Free All These Things I've Done by Gabrielle Zevin

someone had brought in strobe lights, but you could still feel that the original intent of this place hadn’t been nightclub. Even packed with a thousand people, all the stone made it incongruously cool inside. There were marble pedestals everywhere and girls in underwear-like clothing were dancing atop them. If you walked a bit further, you came upon a shallow, intricately tiled pool that was roughly the size of a ballroom, and a mosaic fountain under a mural depicting a bucolic villa by the water. Both the pool and the fountain were, of course, completely drained and badly in need of a renovation that I knew would not be forthcoming. For a second, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what it must have looked like when it was a museum. At some point, I became aware of Win standing next to me. His gaze was fixed on the mural and I wondered if we were thinking the same thing.
    ‘Stop daydreaming, you two,’ Scarlet yelled. ‘There’s dancing to be done!’ She grabbed my hand, then Win’s, and pulled us into the middle of the dance floor.
    Scarlet danced next to me for a while and then she danced over to Win. I sort of danced by myself (making sure to keep my arms down so as not to reveal the hole in my dress or inadvertently make it larger) and observed Scarlet and Win. Scarlet was quite a good dancer. Win, uh, wasn’t. He hopped around like an insect or something. His moves were comical.
    He hopped over to me. ‘Are you laughing at me?’ he said, leaning down to my ear. The music was so loud he needed to do this in order to be heard.
    ‘No, I swear.’ I paused. ‘I’m laughing with you.’
    ‘But I’m not laughing,’ he said, and then he was laughing. ‘Notice you don’t move your arms much yourself.’
    ‘You found me out,’ I said. I held up my arm. As I did this, I became aware of a person across the dance floor, a person who shouldn’t have been there at all. Leo.
    ‘Jesus Christ,’ I muttered. I turned to Scarlet. ‘Leo’s here. I have to go deal with him. You’ll be OK?’
    She squeezed my hand. ‘Go,’ she said.
    As I pushed my way through the undulating bodies, I told myself to calm down, act casual and try not to make a scene.
    When I finally got to Leo, he was surrounded by a group of sleazy girls, all older than me. I wasn’t shocked. Leo was good-looking and, on the rare occasions he went out, usually had a full wallet – he couldn’t help but attract this sort of thing. If he couldn’t always keep up his end of the conversation, well, I guess a certain kind of girl wouldn’t notice that or even care if she did.
    I wedged my way between Leo and one of the skanks. ‘Hey!’ she yelled. ‘Wait your turn.’
    ‘He’s my brother!’ I yelled back.
    ‘Hi, Annie,’ Leo said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that we should run into each other.
    ‘Hi, yourself,’ I said. ‘Thought you were staying in tonight.’
    ‘I was,’ he admitted. ‘But right after you left, Jacks stopped by and said we should go out.’
    ‘Jacks is here?’ I asked, thinking it might be a good time to have a word with my increasingly present, increasingly annoying cousin.
    ‘Yeah.’ Leo pointed to the edge of the pool, where Jacks was sitting with an oddly tanned redhead who seemed to be laughing at everything he said. Cousin Jacks always had a pretty girl by his side, and in general women seemed to find him attractive, though I personally didn’t get his appeal. He was short and very slim. His legs were too long for his torso. Before Jacks’s mother became a prostitute, back when dancing was something people could do for a living, she had been a professional ballerina, and I suppose Jacks took after her. Jacks’s eyes were green like mine, except his were always darting around the room to see if there was someone better he could be talking to. He had letters tattooed on his knuckles that read VORY V ZAKONE, which I knew translated to ‘thieves in law’.
    I looked at my brother.