My first girl was named Mimi. We met at a basement show. I was seventeen, and Mimi was from another planet.

I went to the show because I thought my ex-boyfriend, the moonwalker, was going to be there. I thought I was supposed to want to see the moonwalker. I spent forty minutes putting eyeliner on in my dusty mirror to prepare for the moonwalker. I dragged the skinny black brush along my eyelid, then smeared the crooked line away.

Dragged the brush along, smeared the line away.

For forty minutes straight.

Adelaide stuck her head through my bathroom door. “Still shittin’?” she asked. She wore her makeup like that on purpose. Red lipstick ring around her mouth. Pale white cream across her face and chest. Circles of black powder around each eye.

“She’s gonna be gone by the time we get there,” Adelaide whined, pulling at the hem of her pencil skirt.

“She” was a girl who waited at our bus stop. A girl with spiky green hair and a fat stone ring on every finger. A girl who, like the moonwalker, was supposed to be at the basement show.

The girl had been waiting a few feet away from us, scrunching and tangling her hair, when Adelaide and I first saw her.

“Everyone knows straight girls don’t have dyed hair,” Adelaide had whispered to me. “They don’t wear flashy clothes, and they don’t make themselves look ugly.”

As we rode the bus, I watched the girl take her rings off, line them up on the window ledge, put them on again, then repeat.

“Do straight girls even take the bus?” I asked Adelaide, squinting to see the rings better. She laughed at me.

“Hell no—they get their boyfriends to drive them around!”

Mimi didn’t take the bus to the basement show; she was beamed down from her spaceship in a silver dress that showed her butt cheeks. Her hair was cut blunt, chin-length, and dyed silver. She could have starred in Bladerunner. Her eyeliner was drawn perfectly thin.

I dragged the brush along.

“Am I ugly?” I asked Adelaide. Smeared the line away.

“Would I be friends with you if you were ugly?”

“True,” I said. Dragged the brush along.

“You look sexy,” Adelaide moaned, puckering her red lips and leaning in close.

I sighed, flapped my eyelids in the mirror, and threw down my pencil. “Let’s go,” I said. Liner layered my lids, thick as a nickel.

Adelaide and I took the metro to the basement show. Our driver was a round woman: pregnant, portly, or both. She had a friendly round face like a ripened cantaloupe. Bus stop girl was not at the bus stop or on the bus. She was not sitting on an itchy seat, lining up her rings.

“I swear to shit,” Adelaide hissed at me, after we sat. “You better pray she’s in that basement.” I winked a nickel lid and looked out the window. I imagined the moonwalker dancing next to the drum kit.

Our round driver pulled over at a stop along the way, and a man with a cane got on. I felt Adelaide tense. The man was shaky, gripping his cane with one hand and holding onto the bar with the other. He sat facing us and leaned his head back against the window.

The hydraulics jolted us forward and we continued on our journey. Adelaide’s eyes were slits in her raccoon makeup. I felt I could read her thoughts.

A man—an old man—a young man once—a disgusting young man—muscle arms and wide neck—resenting our existence—wanting to have sex with us us—wishing he could wear our clothes—our skin—wanting to consume more—wanting to choke us until our eyes pop—to consume us—to consume the world—to become a black hole—swallowing like a snake—a man—a snake—a—

The old man was wearing a tweed jeff cap and a mossy green vest. He looked like a character from Wind in the Willows. When the bus hit a bump, he looked up, confused, as if he had forgotten where he was.

I gave him an apologetic smile, but all the man did was frown. Adelaide stood up for a second to adjust her pencil skirt. The man and I watched her.

“The fuck are you looking at?” Adelaide asked the old man, sneering. Her red-ringed mouth opened like a valve to show her red-stained teeth. Those teeth dared the man to say something. Try something. See what happens.

The old man’s frown deepened, and he looked to the front of the bus. We barreled down the street, white spotlights on the four of us, nothing but darkness and silence outside. Four aliens in a ground-bound spaceship.

Adelaide and I got off the bus before the old man. I looked back at him as I tumbled out of the door. I thought he would be wearing a frown, but his teeth were bared just for me. He watched my rubber boots fumble for the sidewalk, his eyes hungry.

Adelaide and I held hands as we walked up to the basement house. People were reclining on lawn chairs—the beachgoing metal kind with woven plastic strips. Others drank breadwater, crowded the basement stairs, and chainsmoked under the street lights. Filters and origami’d cans littered the yard. The air was loud with the sound of crashing instruments.

Adelaide and I stopped to examine the yellow-lit faces. Their mouths were opening and closing to release lungfuls of smoke.

“Everyone here is drunk,” Adelaide complained. Her hand was clammy and mine was sweating.

“Not us,” I reminded her.

“You’d think somebody would offer us something.”

I let go of her clam and itched my neck. “Isn’t that illegal?”

“It’s fuckin’ rude not to.” She shot daggers at the reclining people, and we continued towards the stairs.

No moonwalker in sight, just men with stubble and women with massive breasts, and women with stubble and men with massive breasts. All of them old. Not as old as the old man, but what difference did it make to Adelaide and me? They all laughed and smoked and drank, pantomiming in the deafening sound.

Adelaide and I went to the right side of the basement. Mimi was off to the left, though I didn’t know it or her yet. The moonwalker was nowhere to be seen.

“Where the fuck is she?” Adelaide yelled at me. Her eyes hungered for bus stop girl. The drummer banged again and again and again on the snare.

“Probably on her way,” I yelled back at Adelaide. I searched for any sort of rhythm and moved my hands around my head. Adelaide did the same. We danced like we were tearing at spiderwebs knitted between our ears and shoulders.

I dropped my eyelids for a moment. I lived in a cacophony of sound, sprinkled with sweat, surrounded by heat. My hands caught on others as they waved, like flags whipping in the wind. I let go.

“That girl is staring at us,” Adelaide yelled in my ear. My eyes flew open. Adelaide waved her hands in the direction of a silver-haired girl to the left. The girl whom I would soon know as Mimi.

“Do we know her?” I asked Adelaide, my face going pink, my arms falling to my sides.

“I think you should,” Adelaide said. Her leering smile peeked out from her waving fingers.

I ignored her. I did not want to see the moonwalker, but I felt that I should want to see the moonwalker, so I scanned the room again. I was lucky; he had not shown up.

“She’s hot as shit,” Adelaide added with a hip-knock. “What’re you straight now?” Her tone was daring. Say something. Try something. See what happens.

“What’d you want me to do?”

“Fuck off,” Adelaide said, dropping her arms and shoving me. I bumped into several old people. Sorry, sorry, sorry. They didn’t respond; they could barely see me through the haze. Smokey, drunken, banging.

I stood a few feet away, unsure of what to do. I dripped sweat and watched Adelaide’s pencil skirt ride up. It had been given to her by her mother, who thought she could shrink her daughter by buying her skirts three sizes too small.

I watched Adelaide’s belly hold on. It bounced to the banging of the drum. Her sweat-streaked white cream makeup ran down her chest.

The girl I was about to learn was Mimi walked in front of me, eclipsing Adelaide. Her silver dress matched her hair. It made her look alien. Futuristic. Ethereal.

I was still pink. Still sweating.

“My friend said you were looking at me,” I said. “Do I know you?”

“I’m Mimi,” the girl who was Mimi laughed.

“You go to our high school?” I asked her.

Mimi laughed again. Her slender throat opened up, letting her laughs out like gulps gone the wrong way. I noticed that her eyes were silver, too, and caught the light from the rest of her, which shone like metal. I had to lean back to see above her legs. The bionic woman. Tall and shining like no one I had ever seen before.

“Are you alright?” Mimi laughed at me. “You’re quite red.”

I nodded. “I was wondering if my ex-boyfriend would be here. He’s a moonwalker.”

Mimi laughed again. “Me, too,” she said. She slid back, her feet floating off the ground. She made a circle around me.

My face purpled. I squeezed my hands together and hid them behind my back. “Wow,” I sighed. “Much better than him.”

Mimi smiled. Her glossy lips peeled back and her corners crinkled, forming cheeks like pincushions. Adelaide watched from afar. Her belly jumped. Her eyes narrowed. Her hands waved above her head.

I made like Adelaide’s belly and leaped into the air. I shrunk myself down, small as a pin, and pointed my fingers and feet. I dove into Mimi’s silvery eyes. She opened her lids wide to catch me. I breaststroked; I doggy paddled; I held my breath as long as I could.

Mimi moonwalked to the rhythm, floating above the ground. In her eyes, I learned how to moonwalk and float, too.

I moonwalked so long that the air around Mimi and me became doughy.

I moonwalked so long that Mimi got hungry, cut the air like bread, and sliced layers off my tomato face to snack on.

I moonwalked so long that the band left and the beer cans layered six deep like a beach of stones.

When I finally finished moonwalking, I surfaced and waded in Mimi’s eyes. I noticed smeared white handprints going up the basement railing—no Adelaide in sight.

Mimi laughed her silvery laugh again when I asked her for a ride home. She dipped forward and back, gulping the wrong way, sloshing so hard that I couldn’t remember why I’d gone down to the basement in the first place. Mimi pinched me from her cornea, beamed back up, and left me dripping on the basement floor.

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Madison Ellingsworth likes walking in Portland, Maine. She has recently been published in Fractured Lit, Gargoyle Magazine, and Apple Valley Review, among others. Links to Madison’s published work can be found at madisonellingsworth.com.