“Got it!” Duckie said as he put on his sunglasses. “Let’s plow.”
Then he ran inside the hotel. We followed him through the hotel lobby and down a long marble-floored mezzanine, which led into the main ballroom where the senior prom was being held. Andie Walsh was waiting there, standing all alone in her homemade pink dress, biting her lower lip and looking around nervously. When she spotted Robert Downey Jr. walking toward her, decked out in his Duckie threads, her eyes widened in surprise, just as some piano music from Michael Gore’s Pretty in Pink score swelled on the soundtrack. Then, without hesitation, Andie ran toward Duckie. He started running, too, and when they reached each other, she leaped into his open arms. Then he twirled her around a few times before setting her back down. They both took a step back to admire each other’s outfits, exchanging a few words that we were too far away to make out. Then Andie took Duckie’s arm, and together, they walked through the ballroom entrance. Art3mis and I followed them inside.
It looked identical to the ballroom where the original ending of Pretty in Pink was filmed. There was a large dance floor in the center of the room, where a few hundred well-to-do Shermer teenagers dressed in retro tuxedos and pastel-colored prom dresses were grooving to the song “If You Leave” by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Two DJs in matching bellhop outfits stood on the stage, surrounded by synthesizers and mixing boards. A giant black-and-white photograph of a conductor and his orchestra covered the wall behind them. Circular dining tables were arranged on either side of the dance floor, and I spotted Steph McKee again, sitting at one of them in a tuxedo, looking bored. Then he saw who had just walked into the room and sat bolt-upright.
As Andie and Duckie slowly made their way to the dance floor, every pair of eyes in the room turned to look at them. When the couples out on the floor spotted them, they too stopped dancing to stare. A few seconds after that, the DJs stopped the music too. Now everyone in the room was motionless, staring at Andie and Duckie, with bourgeois contempt burning in their eyes.
We watched from a distance as Blane McDonough emerged from the silent crowd and walked over to Andie and Duckie. He said something to Andie, but she only responded by shaking her head. Blane offered his hand to Duckie, and after considering it for a few seconds, Duckie shook it. Blane turned and walked away, disappearing back into the crowd.
“Boom!” Art3mis shouted. “Andie’s first fate no longer needs mending!”
We continued to watch as Andie took Duckie’s hand and the two of them walked through the sea of silent, staring faces, wearing proud and defiant looks of their own. When they reached the center of the dance floor, the DJs turned the sound system back on and cued up a new song: “Heroes” by David Bowie.
Duckie took Andie in his arms and the two of them began to dance, spinning around and around together, until they merged into a single whirling blur of pink. Then that pink blur vanished in a brilliant flash of neon-pink light.
When my eyes recovered, I saw the Third Shard floating in the air above the center of the dance floor, where the two star-crossed lovers had stood a second earlier.
Art3mis ran over and tried to grab the shard, but her hands passed right through. She laughed and turned back to look at me, then made a come-hither motion with her index finger. I joined her on the dance floor.
“？‘For each fragment my heir must pay a toll,’？” I recited as I reached out and wrapped my fingers around the shard.
As before, taking the shard triggered another flashback…
* * *
I was Kira again, this time standing in her childhood bedroom in her mother’s tiny cottage on the outskirts of London. I’d seen photographs Kira had taken of herself in this room, to mail to Og back in the States during his senior year of high school, which they spent apart.
Two open suitcases lay on the bed in front of me, filled with a jumble of clothing, sketchbooks, and boxes of floppy disks. Kira glanced up from her packing to look at eighteen-year-old Ogden Morrow, who was standing in the doorway, blocking it with his large frame. Beyond it I could just make out a short bald man in a ragged shirt, in the midst of yelling something in a thick Cockney accent. This had to be Kira’s drunken stepfather, Graham—who was clearly enraged, and only keeping his distance thanks to the cricket bat that Og was clutching with both hands and brandishing threateningly, like Shaun of the Dead.
This was another moment Og had described in his autobiography. Something that had occurred in April of 1990, after Kira told her family she intended to move back to the States that summer, to help Og and Halliday found Gregarious Games, instead of going to university like they wanted her to. Hearing this, her abusive stepfather had become enraged and slapped her. （I could still feel the dull ache of pain around her/my left eye at that very moment.） When she called Og and told him, he jumped on the first flight to London to get Kira and bring her back home. And I was experiencing Kira’s memory of that rescue. Or a few seconds of it anyway…