"When I woke up the next morning, it was 10 min past the time I was supposed to have arrived at school, less than an hour before the start of my ceremony, and I couldn't find my shoes anywhere. I grabbed a pair of glittery silver heels by the door. They belonged to a stranger. I don't know what she must have thought when she woke up to find them gone, but I know that for me they became a kind of talisman: something strange and glittering under my somber black robes, these stolen disco shoes, the closing beat of a night I couldn't fully remember. They were proof that I was living beyond the boundaries of the predictable, the expected, the obedient, and the ordinary."