It might as well have been piped in from outer space.
There were no smooth, Donna Summer-style voices. In fact, no one was singing at all—just yelling. And whatever they were yelling about, it wasn’t love.
It didn’t flow, either, the way I always thought music was supposed to. Instead, as I stepped out of the hall and into the big, dark room, the music shrieked and banged and pounded. There was no way to dance to it—not in the way I knew how to dance, at least. The most you could do was shake in tune to all the pounding.
But best of all, this music was angry.
There was a tall, skinny guy in leather pants and spiky black hair bent over the microphone on the little stage at the end of the room, his words incomprehensible under the feedback and squealing guitars and nonstop drumming. Still, the anger came through loud and clear.
It was there in the crowd, too. Everyone I saw—girls in tight jeans and boots, men in wrinkled T-shirts with safety pins stuck through their sleeves, all of them jumping up and down and waving their hands over their heads as the music thumped—they all had that same ferocity on their faces.
It was the same energy I’d felt the night of the march. The sounds and smells and sensations of the club crawled inside my veins, exactly the way the chants had from the crowd that night.
I stepped into the thickest part of the crowd, until I was out of the path of people still pouring in through the door. I shut my eyes, my body thrumming as the fury in the music filled me up.
It felt good to let myself get mad. My shoulders started moving first, and before I’d realized I was doing it, I was shaking along to the music along with everyone else.
“He-e-y-y-y,” a winking voice drawled from the stage. At the sound of decipherable words, I opened my eyes. The guys in front of me were bent over a joint, and through the momentary gap in the crowd, I got a good look at the band.
The guy with the spiky hair had picked up a guitar, and a girl had stepped to the front. She had dark hair and wore a trench coat over a short, tight black dress, with bright red lipstick and platform heels, and she was squeezing the microphone so tightly I was afraid she’d crush it.
“SHIT!” the guy in front of me bellowed to his friend, straightening up and waving the joint over his head. “It’s that chick you like! It’s Midge fucking Spelling!”
The drummer started pounding out a new, sharp rhythm, and a moment later the girl onstage—Midge fucking Spelling, I guess—shut her eyes and growled into the microphone. I couldn’t make out her words, but I knew exactly who she was. The girl from the poster.
She stepped backward, tilting her head up so her hair fell loose behind her, her eyes still shut tight. Her dress stretched and shifted and clung to her skin as she lifted the microphone to her lips and shouted at the ceiling. “WOOOO!”
A hundred voices shouted “WOOOO!” back.
“That’s right, Midge!” the guy in front of me called, sloshing his drink all over his T-shirt. “Shake it, baby!”
Midge ignored him. I could only make out a few syllables from all her growling—the most frequently used one seemed to be “fuck”—but the lyrics clearly didn’t matter as much as the volume and the noise and the life in this room.
The unquestioned rebellion. The complete lack of giving a shit.
Midge didn’t look as if she was “shaking it” to me. What she was doing was bigger than that. As long as she was up on that stage, growling into the mic, the rest of us were at her mercy. No one had the option of standing still.
I shut my eyes again and lost track of how long my body rocked to the music. It was easy, almost too easy, to shut off my brain while Midge Spelling was on the stage.
At some point her growls faded out, and when I opened my eyes again, there was