I flag the head technician down, waving my free hand and pointing at my microphone. My other hand is busy chiming out the chorus of the song we’re rehearsing on my keyboard. I’m supposed to be singing backup vocals right now, but the mic’s getting drowned out.

This is why we have sound checks.

The technician flashes me a thumbs up, and when I go to sing, my voice booms out so loud everyone stops what they’re doing to throw their hands over their ears. A screechy whine of feedback follows, and the rehearsal grinds to a halt.

“Shit!” Ace swears, screwing his face up in pain. “Are they trying to bust out everyone’s hearing?”

“Sorry!” the technician calls. “We’re gonna fix that. Take five, guys.”

Our manager scored us a last minute gig filling in for an act that dropped out of a Christmas benefit concert. Apparently the end of November is early enough for a Christmas benefit. We’ll be closing the show tonight after two other bands perform. The gig sold out within a few hours of us being added to the line-up, and there are already people hawking tickets outside the theatre. It’s been almost three months since we’ve performed, and I think we all forgot how crazy things can get when Sherbrooke Station is involved.

We’re kind of a big deal.

Nico, our usual stage manager, wanders over wearing a headset and passes us all water bottles. It might be almost winter outside, but it always feels like standing in a motherfucking desert under the stage lights.

“Sorry, guys,” he apologizes. “This crew is made of clowns. You’d think the Théâtre would have their shit together, but no.”

“Just make sure we don’t deafen anyone, and we’ll be fine,” Matt jokes.

Nico just grumbles something into his headset and storms off. I open the water bottle and tilt my head back to pour a stream down my sweaty face.

“Save the shower show for when your girlfriend gets here,” Ace tells me.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” I reply, letting my bun down so I can shake the water out of my hair.

“Well you seem pretty fucking into her,” Matt pipes up. “I’ve basically had the apartment to myself these past few weeks. It’s been heaven. No unexpected harmonica solos or power tools going off at three in the morning. Pure bliss.”

“Yeah, because he’s too busy giving Molly his power tool every night,” Ace adds.

That’s not a bad name for it.

He’s wrong, though. I’ve been spending a lot of time with Molly, and we’ve both been enjoying the hell out of ‘working up’ to things, but we still haven’t actually had sex. I’m more than happy to go at whatever pace she needs, and sometimes I even wish we were moving slower. Being with her is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. Sometimes it feels like she’s a song I was trying to find for so long that I forgot about it until I heard it again, like she was there in the back of my head all along and I didn’t even know it.

It scares me shitless.

“I told you guys, we’re taking it slow. We don’t have a label on it yet.”

“Like you’d actually label anything,” Ace continues. “I was joking when I called her your girlfriend. I still can’t even believe you’ve been chasing after her this long. It’s like you’re her puppy or something.”

He holds his hands up in front of him like paws and makes a dopey looking face while he pants, his tongue lolling.

I slosh some of my water on him. “Va t’en, débile!”

“No water fights on the stage, children!” Nico’s voice shouts from somewhere near the curtains.

“She is coming tonight though, right?” Matt asks.

“Oh, she’ll be coming all right...”

This time I skip the water and slug Ace in the stomach instead.

“Ow,” he says pointedly, even though I didn’t hit him that hard.

“Yeah, she’ll be here. She’s got some friend visiting from Kingston, and I got them both backstage passes.” I already know Kay and Stéphanie will be at the show too, so I turn to Cole. “Roxy gonna make it tonight?”

He shrugs. “I think so. She said she wanted to. I got her a pass.”

“And so the Roxle Coaster continues,” I say.

Cole stares at me like he’s trying to set me on fire with his eyes. “The what?”

“It’s what the fans call you,” I explain, ignoring the death glare. “Roxle is like, Roxanne and Cole combined, and then they call you the Roxle Coaster because you’re always so up and down.”

Matt bursts out laughing so hard he clutches his stomach. “Oh my god,” he gasps, “how do you even know that?”

“Uh, Molly used to be kind of a Sherbrooke Station fangirl.”

I accidentally found Sounds of the Station open on her laptop one day, and when she got all defensive about it, I bugged her until she admitted to being one the people who started the site. She made me swear I wouldn’t tell the band, even though I tried to make her understand how impressed they’d be. That website gave us hope for our career back when we were still struggling to get people to listen to our music, never mind actually pay for it.

“Do they have a name for Ace and Stéphanie?” Matt asks me.

“Yeah, they call them Stacie. You and Kay are Kitty Katt.”

Matt looks very disturbed, but Ace nearly kills himself laughing. Even Cole cracks a smile.

“What would you and Molly be?” Ace wheezes. “Molp?”

“That sounds like someone gagging.” Matt pretends to cough. “Molp. Molp.”

We get called back to our instruments after that, and the sound check continues. My microphone seems to be fixed, and we rehearse a few songs before we’re kicked off the stage just before the doors open up. The place isn’t all that big of a venue, and there’s barely room for us backstage, but we’re told to stay out of view from the audience in case we start some kind of mob.

Nothing boosts your confidence like getting told just the sight of you can turn a crowd into a riot.

“The girls are here,” Matt announces, looking down at his phone. “They all arrived together. They want to watch from the front, so they’re not coming backstage until the end of the show.”

Code Viagra, of all people, have the first set of the night. We all bump fists before they go on. Truth be told, they put on a pretty good show, and the crowd is amped up for the second performance from some electronic duo. I angle myself to get a view of the audience, but I can’t spot any sign of Molly or the other girls from where I’m standing.

When the MC announces our set, I forget all about anything except the chanting crowd and the energy that starts to crackle through the air, making my hair stand on end. This is what it’s always like when we play. This is why people keep coming back for more. Something almost eerie fills the room whenever we take control of it, like people slip into this vortex where there’s no yesterday or tomorrow. There’s no up or down, no right or wrong, no me and no you. There’s just this, and it’s enough to make you feel like you’re dying and flying all at once.

We take the stage in darkness. After so many shows, it’s a ritual for us now: the silent, slow walk to our instruments. I breathe in the anticipation on everyone’s tongues, and then I play a few low, wavering notes on the synthesiser. Ace echoes them on his guitar a few moments later. The crowd is completely silent.

Above us, the Sherbrooke Station sign we bring to all our shows—the one that’s made to look like a metro stop marker—flickers a few times before its blue light glows.

Then we start fucking thrashing.

It’s only when we pause after our third song, sweat dripping down my neck and chest as the crowd roars for more, that I remember to look for Molly. I find her right away, in the jostling front row, clinging to her spot on the railing for dear life. This place doesn’t even usually have a railing, but I’m glad they set one up. These people look ready to rush the stage.

Molly’s wild hair is what I looked for when I scanned the front row to find her, but it’s not what makes her stand out tonight. Her whole body seems to be lit up, like she’s putting out some kind of force field that makes her look more alive than anyone around her. Her teeth catch the blue light spilling off the stage, and when her eyes shift to meet mine, I swear I can hear hurricanes howling and buildings collapsing and a hundred thousand speakers spilling out waves of sound so loud they burst.

It’s terrifying, and I don’t know what scares me more: the things I feel when I’m with her, or the emptiness that creeps in when I’m not.

She and I are a language I don’t know how to speak yet, so I pour everything I’m feeling into another language, one I know better than any other. I launch into our next song before the guys have even signalled they’re ready, and I play harder than I’ve ever played before. I work the keyboard like it’s her body, like if I hit the right notes at the right time, I can make her come apart in the crowd. I stare her down as I step to the centre of the stage, right in the middle of our last song. Ace backs out of the spotlight, and I pull my harmonica from my pocket to begin the solo I always perform during this track.

The crowd whoops and screams, their cries rising so loud they almost block out the music every time I let it swell. I fucking wail on that thing, the solo getting more complex and intense than anything I’ve done on the harmonica before. I didn’t even know I could play this way, but my mouth and my hands are controlling themselves now, carrying me along for the ride, demanding I call up the air they need from somewhere deep in my lungs.

We’re supposed to play the chorus one more time after my solo, but when I finally finish with a long, wavering note, there’s a split second of complete silence. I glance beside me and see Ace standing there, guitar hanging off his neck and his jaw slack as he stares at me. I don’t know who starts the applause, but it goes from hesitant to deafening in record time. When I search for Molly in the crowd again, she’s caught in a sea of raised and clapping hands, but her own are still clenched around the railing.

She’s looking up at me with eyes like holy fire, the kind of flames that make you beg for more even as you burn. Every muscle in her body seems like it’s screaming out my name, and I face her with a heaving chest too full to leave room for fear.

Later that night, we’re all packed into a grungy dive bar in the Mile End, a few blocks from the theatre. There was an official after party at a club, but Sherbrooke Station has reached the point where showing up at after parties just ends with us getting mobbed. We tried to help pack all our shit up tonight, but Nico said we were becoming a security hazard and shooed us out the back door. The girls met up with us a block away, and Kay suggested the dive bar.

I have my arm resting on Molly’s shoulders where she’s sitting next to me. My body turns into a sparkplug whenever she shifts against it. I know she feels it too, but we’re keeping it together. For now. Every minute that ticks by makes the sticky bathroom door in the back corner look more and more inviting.

I have to distract myself. I lean forwards so I can see past Molly and talk to her friend.

“So Justine, how do you like living in Kingston?”

Justine blinks at me with those scarily wide, crazy fan-girl eyes that Molly used to make every time a member of Sherbrooke Station walked in the room.

“It’s, uh...small?” she squeaks.

Cole’s standing on the other side of her and accidentally bumps her with his elbow just then. He turns and apologizes, patting her on the shoulder before going back to his conversation with Roxanne. Justine looks down at her own shoulder like it just turned to gold. Molly and I share a smile.

“Mesdames, I noticed your drinks are empty,” I say to both of them. “Another round?”

They agree, and I head over to the bar. The place is bumping, and it looks like it will be a few minutes before I can flag the bartender down. I pull my phone out and check my notifications. I’m not much of a social media guy, and the band locked me out of our official accounts after I wrote too many posts about ham, but I’m still getting tagged in stuff like crazy right now. Someone already put my solo on YouTube.

Matt told me it was the best thing he’s ever heard me play. I don’t really feel like it was me playing at all. It was like something was fuelling me, some force that was stuck inside me and needed to get out.

Freaky shit, man.

I swipe to clear all the notifications away and notice there’s one telling me I’ve got an email. I scroll to my inbox and find it’s from my dad. The message is short and to the point: he wants me to come to the Christmas gala the Parti Québécois hosts every year in Trois-Rivières. I haven’t gone since I dropped out of school, but like my brother warned me, it looks like this year my dad has been forced to call the back-up son in.

The shining suit of armour I feel like I’ve been wearing all night cracks a little.

“Fuck ҫa,” I mutter, as the bartender finally heads my way.

I can’t forget it, though. My dad has that effect on me. As much as I want to tell him to shove his judgmental comments and passive-aggressive emails up his ass, I’ve never been able to let go of the idea that one day, he’ll finally clap me on the shoulder and tell me I’ve done well. Just once. Just so I can know what it feels like.

I’m off for the rest of the night, forcing myself to laugh and make jokes that aren’t even funny as I squeeze my beer bottle so hard Molly eventually leans in to ask me if I’m okay.

“Yeah.” I brush my thumb over the back of her neck. “Just tired.”

Stéphanie and Ace are the first to head out, just before one in the morning. It really hits me then, how much things have changed. Ace used to be the one getting dragged out of bars after last call, cursing the bouncer into next year as he landed on his drunk ass on the sidewalk. I never thought I’d see him nursing a water glass and yawning at midnight.

I also never thought I’d see him this happy.

Kay and Matt head out next, grumbling about the trip to Kay’s apartment. That leaves Molly, Justine, and I to stand there trying to ignore the way Roxanne and Cole are giving each other their typical I-want-to-set-you-on-fire-but-also-fuck-your-brains-out vibes.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” Justine announces, when she’s finished the last sip of her beer.

Molly turns to me as soon as she’s left the table. “She’s freaking out. I think part of her didn’t actually believe I hang out with Sherbrooke Station now.”

“Yeah, she looks like she could maybe use an oxygen mask or something,” I agree.

Molly drops her voice and lets her fingers trail up my arm. “I wish you could come home with me tonight.”

There’s nothing I want more, but right now, I might want it for different reasons than her. The message from my dad threw me off more than I thought it could, and crawling into bed with Molly sounds like the perfect way to turn this evening back around.

I catch her hand and take it in mine. “I wish that too. Make her sleep on the couch?”

“I’m not that rude.” She swats my shoulder. “We should probably head out after she gets back. We’re going sightseeing tomorrow.”

“Sounds fun.”

She hesitates for a moment. “Maybe you could come with us? I know we’re not, like...I know that’s kind of a boyfriend thing to do, and we’re aren’t, uh—”

“Molly.” I tilt her chin up towards me, cutting off her sputtering. “I would love to.”