I’m just calling to say merry Christmas. Merry, merry Christmas, JP.

If they hadn’t been playing that English song on the radio at the thrift store yesterday, I wouldn’t have got the reference. I do know that waking up to a message of Molly singing my name would have felt like a punch in the stomach whether I got the reference or not. I’ve replayed it a dozen times, and it never gets any less painful.

I still keep fucking listening to it.

I shove my phone back down in my pocket. I’m supposed to be wrapping presents right now. December twenty-first, and I’ve already got my shopping done. Usually I push it by a few more days, but I came to Trois-Rivières earlier than usual this year, and there’s not much to fill the time with.

My family gives me shit over it every year, but I always buy everyone stuff from the thrift store. They tell me I’m cheap, but I just call it being original. Who wants something anyone else could pick up at the mall when you could get a gift that’s completely unique, something that’s made its way through history just to find you?

The presents look like they were wrapped by a five year-old, but they’re done and ready to go under the tree now. I carry them from where I’ve been wrapping in my bedroom down to the living room. It takes two trips before they’re all in place.

Maman has been in the kitchen pretty much since I arrived from Montreal. There’s still three days until le réveillon—the big Christmas eve meal we have in Quebec, where you stay up until midnight and eat bûche de noel for dessert—but she seems to have a full seventy-two hours of work left.

“Ҫa va, maman?” I call, as I join her in the kitchen.

She has an apron on, and her sleeves are rolled up past her elbows. There’s a bit of flour stuck to her cheek.

“Ouais, ҫa va.” She pauses to wipe her shiny forehead with the back of her hand. “This was easier before all your siblings and cousins started bringing their boyfriends and girlfriends along, not to mention the new babies that keep popping up every year.”

She’s complaining now, but I know she’ll spend all of Christmas day verbally abusing us for not giving her grandkids yet. Carol gets the worst of it, since she’s the only one who’s actually married.

“At least I’m easy to please,” I tell her. “Just give me a plate of ham sandwiches, and I’m good. No girlfriend or babies here.”

Something in her expression shifts. She turns away from me to hover over the stove.

“It would have been nice to see la petite Molly again,” she murmurs.

My spine stiffens. “Yeah, because it went so well last time. I told you we broke up, anyway.”

Maman moves to open the microwave, where the timer has just gone off. “She seemed like such a nice girl. I’ve been meaning to ask you if—ben, quoi?” She pulls the bowl of chopped potatoes out and pokes them. “Tabernouche, they’re still cold.”

I watch her stick them back in and punch in a minute on the timer. It starts to count down, but the light inside the microwave doesn’t come on. Maman grumbles to herself as she tries a combination of different buttons and slaps the machine’s sides a few times.

“Voyons,” she finally admits. “It’s broken. Can you have a look at this, Jean-Paul?”

I’m already pulling the tool box out from under the sink. Twenty minutes later, I’ve figured out what the problem is, but I’ll need to make a trip to the hardware store before I can fix it. I borrow Maman’s car and have to park all the way at the back of the lot at Réno-Dépôt; looks like I’m not the only last minute Christmas shopper.

I’m scanning the electrical aisle for what I need when I hear someone calling my name.

“Well if it isn’t my most famous student. Jean-Paul Bouchard-Guindon: the hero’s return.”

I turn to find a grey-haired man in a baseball hat and parka walking towards me.

“Monsieur Drolet!”

I haven’t seen my high school shop teacher in almost two years, but just the sight of him makes it feel like he was showing me how to use a scroll saw and yelling at me for doing it wrong only yesterday.

“Comment ҫa va?” I ask him, grinning.

“Bien, mon gars. Très bien.” He claps me on the shoulder. “It’s good to see you. You know, I came to the last concert your band played here. What a show.”

I almost laugh at the mental image. Sherbrooke Station shows are known to get wild in Trois-Rivières. We ruined our relationship with the last venue we played at after I ordered the crowd to start a giant mosh pit and then launched myself inside it, but it was worth it. I can just see Monsieur Drolet standing there in his ball cap, getting jostled around by sweaty twenty-somethings.

“Merci, monsieur. That means a lot.”

Despite the funny visual, knowing he was there really does mean a lot to me. Monsieur Drolet’s class was one of the only places at school where I didn’t feel like a total idiot. I couldn’t sit still for more than five minutes in a history lesson. Even in music class, where I could play everything the teacher put in front of me, I’d end up getting thrown out in the hall after getting bored of repeating the same four bars of ‘My Heart Will Go On.’

When I was in Monsieur Drolet’s class, with a piece of machinery or a project in my hands, listening was easier. I could focus. He used to let me come in and work on stuff at lunchtime. We even spent my senior year building a homemade electric guitar together. He brought me all these brochures for carpentry and design schools, and he couldn’t hide his disappointment when I decided to go into political science.

“You know, I tell all my students that I taught Jean-Paul Bouchard-Guindon,” Monsieur Drolet says. “I tell them you were one of my best pupils.”

“I only got a seventy in your class,” I remind him.

It was my best grade ever.

“That was only because you never handed your projects in on time,” he shoots back. “They were always much better than the shit I usually have to assess. All those half-assed birdhouses...”

We laugh together for a moment. I still remember my birdhouse. It was pimpin’.

“So they’re excited to know you taught Marc Bouchard’s son?” I ask.

He shakes his head, confused. “Mon gars, they’re excited to know I taught you. You’re the biggest celebrity in town. The high school is practically ready to erect a statue in your honour. Who would have thought a Francophone boy from Trois-Rivières would end up in the biggest rock band in the country? Marc Bouchard, ha. The kids these days don’t even know who Marc Bouchard is.”

He’s exaggerating. He has to be. My father’s shadow is too long to have lifted off this town so soon, and as for the statue part, well, there’s no way someone with my track record or grade average would ever be recognized in any way by that school.

“So, are you Christmas shopping?” Monsieur Drolet asks.

He doesn’t seem to notice how much he’s shocked me. Being admired in Montreal is one thing. Montreal doesn’t give a fuck about my past. Montreal has only ever known me as a rock star, but no matter how famous Sherbrooke Station gets, here in Trois-Rivières, I’m still just Jean-Paul. I’m still just the funny kid who wasn’t much good at anything but being funny.

“I, uh, non,” I scramble to reply. “My maman’s microwave broke, and I’m buying some stuff to fix it.”

He claps my shoulder again. “There’s a good man. This is why everyone should take my shop class: real life skill application.”

I shake my head, grinning. “The most advanced thing we ever did in your class was build cars powered by mouse traps.”

He waves his hand at me. “Well, I gave you the fundamentals. I should get back to my wife now, Jean-Paul. Madame Drolet needs these light bulbs, and she is not a patient woman. Plus, I think those ladies are waiting to talk to you.”

He nods over my shoulder. I glance back to see two girls who can’t be older than twenty eyeing me with their phones in hand, the sure sign of a fan looking for a photo.

I turn to Monsieur Drolet again. “It was good to see you, Monsieur. Very good.”

“You should come by sometime. I have some CDs for you to sign, and our daughters aren’t coming home until New Year’s, so we have more Christmas baking than we know what do with.”

“I’d like that,” I tell him.

He pulls out the same style of graph paper notepad he always had on hand when I was in school and writes his number down for me. I don’t bother telling him I could have just put it straight in my phone. Once he’s gone, the girls approach and politely ask for some photos. I listen to them talk about how much they love Sherbrooke Station and how many of our shows they’ve been to, and for some reason, all I can think about is Molly.

Actually, there are a million reasons all I can think about is Molly: her face looking up at me from the front row of the crowd, the way her eyes shine when she hears just the right song at just the right moment, the bite of her fingernails digging into my shoulders before she falls apart in my arms. She’s in my brain. She’s in my blood. She’s the sound that keeps me up at night, the roar that refuses to let me forget.

It’s stupid. It’s fucking stupid to let something like that go, to watch it slip through your hands and out the door without even lifting a finger to stop it. I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have had to do that. It’s all so wrong. The way I’ve been living has been so wrong for so many years, and it’s finally catching up with me. Matt asked me what my plan was, and I told him I’d go back to the way things were before Molly, but I’m starting to realize that isn’t an option.

There’s this big shift inside me I can’t ignore. My life is unstable ground, and I’m the rumbling, shuddering, fidgeting earthquake that’s going to tear it apart.

I pay for the microwave parts and hurry through the parking lot to the car. I’m so agitated I probably shouldn’t even be driving, but I make it through the ten minute trip back home and stride into the kitchen, where Maman is still hunched over the stove. I drop the bag from the hardware store on the counter, and she looks up at me.

“Ah, bon, you’re back. Thank you for going.”

“You’re welcome.” Even I’m startled by how tense I sound.

“Are you all right?” Maman asks.

I rifle through the bag and pull out a package of screws that I pretend to be busy with. “I don’t know.”

“Jean-Paul.”

I stay focused on the package. The maudit thing won’t open. I start breathing heavily as I try to lift the edges with my too-short nails. I’m about ready to start swearing in front of my mother when I feel her hand on my arm.

“Jean-Paul.” Her voice is soft but firm. She takes the package out of my hand and puts it back down on the counter, then pats my sleeve a few times. “Is it...is it getting bad again?”

I go still for a second, and then I shake her hand off my arm.

“It is called ADHD, Maman. Why can’t we call it that? Why is that a bad word?” I start pacing the room, looking anywhere but at her. “Why am I hiding it? My whole life, that’s what you told me I had to do, but why wasn’t there another option? Why didn’t we try anything else? It obviously wasn’t the best solution. I barely passed high school, Maman! And forget college. That was just another thing I was too stupid to do. Do you know how bad that made me feel?”

She doesn’t offer a reply, and I plow right on, hardly giving her time to come up with one.

“No, of course you don’t! I’m just silly little Jean-Paul, le bébé, the funny one, the jokester, the one who doesn’t take anything seriously. Of course I didn’t take anything seriously! Do you know much it would have hurt if I had? If I let myself care about everything I couldn’t do?”

I hear a sniff. I force myself to ignore the fact that she’s probably crying right now. I’m turned away from her, hand braced against the kitchen island to keep me from moving around anymore.

“And then the one time I did something I was proud of, you and Papa ignored it. Do you even realize how impossible it is for a band to succeed like mine has? Maman, it’s practically a miracle, and I helped make it happen, and you don’t even care. It doesn’t count. It’s not enough. I’m not enough. Is that why you made me hide it all those years? Were you ashamed?”

I hear her gasp when my fist slams down on the granite. I finally turn and see her with her hands pressed over her mouth, eyes wide with horror. Her shoulders are shaking. She suddenly looks so small.

“Maman...”

She shakes her head, blinking back tears, and rushes out of the room.

“Maman!”

I follow her to the kitchen’s entrance, but I stop there and watch her flee up the stairs. I hear the bedroom door open and close. I want to feel regret, but I’m still buzzing with too much anger. I walk back into the kitchen, grab a pair scissors, and cut the screw package to shreds, letting all the little pieces inside scatter onto the island.

I’m still tearing up cardboard when Maman thunders down the stairs and into the kitchen. She slams a plain blue binder down on the island and takes a step back.

“Regarde,” she orders. “Look.”

I hesitate before reaching for the binder. I flip to the cover open, and at first, I don’t understand what I’m looking at. It’s only after I’ve scanned through a few pages that the realization hits.

The binder is filled with articles about Sherbrooke Station: newspaper clippings with my name traced in yellow highlighter, glossy magazine photos of me and the guys struggling to look serious, printouts of online music charts with our singles in various spots on the top ten lists. There’s even some tour media and posters from old shows tucked away in the binder’s pages. It’s so full of stuff the cover doesn’t even lie flat when I finally let it fall closed.

“Maman, you—you did this?”

I look up and see she’s got her hands pressed over her mouth again, new tears making her eyes look extra bright in the kitchen lighting. She shakes her head.

“Not me,” she whispers from behind her fingers. “Ton papa.”

Now I’m the one shaking my head. “I don’t—That doesn’t—What?”

“Every night,” Maman murmurs, “he gets on his computer to see what your band is doing. He started that book before you even made your first CD. He is so proud of you, Jean-Paul.”

I don’t realize I’ve been backing away until I knock against the sink. I feel like I’m in an alternate universe right now, like I’m stuck in a dream where everything looks familiar but not quite right. The angles are off. The proportions are wrong.

“No, he isn’t,” I say shakily. “He’s not. He never has been.”

“Come with me.”

She stretches her hand out towards me. I don’t take it.

“Jean-Paul, please,” she begs. “Come sit down with me. There are...There are some things I want to say to you.”

I let her pull me into the living room, where we sit side by side on one of the creased leather couches. I’m the first kid back for Christmas this year, and with Papa away at work, the house is silent enough for me to hear the pot on the stove bubbling in the next room.

Maman draws in a breath. “We made some mistakes, your father and I, but we always did what we thought was best for you at the time. You have to understand that fifteen years ago, things weren’t like what they are today. People didn’t talk about disabilities as much. It was starting to change, but still, humans can be so cruel to each other, especially children. When you were diagnosed, we just...We wanted you to have as normal of a life as possible. We thought that was the best thing we could give you.”

She stops to dab at her eyes with her sleeve. I feel like this couch is a boat, and everything around us has become a wild and raging sea. Nothing is solid anymore.

“It seems so stupid now, to think I could believe that getting you help would make things worse. We didn’t want you to feel like you needed help. We didn’t want to limit you. That’s why your father pushed you so hard. That’s why he wanted you to have a career like your siblings. He wanted you to believe you could do anything they could. He didn’t want you to think you were less than them.”

She should check the stove.

That’s all I can think. That’s all my brain can come up with to keep itself from having to process what she’s saying. The things she’s telling me don’t match up with the image I have of my father, and I don’t know if I can tear that image down.

“He was upset when you dropped out of your degree because he thought you were giving up. He thought you lost faith in yourself, and he wanted you to get it back. He’s only ever been critical of your music because he assumed it was your second choice, that you were settling for it. We never wanted you to settle, Jean-Paul. We wanted you to soar.” The laugh that follows her words is sad and small, but tinged with wonder. “You have, though, haven’t you? In spite of all our mistakes, you’ve grown up to do amazing things, things we never could have even imagined for you. We’re so proud.”

She places her hand on my leg. Its weight is heavy with regret. I know she means what she says, but the words don’t undo all the years of my life that led us to this moment.

“Why hasn’t he told me?” My voice comes out thick. “If he’s so proud, if he’s been stashing articles about me away for years, then why hasn’t he ever said anything about it? All he does is push and nag and make me feel like I’m a disappointment. Why can’t he show me that book himself?”

“Your father is...a tough man.” Her tone is strained. “He has to be. His job is to make other people believe in him, which means he has to believe in himself. He...has a hard time admitting he’s wrong. I think he still wants to believe that our choices were the best thing for you.”

“Well, they weren’t.”

“No,” she answers quietly, “they weren’t.”

We sit there in silence as a few minutes tick by. It’s almost suppertime now. It’s already been dark for a few hours. Papa will be home any minute, back from a long day of reading reports and making speeches and being too damn proud to say the one thing that could change his kid’s whole life.

“You should check the stove,” I say eventually. “I’ll fix the microwave in a few minutes.”

She nods and sits there tapping her fingers against her arms like she wants to say something else, but when she gets up, it’s only to bend down and kiss the top of my head. Once she’s back in the kitchen, I grab the binder from where she’s left it on the coffee table and start to flip through the pages again. She was telling the truth; the stuff in here goes back years. There’s an article about the very first show we played in Trois-Rivières, just after we released our first EP. It’s only a few sentences long, but I’m mentioned in the very first line. In fact, I’m the only band member who’s named. I don’t think that’s ever happened before; if anything, usually they just include Ace’s name.

I keep inspecting the pages, reliving a new set of memories with each one. Even Kay’s article about us is in here, the one that caused so much trouble and got her and Matt together in the end. We’ve all been so focused on the future of Sherbrooke Station that we don’t often take the time to think about our past, how much we’ve done. My dad even has articles printed out in other languages: German, Dutch, Swedish. There are pictures of us on stage at huge festivals in the UK.

I still have the binder in my lap when I hear the front door open. There’s no time to react before my father walks into the living room, pulling his tie off as he calls out to Maman. He spots me and starts to say hello, but freezes when he drops his eyes to the binder. Maman appears in the kitchen doorway, and he looks between the two of us like he’s expecting this to be some kind of joke.

“I had to show him.” Maman sounds firmer than she usually does when she speaks to him. “He needed to know, Marc. This has gone on long enough.”

He gives me one final glance and turns back to her. “Can I speak with you in the kitchen?”

I drop the binder on the cushion beside me and get up from the couch. “I’m not a kid. You can talk in front of me.”

“This isn’t about you.” He doesn’t even face me to say it.

“Then what exactly is it about?” I demand. “Is it about you? Is this all just about how it affects you?”

“Watch your tone, Jean-Paul.”

“Or what, Marc? You going to put me in time out? Because that always worked so well. Just another great parenting strategy from Marc Bouchard. Sacrement, you should write a book.”

That makes him whirl around to face me, tie still loose and dangling around his neck. “Don’t use that kind of language in front of your mother!”

I’m about to apologize to her when she steps forward with her hands on her hips and lets out an explosion of swear words that leaves both me and Papa blinking in shock.

“Esti de tabarnak de câlice! Just tell him you’re proud of him, Marc. He is the child, not you. Grow up!” She whips off her apron and throws it down on the floor in front of her. “Six children! We raised six children together. You think we could have gotten it right the sixth time, but we made mistakes, Marc. We were wrong. We’re his parents. We were supposed to...to protect him...and we hurt him. We hurt our baby.”

She’s crying again. Papa goes to wrap his arms around her, but she pushes him away.

“Non! That is not what I want. I want you to tell Jean-Paul how you feel, and I want you to tell him you’re sorry. I will not let this go on anymore. Tell. Him.”

I almost laugh when she stomps her foot and marches back into the kitchen, but I wipe the amusement off my face when Papa turns to me. I cross my arms over my chest. We stare each other down.

“She’s upset,” he says.

“She is,” I agree. “Is it true? That was you?” I nod at the binder.

“I...”

I’ve never seen my father look flustered before. He almost seems embarrassed.

Embarrassed to be proud of me.

I don’t know why it matters so much. I meant what I said: I’m not a kid. I shouldn’t need his approval. Seeing Monsieur Drolet today woke something inside me up. Hearing him talk about me like some kind of returning hero started a humming inside me, a rumble deep in my bones I’d never felt before. The sound only got louder after I spoke with Maman, after I listened to her tell me I’ve done amazing things.

Sometimes I swear I catch Molly’s words inside its rhythm: You have to believe in yourself.

I want to. I want it so bad, maybe even more than I want her, because I know that there is no chance of having her without this. I understand that I can’t truly be with someone else until I’m ready to be myself.

And for some maudit reason, I need this man in front of me to help me do that.

“I...It...” Papa continues to struggle, staring down it the floor. “It—Yes. It was me.”

Well that’s something, I guess. It’s just not enough.

“Why did you hide it?”

“I...” He swallows and looks me straight in the eye. He doesn’t stutter anymore. “I thought I was helping, that if I encouraged your music, you’d think I didn’t believe you could do the same kind of jobs as your siblings. You deserved to be treated the same way, to be held to the same standard. Everything I did was to keep you from feeling limited, like less than anyone else.”

I surprise us both with my next sentence.

“Different than doesn’t mean less than.”

We stay silent for a moment, letting the words ring out before I continue in a low voice. “I needed to be treated differently. I am different, but that...that doesn’t mean I’m not equal.”

At first I don’t think he’s going to reply. I almost miss his answer.

“I was wrong.”

It’s exactly what I’ve been waiting to hear, but I still can’t quite believe he’s just said it.

“Your mother was right,” Papa continues. “We failed you. I should have told you a long time ago...that I’m proud. I’m very proud of you, Jean-Paul. I always have been.”

“That’s all you ever had to say, Papa.” I feel myself standing taller. “I want things to be different now. If you’re proud of me, I want you to treat me like you’re proud. If you respect me, I want you to show me respect, and I want you to show it to anyone else I bring here. This is my life, and I get to decide what or who is enough for me, okay?”

He walks away, but at least he nods before he does it. I stand there for a moment, breathing hard.

I know what the sound inside me is now. I know what the humming means, the one that’s telling me to move—not with the spastic demands that have always ruled my mind, but with the purpose of decision.

It’s the sound of change.