Jaymie slept for the entirety of the following day. He was twenty-five minutes late for band practice and they all assumed he was finishing a shift or had gone out somewhere and lost track of the time, until Rex had the inspired idea to check the old loveseat in their enclosed front porch and found him curled up under all three of the Brzezinskis’ ancient cats and two ratty blankets that had been deemed too decrepit to be allowed on anyone’s bed, but still acceptable as knee-shawls during evening porch hangouts.

The Brzezinski siblings were the third generation of their family to watch over the old house on Pandora Street. Their Grandma and Grandpa McLeod had bought the home in 1965 and lived there until their retirement in 2000, at which point they’d left it to their itinerant daughter and moved to Florida to live in warmth and comfort. The cats had opted to stay and keep watch over the house rather than snowbird away to a warmer locale; they were estimated to have moved in at around the same time as the grandparents and likely didn’t have another relocation in them.

Their home was two and a half stories tall, had an outward appearance of dilapidation, was cluttered but clean within and, most importantly, boasted a cozy and well-furnished basement jam space. Jo hadn't seen much the house beyond the jam space. She'd never asked for a tour.

Herman, a massive long-haired tabby, creaked down the stairs as Jaymie haphazardly arranged himself by his keyboard and guitar. Two out of three cats had gone deaf in the early 2000’s and as a result now enjoyed actively participating in band practices. The third sang along loudly from the safety of the main floor in a voice that didn’t quite approximate English syllables or a steady pitch.

As Jaymie set up, Aaron made sure no one had curled up for a nap in the bass drum and began a quiet swing beat. Rex began walking a bassline and Jo tried out some dissonant jazz chords while the tubes in her amp warmed up.

Jo had realized at her first real practice with Aaron that she had judged his playing unfairly at the beginning. At their house concert the previous month, she’d been disconcerted by the inconsistency of the tempo, and it was dismaying to think it could be the downfall of a band that otherwise had so much potential.

She’d since upgraded her opinion of his musicianship—Aaron’s drumming was entirely adequate, and at times even inventive in a way Colin’s steady hands hadn’t been, provided no one had been murdered in the building they were playing in, and he had to believe no one was going to get murdered by the end of the night, which seemed to be difficult criteria to fulfil lately.

Fortunately, they were leaving the province, if only for a weekend. Regina would probably have its fair share of challenges, but at least no active serial killers that they were aware of.

“Today, a new song!” said Jaymie, gulping coffee and incorrectly plugging and re-plugging XLR cables into the inputs of a vocal effects pedal. He continued, in a mumble, “Then we run our pop-country set.” Aaron groaned. “—And none of your highbrow music snobbery bullshit, Aar. Sometimes you have to give THE PEOPLE…” His voice was suddenly magnified as he succeeded in connecting his mic to his pedal to the PA. He clicked the delay on. “…what they want.” What they want they want they wantwantwa

Two years ago, the Bukowskis had decided to supplement their musical income by going the commercial route. Jaymie had initiated the change after attending a particularly inspiring arts career workshop that promulgated the benefits of selling out.

“You know who loves family bands?” he’d lectured his family band. “Country fans! Well, folk fans. But we already play one genre that doesn’t make any cash. So.”

The extra couple of sets of country covers (and one or two only slightly sarcastic-sounding originals) wasn’t an inconvenience to Jo. She’d never been a country fan, but she was a shredder, and she took to learning the chicken-pickin’ style with a gusto that renewed her musical spirit and kept her stone-cold sober for at least two or three hours out of every day.

“What’s the new song?” asked Rex, their usual calm expression taking on a slightly upturned variation that Jo was coming to recognize as eagerness.

“Yes, thank you for asking, T-Rex. I just wrote it! In the front porch a few minutes ago.”

“You were passed out cold,” said Rex.

“There’s no use contradicting him, Rex. You know that,” said Aaron, impatiently clicking a rhythm on the rim of his snare drum.

“What’s it about?” Rex asked.

“Yes, Trent Rex-nor. Again, good question, thank you.” Jaymie adjusted his vocal level on the mixer, cleared his throat into the mic, struck a chord, and sang, “Mira, Miiiiiiiiirrrrrraaaaaaa…”

***

The Bukowskiphiles were also having a creatively productive day, having finally decided on a nice gesture to send their favourite band off on their first tour. In attendance at the gathering in Maggie’s living room were Maggie, Shahla, and Shahla’s little sister Ayla who, at twelve, was too young to go to shows and therefore only held the status of “Junior Member.”

Stan’s presence would have been too difficult to explain to Maggie’s mother, but he would be allowed to Skype in at some point to give a presentation on references to the novel “Ham on Rye” in Jaymie’s new song “Ramen High,” and no doubt give his opinion on their new guitarist.

The three girls had strewn the carpet with craft supplies while the band's second EP played on repeat. Maggie had drawn the four Bukowskis as woodland animals, positioned onstage with their instruments. Ayla had printed her own and Jaymie's initials in perfect gothic calligraphy script, surrounded by a loopy expanding network of pink marker-drawn hearts that gave the impression of a very affectionate acid trip.

Shahla had written a computer program which, once fed all of Jaymie's lyrics, outputted its own new and original Bukowski lyrics in varying degrees of lunacy.

Next on the agenda was to thoroughly research the tour venues where the Bukowskis would be stopping. This was an important part of staying on the same page as the band when they were unable to be with them in person. The first was easy to find, a pleasant-looking pub with few distinguishing features.

The second venue proved more of a challenge, since it was a private house concert. Shahla had no choice but to hack into the Bukowskis’ Facebook messages, find their correspondence with the show organizer, hack the promoter’s google account, determine her address via an order confirmation email from Amazon, and do a thorough examination of the house using Google Street View. A fan’s gotta do what a fan’s gotta do.

The show’s host had a huge but otherwise normal-looking house on the outskirts of the small city. It was light blue with white trim. Shahla made a note of this detail in her BBBFB spreadsheet.

Stan was having some trouble with his Skype connection, and she absentmindedly scanned through the host’s email while they waited. Maggie finished her drawing and sent a text message rated approximately 18A to the boy she'd befriended at the Bukowskis' house show.

"Hey, look at this." Shahla spun her computer screen around to face Maggie. It showed an email from a few days before. Maggie's eyes darted down the page, narrowing as she scrolled.

“Who are these people?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Practically all her emails are like this.” Shahla returned to the inbox and pulled up another email. “Do you think we should tell Rex?”

“I think we should go to this show,” said Maggie.

"I don't think I'll be allowed to drive to a different province for the weekend," said Shahla. "Especially to go to some stranger's house for a private event."

“Can I come?” asked Ayla, pausing in the midst of a reapplication of the lipstick she was using to make kiss marks on the purple construction paper of her card.

“Did you hear what I just said?” Shahla lobbed a glue stick at her sister, already fabricating an email in her head, sent to her mother from her programming instructor’s account, about a youth tech conference in Saskatchewan which would enrich her young web-developer mind…

“We can take my dad’s car,” said Maggie.

“I’m not sure...” Your child, having shown strong potential in the field of computer science, is invited to attend a Canadian Youth Conference for… No, The Western Canadian Tech Conference of… She’d have to come up with a fake website and everything.

Just then, Stan decided to try unplugging his router and plugging it back in again, and the deities of internet connection looked up from their cat memes and smiled upon him. The video-chat ringtone piped out of Shahla's computer.

“Hey Stan,” said Maggie.

“Greetings,” said Stan. “Today, I want to talk to you all about symbolism…”

***

They played through the country covers, then ran the new song four more times, reworking the structure, adding a chorus repetition, lengthening the guitar solo by eight bars, subtracting the extra chorus, changing the background texture in the second verse. They left the vocal harmonies, the development of which usually involved some amount of controversy and abuse, for last.

“You want me to sing a third above the entire time and then randomly drop down to this weird low thing in the middle of a line?” Aaron asked dubiously.

“Yes, correct, I’m so glad you understand. Well done. Should we take it from the bridge?”

“Jay, that doesn’t make any sense. If I’m already singing a higher part, why don’t I just stay there and neither of us has to make a big switch all of the sudden?”

“I just, this is how I hear it,” said Jaymie, shrugging.

"You just like that harmony line better! It's the one part where the harmony moves more than the melody. You can't stand not being on the better part for even two lines!"

“No, that part is the melody. They swap registers,” Jaymie insisted. “That’s how I wrote it.”

“You didn’t write it. I literally just came up with it while we were singing, like two minutes ago!”

“Right, but it’s how I imagined it—that’s why I told you to sing a third above!”

Aaron was about to retort when Rex broke in. “Guys! You have the same voice. Literally nobody will notice the difference.”

“The difference is in the delivery, Rex,” said Jaymie adamantly. “No one who has heard us would mistake us.”

"Anyone who listens to the recordings just thinks you layered your own harmonies."

“What!” said Aaron.

"There are obviously two of us!" said Jaymie.

“Jo?” asked Rex, and Jo was taken off guard at finding herself pulled into a family dispute. Maybe this meant she was officially welcomed into the band.

“Yeah, I figured you multitracked yourself,” she admitted.

“Goddamn it,” muttered Aaron.

“Well,” said Jaymie, looking at Aaron in defeat. “Arm wrestle for the higher part?”

“Tenors,” muttered Rex. “God.”

Aaron rose compliantly from behind the kit. Rex rolled their eyes and swung their bass off their shoulder.

“This will take forever. Want a snack?” they asked Jo. She nodded and undid her guitar strap.

Jaymie was slightly bigger than Aaron, but Aaron spent many hours each week beating on inanimate objects with sticks, so the two were perfectly matched in strength. The real suspense of the contest lay in whether Jaymie would get distracted by something before Aaron started to get worried about the health ramifications of prolonged strain on a muscle group.

Rex led the way upstairs and into the kitchen, where Diana Ross lay in the middle of the floor like a forgotten bundle of dishtowels, exhausted from trying to make her octave-above harmonies heard from one floor away. Jo touched her side when Rex wasn’t looking, not convinced she was breathing, and was reassured by a gentle purr beneath her fingertips.

Rex opened the door of the fridge, on top of which sat an impressive collection of marshmallow-filled cereals.

“Do you guys rent this place? Looks like it’s a pretty big house,” said Jo, mostly to make conversation. Sometimes young people, even if they were only five or ten years younger than her, made her feel self-conscious. Even nice ones like Rex could throw her off a little. It was something about their limitless potential.

“No, it’s my mom’s house. We look after it, and the cats.” Rex found containers of salsa and cheese whiz in the fridge and then rummaged through a cupboard for tortilla chips.

“She’s travelling, right? A musician?”

“That’s right, she’s usually in the States. She plays in Vegas, or she’ll get on with touring shows. There’s a more work down there.” Rex poured salsa into a bowl.

“But, so, if she’s down there, you weren’t just brought up by…” Jo raised her eyebrows and glanced at the staircase, whence the twins could be faintly heard trying to psych each other out. Rex laughed.

“We stayed with our aunts when she was away. You know Sasha—her moms. Aaron and Jaymie moved back here when they were eighteen, and I was allowed to come live with them a year ago, provided my health and grades remain in acceptable condition. I was back here practicing all the time anyway.”

“And your dad doesn’t live here?”

“He lives in Poland. We’re going to visit him someday. He says he’ll pay for our tickets whenever we decide. But we wouldn’t go there unless it was with a really big music project. Like, with lots of security. It’s too dangerous otherwise.”

Jo was confused for a moment, then said, “Rex, uh, you know Poland is a First World country, right? With a pretty high standard of living?”

Rex made an unreadable teenager expression at her. Jo wondered if Rex felt like she was grilling them, and volunteered, “I just moved a couple months ago, out of my parents’ place. Again. Must be nice to be in your own place for long enough to get comfortable and set up a jam space and everything.”

“Where was that? Are you from here? Do you have siblings?” Rex grinned embarrassedly at this lapse in their impassive demeanor. “Sorry. I’m sure there will be lots of time on tour.”

Suddenly, Jo felt much more at ease. “I have one sister,” she said. “We don’t have a lot in common, though. Not like you guys.”

A round of swearing from downstairs signaled that one of Rex’s brothers had won the upper harmony. Rex scooped up both dip bowls and the chip bag in one stretchy musician hand and plucked the limp cat off the floor with the other, then led the way back downstairs. Aaron was stretching and shaking out his arm. Jaymie had just turned off the PA.

“I don’t care who won,” Rex told them.

“Okay, well, the last thing for today, I wrote a song too,” said Aaron.

“Is it about dogs?” Jaymie and Rex asked at the same time.

“No! Jesus, you think I can only write songs about dogs?”

“It’s just, you write a lot of songs about dogs,” Rex said apologetically.

“I need to work through things sometimes.”

“What’s the song about?” Rex asked.

“Never mind,” said Aaron.

“We’ll have to hear it next time, Aar-bear,” said Jaymie. “It’s time for—”

“Snacks!” Rex said at the same time as Jaymie finished with “—us to steal more vegetables to fund our—” and immediately corrected to “Snacks, I meant snacks!”