We got off the train, which had alighted overground in Queen’s, and walked out of the station down the streets to Sam’s house--I let Ali lead the way. Sam must be one of the more affluent members of our school, as we were properly in the suburbs now. Instead of the boxed-in, brownstone apartment blocks and towering skyscrapers closer to the heart of the city, we walked past fenced-off sometimes semi-detached houses down wide streets even dotted with the occasional tree. Commuters passed us concealed in their cars, returning to their homes as the day grew dimmer. It took us a long time to get to Sam’s house though, having to walk as we did, both being too young--and in my case, too poor--to drive, so by the time we arrived it was almost completely dark and there were far fewer cars passing us on the road.

When we got there, it was obvious which one Sam’s house was. It was a slim, brick-built dwelling built onto the side of another identical house, just like all the other houses in the street, only the lights were on in all the windows. The steady dum dum dum of a bass beat was pulsing out of it, loud enough for us to hear it as we turned into the street but, I guessed, not quite loud enough to irritate the neighbours too much--not yet, anyway. Inside the windows we could make out the silhouettes of our fellow teenagers moving and dancing and drinking already.

As we approached the house Ali was recognised by a small group of kids coming from the other direction.

“Hey Ali,” said a boy at their lead, trim and good looking, with gelled-back hair. “Who’s this?”

I recognised him, and some of the others, from school, but I didn’t know any of their names. My gut clenched. I put my hands in my pockets to try to stop them tremoring. I shouldn’t have had that coffee.

When I said nothing, Ali said “This is Gonzalo. He’s my Physics lab partner. He’s cool.”

“Ah, your boyfriend, you mean?” said a girl from the pack mischievously. She was short, and wore a brown bob. I thought her name might have been Hannah, but really it was anyone’s guess.

“No, he’s not my boyfriend,” said Ali. The quickness with which she said it stang in my chest a little, but I bounced back. Inside, I just added Yet. It was only a matter of time. I was going to a party with her, after all. And I had superpowers. Don’t forget about the superpowers. I couldn’t use the superpowers or reveal them to anyone, but I had to keep reminding myself that I had them.

“Come on,” said Ali, to me and everyone, “let’s go in.”

The front door was unlocked and swung open at a gentle push from gelled-hair. I stepped over the threshold last, entering a new world a few steps behind the others, in more ways than one. I had never been to a high school party before. No one had ever invited me. I would have probably been too shy to go anyway. That was before the powers, I reminded myself.

Beyond the door I was immediately hit by thick fog. The burnt, dirty smell of cigarettes filled my nostrils, along with something else, something more exotic and rich, which I guessed must be marijuana. The fog swirled around a cramped entry corridor crammed full with people. Two boys were locked in an embrace just a few steps inside the door, one of their backs pressed up against the orange wallpaper, kissing with passion. Others kids lined the wall, leaning, standing, dancing, chatting, lifting bright red cups of clear liquid to their mouths.

Welcome to your first high school party, Gonzalo. Wait, where did Ali go?

In the time I had taken to stare dumbly at the scene before me, I had lost Ali and the others in the fog. They had walked on down the corridor and disappeared into the mist. Had she meant to go off like that without me, or had she simply not realised I wasn’t still with her?

I made my way gingerly down the corridor, first stepping over the two boys who had now fallen over onto the floor together, weaving my way around flailing bodies and trying not to spill anyone’s drinks. Most of the other kids squinted at me suspiciously as I passed, if they weren’t already too drunk or stoned not to notice me.

At the end of the corridor I turned a corner, but then found myself confronted by a dilemma: To my right, a flight of stairs flew upwards, decorated with more high schoolers sitting and talking and kissing. Straight ahead of me, a doorway opened into the living room, the heart of the party where the music was pounding out of a hifi system. Someone had rigged up an electronic ball on the floor in the middle of the room which threw different colours onto the walls, turning the family photos and single glazed windows purple, then red, then green, then purple again. The room was a mess of bodies, of shadows spinning and whirling and throwing out their limbs, all flickering and shimmering in the changing lights and the haze of the smoke. I couldn’t see Ali, or any of the others we’d met at the door, in either direction.

Which way to go?

I chose the stairs, marginally less intimidating, wondering if Ali had gone up those and if that was why I couldn’t see her anywhere.

This time I got some scowls of unfamiliarity from the kids sitting on the stairs. A fat boy who was for some reason holding a hockey stick tracked me with his eyes as I passed him. Maybe he was some kind of gatekeeper.

“Er, hi…” I tried mumbling to him. He didn’t even bother to respond, but he let me pass in any case.

Did they know that I was the kid who had broken Bill Jackson’s hand? Nobody but Ali spoke to me at school, so I didn’t know if people were still talking about that, whether they could identify me as the bully-rebel or not. At least Sam hadn’t mentioned it when I’d met her--she didn’t seem to mind, if she did know.

At the top of the stairs was a landing with more talking and dancing bodies and three doors off of it. I dodged the dancers and tried the nearest one: a blue-tiled bathroom with a girl throwing up in the toilet and another girl holding up her hair for her--neither of them Ali. “Oops, sorry…” I shut it at once.

The next door wouldn’t open and when I put my ear to it I could hear muffled gasps.

“Hey, get away from there, creep!” said a girl on the landing, wrapped in the arm of a guy in a football shirt. “Wait your turn like everyone else!”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know…”

“Yeah, yeah. That’s what they all say.”

I wasn’t sure that I wanted to try the last door any more, but tensed my muscles, found the courage and checked it. Behind was a single bedroom, populated by yet another group of teenagers, thankfully this time none of them doing anything more innocuous than sitting and talking. They turned their faces on me with blank expressions, like I was an unexpected intruder. I scanned them quickly as I could--none were Ali. I mumbled an apology and shut the door.

I went back downstairs. I had to brave the living room. I took a deep breath and walked in, starting to move slowly through the room, trying to look like I was enjoying myself and not just methodically investigating each person I encountered to see if they were Ali--which was exactly what I was doing. It was hard in the flashing colours and mist. At one point when I got close enough to one girl to look at her face and see that she was a white kid with a wide jaw, not Ali, she thought I wanted to dance and started shaking her body nearer to mine. Terrified, I joined in, dancing at a party for the first time in my life, lifting my hands and wobbling them from side to side while my hips remained completely rigid, like I was a badly designed puppet.

Eventually I got my legs to respond to me again and I danced myself away from the girl, trying to make it look natural, like I was simply carrying on my dance in another direction. As soon as I was outside of her orbit and she was shrouded in enough coloured mist, I dropped my arms with relief and started walking again.

I checked everyone in the room that I could find; none of them were Ali.

She wasn’t anywhere upstairs or downstairs that I could see. It was like she had vanished.

Through the haze I noticed something on the wall in front of me: an upright rectangle with a small circular knob halfway up one side. Oh come on!

I opened the door and yellow light spilled through into the living room, interfering with the colour scheme of the makeshift nightclub. The nearest living room dancers immediately yelled at me in complaint, so I shut the door again quickly with me on the other side.

I was in a little kitchen, flanked by two surface tops, cupboards above and below them, with an open fridge-freezer at one end. Every foodstuff in the place seemed to have been raided, spread out on the counters, in the sink, on the floor--bread, cookies, chips, even dry pasta and rice. It was all being eaten by a group of four boys with bedgraggled long hair and bloodshot eyes. “Munchies!” one of them looked at me and said. “Munchies! Must have fooood!”

My chest was tight and it had become difficult to breathe. I stepped through the back door at the end of the kitchen and out into the garden, where I gasped and gulped in the clean air. My glasses fogged over, so I took them off and rubbed the lenses with my shirt. I put them on and scanned the people in the garden, renewing my search for Ali. It was completely dark now, but the light from the kitchen partly illuminated the figures so that I could just about make out their faces. Things were a bit calmer in the garden, where people had apparently come if they didn’t want to dance right now, and were stood around talking to each other and sipping from those bright red cups.

This time I recognised a few more kids from my classes--Brad Woolner from Physics and Jane Perkins from English and Tim Fassbender from Biology--but still no Ali. I could see about half of each of their faces, as they stood talking, turned slightly away from the house. At the back of the short garden, on the grass, was a big keg, with a tap near the top, and people milling around it. This must be the source of the alcohol in the red cups. I thought I might as well go and get myself a drink. That could calm my nerves, help me to fit in better.

As I walked over to the keg, I recognised someone else standing next to it. Not Ali, but Sam--the birthday girl! There she was with her blonde curls and favourite cherry lipstick. The second girl who had spoken to me like a human being this year.

I went over. She was surrounded by other kids, laughing and joking, and was dispensing drinks for people from the keg, a stack of red cups nestled behind it, fuelling the frenzy of her own party.

“This is such a good party, Sam!” one of them was saying.

“Oh, you really think so?”

“It totally is,” said another. “This is like best party ever! There hasn’t been a rager like this for… well, at least a few weeks!”

I didn’t know about any other recent parties. I stood for a while waiting for a natural gap in the conversation to greet Sam, but none came.

Just open your mouth, Gonzalo. Stop being such a weakling. You can move a car with your bare hands, for goodness’ sake. It shouldn’t be so hard to talk to a girl at a party.

“Hey there, Sam.” When I eventually said it, it happened almost at random, right in the middle of someone else’s sentence. Nobody even heard me. I gulped, breathed, waited for at least the current speaker’s sentence to finish, and tried again.

“Hey there, Sam.”

They heard me this time, and five pairs of eyes turned on me, shining slightly in the kitchen-light. Sam had to shield her eyes from it with one hand and scrunch up her eyes to make me out.

“Hi there! Who is that? Oh, it’s you, the guy from the doctor’s! Gordon, right?”

To my shame, I was too on edge and self-conscious to even correct her. To this small crowd of my peers, I became ‘Gordon’, forever.

“You know this guy, Sammy?” said generic high school teen kid number one.

“Yeah, he’s friends with Ali. You know, the new girl, from the Middle East? She’s cool.”

“Would you like a drink, Gordon?” said Sam.

“Er. Yes please. I mean, sure.” I remembered something. Something that might help. “Actually, Sam, I’ve got something here for you.”

I slung round my rucksack, which hadn’t left my back this whole time, fiddled with the zip for what felt like an age while I felt their stares burning on me, then fished something out from the bottom where it was hiding underneath my school books.

I thrust it out towards Sam. A small, square present, wrapped in shiny silver paper, with a card in an envelope stapled to it.

They all looked at me.

“What’s this?” said Sam after a moment.

“Er. It’s a present. You know to...celebrate your...birthday?”

I realised at once that I had done something embarrassing, something outside of the normal social code. Generic high school teen number two put a hand to her mouth to stifle a snicker.

“Awww!” said Sam, at twice higher the pitch than normal. “Gor-don! That is so sweet!”

“What sort of dork brings a birthday present to an open house party?” I heard generic high school teen number three say to number four.

An open house party...suddenly my individual invitation from Sam didn’t seem so individual any more.

Revelation dawning on me, I tried to subtly pull the present back from her, saying “You know what, you can open this later, can’t you?”

But it was too late. She had already reached out and put a hand on it to take it from me. She clutched onto it tight and would not let go. For a moment we each tugged at it, like we were fighting over it, but it would be even more embarrassing to snatch it back off her now. I was committed. The present slipped out of my fingers and Sam had to put a foot behind her to stop herself falling backwards.

She opened the card first while the others looked on with raised eyebrows. It said “HAPPY SWEET SIXTEEN” in rainbow letters on the front. It had been ninety nine cents in Walmart. She was actually turning seventeen since she had been held back a year after her expulsion from her last school, but I only found that out later.

“Thaaaank you, Gordon!” she cooed all the same, and beamed at me. (Perhaps she was happy to perpetuate the myth that sixteen was her real age.) “To Sam,” she read from inside the card. “I hope you have a really neat birthday. Thanks so much for inviting me to your party.” It sounded stupid read out loud. I should have read it loud before to check it. ‘Neat’? What was I, ten years old?

This time generic high school teens one through five just outright laughed.

“Hey--cut it out, you guys!” said Sam. She spared me reading the sign-off of the card, perhaps because she had seen that it actually said ‘Gonzalo’ not ‘Gordon’ and had taken pity on me. “I think it’s really sweet.” She gave me a wide smile. “Now let’s see what’s in here…”

She fumbled open the little square of wrapping paper, then furrowed her brow at the CD case she found inside.

JOY DIVISION, UNKNOWN PLEASURES it said on the cover, above and below a picture of white wavy lines on a black backhround that looked a mountain range viewed from above and at an angle, which was actually a visualisation of a data readout from a dead star--a pulsar. Ali would have found that cool, I bet.

“‘Unknown Pleasures’?” said generic high school teen number two. “What is that, like a porno? Are you trying to come onto her or something, Gordon?”

“No, no! I would never!” I said straight away.

Sam narrowed her eyes.

“Not that I wouldn’t want to…” I carried on, crashing the car of the conversation into a ditch. “Wait, no, you know what I mean! It’s...it’s this really cool British band I discovered. They’re from the 1970s.”

I only had a pitifully small allowance at the best of times, and for the period I had been grounded Mom had cut even that off. I had scoured the shops around where I lived since my grounding had finished searching for a suitable present for Sam’s birthday, but hadn’t been able to find anything within my price range. So in the end I just bought some shiny paper and wrapped up one of my favourite CDs from my personal collection which I had inherited from my Dad. Who even listens to CDs anymore? I thought it would be cool and retro. I was realising now that I had misjudged that, quite a lot.

Crap.

“It’s nice, thanks,” said Sam, entirely unconvincingly, putting the CD to one side on top of the keg. She probably didn’t even have anything that played CDs. She pulled down another drink into a cup for me. “Here you go, Go--oh, hi you guys!”

Some more people were coming over.

“Hey look everyone, it’s weakling, at a party!” somebody approaching said.

Oh no, not that name. I had been recognised by someone who knew me by that name. Probably someone who had witnessed the episode in the Science corridor a few weeks ago.

“Weakling?” said a deeper, growly voice behind me. “What are you doing with my girlfriend?”

I turned around and looked straight into the face of Bill Jackson, bully extraordinaire.

Don’t use your powers.