The girls circulated in the Caribbean and hip-hop rooms and watched drag performances. They were ready to go when bullets began zooming past them. Murray and Carter managed to leave but then went back for Parker. Instinctively, Parker pulled the girls into the bathroom, ignoring an exit nearby. It was a split-second decision that cost them their safety. They were hostages.

“It still burns me to this day,” she said, “because there’s nothing that I could have done to change that moment.”

Before that day — that moment and those that followed — Parker aspired to be a celebrity makeup artist.

Then came the shooter.

He murdered the set of people in the first bathroom stall, then the second. He shot all three girls, Parker in her arm and breast, and cousin Murray, 18, in her arms.

Captive in the bathroom for three hours, Parker witnessed the gunman make his rounds, sometimes shooting at dead bodies. When he returned to the bathroom — which he did three more times — she stared at him.

“I want him to think, at least I died with my eyes open,” she said.

She eyed the standoff between the gunman and the police outside. She saw his body fall to the ground and bullets ricochet.

But she didn’t see that one of the gunman’s last three shots hit Murray’s ear — a blow that made her the youngest of 49 victims.

“For a long time, I was messed up,” Parker said. “I didn’t know what direction of life I was going to take, and I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

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