The first time she heard the song she was in the car with her father, coming back from school. The tune was sticky and she hummed it for the rest of the day.
As she caught it on, again and again, the humming grew more frequent, some words began to appear between the mumbled syllables, and three weeks after that first listening, she all but begged her mom to take her to the local record store to buy the single.
She listened to it time and time and again. By that night she already knew all the lyrics, and after the following weekend, she had performed for both her parents (together and separately, several times), her brother and two of their elderly neighbors. Everyone clapped and cheered (one of the neighbors slipped her a dollar), even Russ admitted she "didn't do it half bad", but none of them compared to her mother telling her she sang it better than Cindy Lauper herself. Not even the ovation she got at the festival at the end of the school year where she sang as the rest of her class did a routine they had been preparing for months.
Those first months after her parents' disappearance, she clung to the good memories. She would get out old records, and although she didn't sing anymore, she would listen to them as she did house chores or her homework, always moving her head to the rhythm. Russ would come in sometimes. He never joined her, he just looked at her that way, hovering by the door, as if he knew exactly what she was trying to do. He never said anything, he just looked.
Then Russ left, she went into foster care and she left the records safe and hidden with the rest of her valued belongings.
It was quite the surprise when years later, after she had been dragged by her roommate to a party off campus, she realized she hadn't listened to that song in almost a decade. Not much later, she moved to her new house, and as she unpacked, she found her old LPs. She spent that first night singing again as she arranged all her books in her brand new shelves.
The first time Angela gave her something, it was the Cindy Lauper greatest hits CD. She was pretty sure than even though Angela claimed having special powers to know the perfect gift for anyone, she had just seen one too many times the scratched vinilo in the LP player in her living-room.
She wrote the first lines about Kathy Reichs listening to that cd.
She's sitting in a hospital chair now, hands bloodied and eyes fixed in an indeterminate point of the door of the waiting room. She still sees Booth, quiet (too quiet), that wheezing sound coming out of his mouth and the blood spilling out of his chest trough her fingers.
And she can't get the music out of her head.