She kisses Dawn's neck, and tastes Aqua Net hairspray.

Star and Dawn, morning star. She'd known from the moment she saw them together that Star was in some way property of Dawn, property of the gang — like the little sister, she'd maybe thought, and she'd been naive. Star isn't here, but Mike feels her eyes on them anyway as they tangle together. Dawn rips Mike's shirt up over her head, tangling her arms and making her crook her neck — she bites at Dawn's fingers, Dawn bites at her small breasts and it makes her nipples stand like a chilly locker room. Dawn's lips are cold, and the wet pad of her tongue.

"What do you know about fucking?" Mike says, self-consciously nasty, squaring her shoulders. "You don't ever fuck those guys down on the beach?"

This girl's made of ice, she never fucks — all those girls around her, all those boys going crazy for her on the boardwalk, and she never even thinks about it? Mike thought she knew everything before she came out to Santa Carla, and now there's a whole new world opening up under her feet like earthquake cracks. Dawn yanks her head back by the hair, a big twisted fistful, and levers her apart with sharp fingers — finding Mike's gash with the fingers of one hand, pressing into it not with slow circles or dextrous letters of the alphabet but with cruel insistence. No boy has ever touched Mike like this, with such absolute confidence of what he'd find there.

"You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. My blood's inside of you," she says, so close to Mike's ear that her lips brush Mike's earring, "I'm inside of you, how does it feel?"

It feels like heat. It feels like the way Mike used to feel in the pit of her crotch watching pretty girls bend down slowly, or tie back their hair — quaking in her jeans. Mike tries not to make a sound, but she can't help it — just a hurt sound, as she tightens her legs. Dawn's fingers withdraw from her like a tease. Mike digs in her heels and drags Dawn closer.

Here in the rubble, with junky polyester scarves and burnt-out joss sticks and the smell of weed — there's broken glass and beer cans twisted in half, you'd never want to walk around in here barefoot. Dawn's girls run riot in here. Somewhere music is playing on a battered stereo; the tape must be chewed up, it plays the same hypnotic riff over and over again like the soundtrack to a haunted house.

Mike half-shoves her, and Dawn drops down really low, between her legs — in the salty humid patch where Mike's thighs stick together, the place where the seams of her jeans are starting to wear from straddling the back of a motorbike. More than the wetness between her thighs she's aware of the pinch of Dawn's hand on her knee, bracing and forcing back — when they met she had a hand full of manicured acrylic nails, and now they're all broken down to bare fingertips. Mike's breath is coming hard, catching in her throat, and looking down past her stomach she can see Dawn's face framed in between her thighs. Down between her legs, Dawn is smiling nastily up at her.

Mike isn't wearing any underwear, which was stupid of her — a stupid affectation and one of many stupid affectations, like the earring and the tee-shirt with its sleeves cut out. Dawn's known this since she yanked her blue jeans down past her knees, she's known this since long before. She mouths at the rise of Mike's pubis, the way Mike's fantasized about burying her face in the crotch of a girl's panties — her fingers are working into the wetness of her, pressing their way into her as her tongue flicks over Mike's gash, and it's such a sudden cold flicker against Mike's clit that it makes her yelp. She doesn't want to make any sound, she doesn't want to give her the satisfaction.

She can cup the back of Dawn's head as it bobs in her lap, so strangely like a boy's — the teased-out peroxide blonde tangles at the nape of her neck, the narrowness of her shoulders under her cut-out tee shirt. Everything Mike's done since the gang took her in has just been a pale impersonation of this girl, a cliquey following. The steady movement of her fingers is just a hook to keep her in place, as her mouth works against Mike's clit — the uneasy spread of pleasure radiates out from there, like the epicenter of an earthquake, up to the pit of her twisting stomach and down the clenched backs of her legs. The little twitches of electrical discharge make the muscles of her stomach jump. The slippery edge of an orgasm, only she won't let her have it. She wants her to whine for it, instead of stifling her own eager breaths out of habit.

"Come on," Mike says, "you know what to do, don't you?", but she's already doing it.

Mike grips her own breast with own hand, feeling like some magazine pinup the moment she does it — posed, pivoted back at the waist with another girl pretending to eat her out. It's different than she'd imagined, but that's not hard. Nobody's watching after all, and she'd been stupid to think so — she can throw her head back and shut her eyes, and focus on the red wet mess of pleasure that's been thrust between her legs like a hot coal.

They should have done this earlier, on the beach, in the moonlight. Dawn sucks a hot bite on the very inside of Mike's leg — Mike's eyes jump open and she yells out, scratching her fingernails up Dawn's white shoulders. Maybe she used to have freckles once, right here, before the stuff that's in her blood took her over. Maybe if Mike fucked her to pieces that nasty sneer would leave her lips and she'd be only a girl again. Maybe if she returned the favor.

Dawn turns her head and presses her bloody mouth to Mike's wrist. Just a couple of girls.