angela had appeared beside Jessie, there one second and gone the next, stumbling forward to grab at her big brother's shoulders. At her touch he instantly swung around, up off the ground and the kid lying on it faster than a cat, fist raised, ready to strike. When he recognized his sister though, he lowered it, but his face didn't relax. He just yelled, profanities and threats and grabbed her arm to push her back into the crowd, keep her away from the danger, keep her away from the boy on the floor.

Even with his face all bloody and bruised, Jessie knew that face. And she'd seen the gun before too, on the floor a few inches away from his hand. That was Boyd's face. And that was Boyd's gun.

x x x

Boyd was leaning back in the armchair, fingers crossed, palms resting on his hard, flat stomach. His face was calm but it wasn't hard to see the storm brewing in the baby blue eyes following Marshall's frustrated pacing back and forth from the kitchen to the living room. The news was playing on the television set in the corner, but nobody was watching it. Jessie was going between Boyd and Marshall like a tennis match, homework left untouched on the coffee table.

"Don't go," Marshall finally spoke, his voice deep and thick and full of authority. He wasn't just Marshall Brumley, absolute ruler of the Brumley gang and one of the toughest Greasers on this side of the city; he was mom-and-dad, guardian and caretaker, everything that his little brother Boyd and little half-sister Jessie didn't have since four summers ago. "Don't fuckin' go to that party Boyd."

Boyd shrugged lazily, switching from laced fingers to crossed arms. "It's just a Shepard party. We've been to those before."

"That's not why you're goin' Boyd, I'm not stupid."

"So Lorne is gonna be there," Boyd waved off, and Marshall said angrily, "and so you've got a beef with him. This ain't the way to settle it. We need those boys on our side. We ain't got the Shepard outfit, we ain't got nothin' next time we need help."

Out of nowhere he rounded on Jessie, cross-legged on the floor. "And don't you be going there either, Jessie Lynn Harris."

"I never said I was!" Jessie shouted – but she didn't have to. Everyone knew that Angela Shepard was the leader of that little gang, and if she said so, both Jessie and Kristie Mathews would be at that house too.

"May have been born Tuesday, but it wasn't last Tuesday," Boyd sing-songed.

Jessie snapped, "mind your own business." Boyd just laughed.

"I don't want either of you there," Marshall said with finality. "And for fuck's sake Boyd, put that heater away. I can see it tucked into your belt. You kill people with those."