Everything is veiled in a smoky haze, as if the air itself has turned a blind eye. Perfume and perspiration intermingle like dance partners, and bodies flow through the room. Lucid like daydreams, intoxicated by night’s cheap mystery.

There’s the black flash of a woman’s eyelid, painted like a crow darting across her skin. Perfected, striking. There’s the poise of a man’s fingers, one set gripping a cold bottleneck and the other against his hip. Nonchalant, easy.

All around is casual innuendo, practiced laughter, and introductions forgotten with the next mouthful of campaign bubbles.

Everyone in the musky room screams silently, “look at me, love me!”

Everyone except a boy.

The boy leans lightly against a wall, poised to move but without invitation. No where to go in a room full of people. His hand moves through hair like he’s lost something within it, confidence, maybe. His shirt is tucked beneath a belt carefully selected. Sealed like a coffin while everyone else flaunts their shirts’ edge like a package’s “tear hear” serration.

He is stranded, stranded in a sea of unfelt intimacy. And heals too tall for any possible comfort. Why are women so desperate to escape the ground, anyway?

The life of a party is not a life, it’s a strange, detached manipulation of the familiar. People are puppets and drinks are undrinkable, OJ is far better, he decided. Maybe he should go home to find some.

But the boy doesn’t know that there is also a girl.

A girl who’s makeup ends with hasty mascara and who’s lips are fatigued from fake smiles. Like a tethered balloon, she floats through crowds of blundering children dressed up as adults. She doesn’t scream. She’s just waits for someone to hear her silence, and escape with her into the starry night.

Maybe he hears her. Maybe the music’s too loud.