Jaymie, on the other hand, did not go home with anyone that night. His evening did, however, take a surprising and romantic turn.

Once they were in the car, Daffodile asked him if he’d really led a cult, and he was about to launch into the story when his social sixth sense, which he later speculated had been numbed by the cold when he’d first met her, kicked in, and he realized he was up against a higher level of romantic disillusionment than he was used to.

Perhaps he sensed the ghost of her hyper-extraverted folk singer ex still lingering on her, or maybe he was just taking slow steps toward maturity, but he said “It’s a stupid story, it’ll bore you to death. I actually seriously love your work. We listened to your new album nonstop on tour. It’s brilliant.”

“Ok, what’s it called?” she demanded affably.

“Basilisk,” said Jaymie, whose trouble with names did not extend to the music he liked.

Daffodile was enthusiastic to talk about the record because, she told him, she’d used some unconventional chord progressions and she’d been thinking a lot about the balance between creative exploration and accessibility. She wasn’t sure if she’d pulled it off the way she wanted to, and she wanted the opinion of another musician who wasn’t part of her band or production team—she’d had a production team for the first time in her life—and Jaymie listened to her speak without interjecting except to ask thoughtful questions at appropriate intervals, or assure her that it was indeed both artful and accessible, or to tactfully disagree on production techniques just often enough that she knew he wasn’t being a yes-man to get into her pants or her band.

They were dropped off at Big Brother Coffee, where Daffodile’s companion greeted a friend and went in ahead of them. They descended the staircase into the concrete basement, commenting wearily on how loud and muddy the sound was going to be, and Daffodile stopped to speculate that she might have forgotten her earplugs. The singer fished in her purse, and Jaymie had another stroke of good luck when he was recognized by two people who’d been at a recent Bukowski Brothers’ show.

“What do you know, it’s Charles Bukowski—in the flesh!” said one.

“We attended your house concert a couple of months ago,” explained the other. “We spoke to you briefly, but there were a lot of people—it’s fine if you don’t remember.”

“Yes, I remember!” said Jaymie, who didn’t.

“We couldn’t decide if you were a cosmic nihilist or an existential one,” laughed the first.

“The show rocked!”

“That ‘Ramen High’ spoonerism—”

“I had a Bukowski binge after that night! Total immersion—I read his poetry, I read Post Office…”

“Also, you can sing, dude.”

“I don’t think you’re a nihilist at all, actually.”

“It’s easy to frame everything in that context when you’re embroiled in a Nietzsche unit for a third-year honours class,” said the first apologetically. “It tends to take over your brain!”

“Now we’re working on one of Sartre’s lectures—say, do you consider yourself a Humanist?”

“I love certain humans,” Jaymie confirmed.

“What about Absurdism? In your music, I mean.”

“I’m sorry—we’re being annoying, aren’t we?” They beamed at him.

“Not at all,” said Jaymie with sincerity. “It’s just, I never finished high school.” He gave a humble shrug.

The two students congratulated him once more, asked the dates of his next performances, promised to share their opinions on the BBBFB fan forums, and bid him enjoy the show. He turned back to Daffodile.

“I promise that I didn’t pay those people to pretend to be strangers and praise me in front of you, and that I didn’t send a list of exactly which compliments they should bestow upon me to cast me in a favourable light in the eyes of a talented and intellectually astute pop singer,” he told her.

“It’s ok, I use that trick all the time,” she said, and gave a vulpine wink. Then she confessed that she hadn’t found her earplugs and might not be up to social-butterflying around a loud punk venue just yet, and wondered whether Jaymie would like to take a brief walk over the Osborne Bridge while she mentally prepped herself for the evening ahead?

Jaymie most certainly would.

***

“Hey. You were really good,” said the glowing, soft-voiced being who’d materialized from the havoc of the mosh pit to stand in front of Hannah in all his slender, sweaty sublimity.

“No, I wasn’t,” she replied.

“Ok, but I heard that you’ve never even played a show before, so.”

“I’m going to play a lot more of them,” said Hannah resolutely.

“Me too.” He smiled and looked at his sneakers, his cherry-red hair sweeping down to hide the top half of his face. “I play the bass,” he clarified.

“Oh, cool. I like bass players. I mean, I like the bass.” Hannah winced inwardly.

“Nice! D’you want jam sometime?”

“Do I want what?”

He blushed at her. “Like, to hang out and play music.”

“Oh, I thought you were asking if I wanted to eat jam,” said Hannah.

“Yeah, I should annunciate,” said the boy, and rubbed at his piercing, which she could now see was either very new or slightly infected. “I was trying to say ‘to jam’… Also, I really like your hair.”

“I bleached it this week. Before it was black.”

“Yeah, I figured it was.” His eyes widened. “Wait, is that racist?”

“Whatever. I like your nose ring.”

“Thanks, I got it done today. Before it was… not there. So…”

“Ok, let’s have some jam.” Hannah laughed nervously.

“Oh, ha, good.”

He didn’t get another word in, because at that juncture Hannah was nearly felled by the delirious affections of her friends Robby and Bo, who’d been largely responsible for maintaining the mania in the pit. They’d disentangled themselves to come and commend her on a show well done—or maybe it wasn’t well done; they couldn’t tell and didn’t care.

By the time Hannah had recovered and congratulated herself on having spoken with him at all, the young man had disappeared and she was left to lament that, in a ridiculous sitcom-style blunder, she’d forgotten to get his name or number and now had no way of finding him.

***

Jaymie and Daff crossed the same bridge that, a few minutes later and some distance away, Aaron would gaze up at under the spell of a last shining vision of hope before taking an unfortunate nap.

They trekked through the arctic gardens of the Legislative Building, which had been elaborately arrayed in dazzling golden Christmas lights (or purple ones, depending on your perspective) in loops and coils around the trees, in robes billowing ostentatiously over the statues, and in towering three-dimensional wire formations of reindeer and beluga whales along the paths.

They shared stories of past tours and gazed, laughing, into the outrageously bright spotlights around the building for as long as they dared before giving up in fear for their vision. They shouted in wonderment and delight at the great mural of the word “cunt,” which would normally strike them as shameful and degrading, but in this context somehow seemed feminist and empowering, painted in towering purple cursive on the back of the building.

The adventure stretched past the hour that the opening band was supposed to play for, and when Jaymie finally stopped checking the clock on his phone it extended into timelessness.

That’s why Jaymie Brzezinski never made it to the secret show, and why he got home very late and frostbitten and happy, and curled up on the living room couch under a blanket with Dick Dale as an eye mask and the other two cats entwined on his belly. He'd barely made a sound coming in, being unexpectedly sober and considerate enough to avoid waking the siblings he assumed were peacefully sleeping in their rooms by then, though of course they were not.

***

“I’m like, ‘Is that racist?’—It’s like, if it wasn’t racist, you just made it racist! I’ve never said something racist in my life! And now this one time—”

“Oh my god relax,” said Maggie. “It’s forgivable.”

“It was like I was twelve and I didn’t know how to have a conversation with another human being! I didn’t know what to say…” They noticed Maggie was smiling. “What?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to enjoy your distress, it’s just so rare that you’re not, like, totally chill,” she said. "If you're really worried, you can ask her if it made her uncomfortable."

“I just—‘Do you want jam?’—what the fuck!”

“Ha!” Maggie snorted. “Rex, calm down.”

“I fucked it up, and—ow! My nose hurts.”

“Stop rubbing at it! You’ll make it worse. You know that. This is, like, your tenth piercing!”

Rex forced their fingers away from their face and ran them through their hair instead. They’d shaved the left-most third of their head and dyed the rest a vivid scarlet earlier that evening to celebrate the new piercing.

Rex was ready for grade twelve to be over. They’d quit hockey because it conflicted with jazz band events, and then they’d quit jazz band because it got in the way of the Bukowskis’ next show, and they were ready to quit the high school endeavour entirely, the way their brothers had, except that they still entertained notions of someday going to university and studying art or politics or music. At the moment, however, Rex had different priorities.

“Ok, chill out, let’s find her.” Maggie pulled out her phone.

“I tried Snapchat and Insta but no luck. All I know is her first name and I was an idiot and didn’t add her right then—not that she’d have wanted me to because I’m a total weirdo—”

"Just ask Jo," Maggie suggested.

"I can't, I feel too awkward," said Rex.

"Seriously?"

"I'll think about it."

"Well, in the meantime... Hannah, Hannah… such a common name… this is taking me a lot longer than usual…” Maggie pursed her lips in frustration. Rex knew she would consider it a great personal failure if she couldn’t locate the girl’s profile in under a minute. Rex also knew that if Maggie couldn’t find someone on the internet, it meant that person didn’t exist on the internet.

“I have some homework here, I guess. But I will find her,” she vowed. “Everyone has friends, and those friends all have friends, and I am friends with most of those friends.”

“And then what?” asked Rex dolefully.

“Then you can add her!”

“I’m not adding her! Not after that conversation.”

“Ok, then I’ll add her, and she can be my new best friend forever, instead of yours.” Maggie grinned impishly. “That’s what you wanted, right? A new best friend?” She looked back at her phone. “Hey, maybe this is her…”

“Never, you’re irreplaceable, you complete…frigging…jerkwad…” Rex made a few swipes at Maggie’ phone and finally succeeded in purloining it. “No, this Hannah is a nurse who loves Christian rock.”

“Oops, I didn’t look closely. Anyway, I overheard her drunk friends in line for the bathroom. I deduced that they’re on a gap year but she’s in first year uni.”

“She’s already in university? Ugh, she’s way too cool.”

“Let’s see, she’s in a punk band, so she’s gotta be in, like, art school, or English Lit., or gender studies...”

“She can study my gender if she wants—know what I’m saying?”

“Rex, you’re an animal!” Maggie squealed gleefully.

“I just said it and I already feel bad about it.”

“First racism and now this!”

“What’s come over me?”

“Horny little Jaymie Brzezinski Junior over here…”

The exasperated coffee shop owner, whom they’d been ignoring for the past few minutes, finally succeeded in ushering them out with the last stragglers and locking the door.

“Well, we did it, we had fun,” said Rex, bracing themself against the cold wind. “Good show. Mission accomplished.”

“Yes dear, it was quite the charming soiree! I’m ever so pleased we decided to make an appearance. People will be speaking of this grand occasion for quite some time, don’t you think? A real who’s who in there, wouldn’t you say, darling?”

“Ha! Isn’t Jo fucking amazing though? I, like, couldn’t even talk to her after.”

“Do you think she got born the same moment Hendrix died?”

“In 1970?”

“Yeah, and she just looks really young! She’s blessed-slash-cursed to keep reliving her twenties!” Maggie glanced behind her furtively, as though protecting this new hypothesis from eavesdroppers until she had it safely patented, though Rex knew she was really just making sure it was safe to pull her hood over her freezing ears without any strangers seeing and judging her for the goofy lump her bun made beneath it.

“An enchanted anti-aging serum that keeps her twenty-seven forever!” conjectured Rex. “Bestowed on her by the ghosts of the Twenty-Seven Club.”

“Yeah, because she’s like forty-something, deep down. You can hear it when she plays.”

“Like how you’re technically sixteen, but not really.”

“I know, inside I’m twenty-two. I’m trapped in the wrong body!” Maggie moaned.

“Fuck off!” said Rex, and shoved her into a snowbank. From Maggie’s coat pocket spilled a handful of miniature plastic bottles, which the two friends had to dig to retrieve in the powdery snow.

“Jager shots! I almost forgot I stole those,” said Maggie.

“Never mind, you’re sixteen after all,” said Rex. “Me, on the other hand, I’m not so sure what I am…”

“I’m more a sixteen-year-old than you are a girl,” Maggie agreed. “Here, there’s two each and a third to split.”

“Yikes, I’ll do my best,” said Rex. “Cheers!”

The two teenagers made their way across the blithely twinkling Osborne Bridge and disappeared into the night.